The Wire feels Dickensian in other ways, too. Part of Dickens' genius lay in his fascination with urban children, and his horror at the waste of their lives. The Wire, with its brilliant exploration of the lives of children in drug gangs, and (sometimes simultaneously) in inner-city schools, in that respect echoes one portion of Dickens more successfully than any living American writer who has made an impression on a mass audience.

Dickens was strongest when he stuck to what he knew most intimately, namely certain areas of London, and was generally weaker when he wandered off into the eighteenth century, or up to the Midlands. The Wire restricts itself to Baltimore, indeed to certain aspects of Baltimore- among them public housing projects, police stations, docks, schools, city hall, a newspaper. These are all worlds that good city reporters and policemen know about, and the writers who created The Wire famously included a former Baltimore cop and a Baltimore newspaperman, one of whom had also worked in the city's schools. Apparently they decided to stop making The Wire once they ran out of subjects they knew as intimately as what the first five seasons depicted. That was a startlingly principled decision, and also one that suggests they knew just how good a programme they had made. It's worth noting in this regard that Dickens too began as a reporter, and invented one of the first detectives in literature.Dickens was also, of course, a comic genius, as are, in a smaller way, some of the people who wrote The Wire, and like Dickens', their comic sense can be quite savage. Since one can very easily overwork an initially plausible simile by overextending it into a conceit, it is probably a good idea to put the Dickens comparison to rest. In any case, there are vast numbers of differences, most of them inevitably to the advantage of the already canonical genius, but perhaps not all of them. Dickens, after all, was often accused of sentimentality, and no-one has ever accused The Wire of that particular vice. Indeed people who do not like the show usually make the opposite charge: that it is too cruel, and too harsh. To again risk the obvious, the world it chronicles, the lives and fates of people living and working in a decaying American city, are themselves often cruel and harsh, and any great and greatly honest account of them will possess such tones as well.