The Wire

I’ve now finished the first season and will go right on to the second, like finding a favorite author and putting down one book only to pick up the next, though there’s a stack of other stuff one needs to read. I won’t essay a review at this point, but just make a most importunate recommendation -- if you like highly literate, socially aware, witty and wise crime fiction (somewhere between Elmore Leonard and Richard Price), you must get this program on dvd and watch it straight through! You can’t approach it episodically (like NYPD Blue, for example), or come in late, but have to watch it chapter by chapter like a novel. This HBO series makes no concession to short attention spans, or to viewers who feel they need to know what’s going on now and not figure it out for themselves two or three episodes further along. I was way more than halfway into the first season’s thirteen one-hour chapters before I could keep the characters names and faces straight, despite consistently acute characterizations from every last one of the dozens of players. If this were a movie, I give it an *8+* and rising.