Many critics who write about television for the high end of the market believe The Wire is the best American television program ever made, and even people normally skeptical about the aesthetic judgment of TV critics tend agree.  Why is The Wire so extraordinary?

(The Wire is an HBO dramatic series that realistically depicts, among other sorts of people, urban drug dealers, policemen, politicians, schoolteachers and journalists. It concluded its fifth and final season a few months ago in the US. and its final season has just arrived in the UK.)

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, although it was never obvious to me until an insightful writer pointed it out, American network television tends to be made in the series form, with a relatively invariant formula.  In contrast, drama made for "premium cable" like HBO can be serial rather than series drama.  Serial drama may unfold a plot over a number of episodes or seasons, rather than confining its development of character and situation to forty-five minutes of storytelling, which is all the time the makers of traditional series television for network TV are allowed before the dramatic clock is re-set, and the next episode begins.