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The series opens as maverick Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) is tapping
into a vast network of drugs and death around southwest Baltimore's
deteriorating housing projects. With a mandate to get results ASAP, a haphazard
team is assembled to join McNulty's increasingly complex investigation, built
upon countless hours of electronic surveillance. The show's split-perspective plotting is so richly layered, so breathtakingly
authentic and based on finely drawn characters brought to life by a perfect
ensemble cast, that it defies concise description. Simon, Burns, and their
co-writers control every intricate aspect of the unfolding epic; directors are
top-drawer (including Clark Johnson, who helmed of The Shield's finest
episodes), but they are servants to the story, resulting in a TV series like no
other: unpredictable, complicated and demanding the viewer's rapt attention,
The Wire is "an angry show" (in Simon's words) that refuses to comfort
with easy answers to deep-rooted societal problems. Moral gray zones proliferate
in a universe where ruthless killers have a logical code and where the cops are
just as ambiguous as their targets.
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