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i’ll admit, i didn’t think much of the wire when it premiered in 2002. at first glance it was just another retread of a hopelessly played-out genre — the gritty urban cop show — and worse, a staging of the war-on-drugs melodrama that seemed to affirm and reinforce predictable roles of good-guy cops and bad-guy dealers. pure ideological anathema to me at the time.

while, at a superficial level, that initial assessment wasn’t too far off, it took me until the second or third season to realize there was a lot more going on than that. i’ll leave it to more eloquent critics to explain exactly what — suffice to say, i can’t think of a single TV show that has changed my thinking more on matters of crime, justice, poverty, bureaucracy, corruption, and the whole notion of public service (not to mention cop shows themselves).

but on to today’s entry from the more-meta-than-meta department. if you saw any of the wire’s fifth and final season, which concluded this week, you know that it took a swing at the newspaper business through plotlines dealing with a fictionalized baltimore sun. some of the most interesting — and weirdly self-referential — coverage of the series has been from the real-life sun, where series creator david simon once worked, and which was the origin of a personal grudge that season five was, apparently, largely devoted to thrashing out. the sun’s columnists and reviewers couldn’t get enough wire for the first four seasons, but notice how the love affair cools when simon turns his cameras on their own newsroom.