Yes, HBO's 'Wire' is challenging. It's also a masterpiece.| Tim Goddman, sfgate:
After the death of drug dealer and entrepreneur Stringer Bell and the incarceration of his partner and empire-ruling (and ruining) leader Avon Barksdale in Season 3, 'The Wire' returns yet again to dilapidated Baltimore to explore what remains. And much of it does.
The wiretapping of young gang leader Marlo is up and running, producing encouraging results for Major Crimes detectives Freamon and Greggs. McNulty seems happy walking a beat as a street cop, and the mayoral race between incumbent Mayor Royce and the white challenger, Councilman Tommy Carcetti, is heating up.
The big hook this year is that former officer Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski -- who accidentally killed a cop in Season 3 -- is now teaching in one of Baltimore's tougher grade schools. The whole gist of Season 4, in fact, revolves around education. And not just in the wildly dysfunctional, borderline hopeless Baltimore public schools system, but as has been the way of "The Wire" -- a series that has managed to contrast the mundane failures of office work (police) with the mundane failures of being a drug dealer running a syndicate -- the show will explore all facets of education, from what volunteer boxing instructor Cutty brings to young kids trying to stay off the street to what kids on the corner are learning about the drug trade from older dealers to what "Bunny" Colvin the repudiated major in the police department (who tried to set up a legalized drug experiment Hamsterdam) can do to help a Maryland university study at-risk kids.
Simon has decentralized the cast structure that nominally hadMcNulty as the lead and Bell (Idris Elba) and Barksdale (Wood Harris) as co-leads. Now the enormous cast serves as one lead (how they act when they bump into each other -- wonderful plot elements at every turn -- should delight longtime fans without overly confusing new viewers, which is a structural marvel all to itself).
Yes, McNulty is back. Bunk is back. Pretty much everybody is back. Best of all -- "Omar back."
As in seasons past, it's not until the third episode, where directions announce themselves, that the myriad stories pile up with irresistible pull and depth. By the fourth and fifth episode, once again you're caught in a bracingly complex, enriching tale you don't want to end.
"The Wire" is an inherently sad story. Though Simon and his writers infuse it with street-smart humor and even a droning quality that strips workplaces and government institutions to their flawed core, the heart of "The Wire" is a dark one, as always. The tale that Simon has told for three seasons can best be summed up this way: "It doesn't work."
Simon on dvd commentary for season three finale says that The Wire steals not from Shakespeare or Chaucer but from Euripides and Sophocles. greek tragedy. where the gods batter you. here, the institutions are the gods ~who have to appease and whose protection you need.
this is prompted by mention of Avon and Stringer as tragically flawed. Avon as heart, Stringer as mind, the two needing each other, falling when broken apart.
The war on drugs is flawed not only from a police procedural standpoint but also because the department is beholden to the mayor and the mayor to special interests. Even the most cleverly constructed, forward-thinking drug gangs are flawed because the greed, hopelessness, laziness and fearlessness of others always intervenes. Politics fails because so much of Baltimore is in the death grip of immediate need, of decadeslong failure that demands reparation.
And now we see how the education system doesn't work, from a strapped school district that advocates "social promotion" so that teachers don't have to deal with bigger, stronger troublemakers, to the cruelty of poverty and how it strips away chance and, ultimately, to the much more damning, complicated notion of historical nonparticipation of poor families in the very idea of necessary education for betterment.
Season 4 follows the lives of a band of grade-school kids who will find out sooner than they should that their world begins and ends at the corner.