samreich:

Just finished it.  Definitely one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen.  It’s kind of like “Law and Order” if “Law and Order” were “Law, Order, Drugs, Schools, Government, and Newspapers.”  It breaks society down and shows why no progress is made.  Creator David Simon says that the show’s thesis is, “Everything’s fucked.”

So why did such a great show get such low ratings?  Instead of having A and B stories, the show had A through Z stories.  You might only get one installment per story per episode.  This meant that new audiences were lost.  The show liked mystery, too, so you might see three installments of a particular story before it started making sense.  Audiences hated that.

But what was too rich for TV is a work of art on DVD.  DVDs have shown that a TV show doesn’t need to stay on the air in order to have an impact.  I wonder if in the future we’ll see straight-to-DVD TV shows; 50-hour movies from creators and distributors who want to cut out the networks as middlemen.  The way Marlo cut out Prop Joe.

If you liked it, may I suggest the works of George Pelecanos, writer, story editor and producer for The Wire and also my Mom’s first cousin.