As a long-time devotee of The Shield my set of The Wire (series 1) has been lying around unopened. Maybe I felt disloyal to Azeveda, Dutch, Vic et al in watching it? We saw the whole thing this week. The acting is incredibly good (particularly the fatter cops and the two older hoods-in-chief) and the story-lines gripping. Nobody's humanity is neglected. I guess the most depressing thing about what it portrays is that crime is just a way of life, although I wondered about all the people in the 'projects' who managed to avoid it unless they get shot for doing their civic duty, and couldn't quite reconcile the enormous sums of money involved with the economists who claimed that most drug dealers live with their mothers.

What it also did, and which nothing made here rivals, is to make television indispensable, in this case to a discussion about crime and its causes. I doubt whether this is purely a matter of smaller resources, although the credits for the series seemed to involve a very large number of people.