The Wire has other virtues. It shows how the police and the drug gangs do what they do — in this respect, it provides some of the pleasures John Le Carre did, when he wrote about what his readers learned to call the tradecraft of espionage. It also shows how and why both sets of actors generally fail.

Moreover The Wire has a tragic sense, and in ways more precise than the contemporary connotation of telling some very sad stories. It recounts the fall (within an updated and necessarily restricted social compass) of some people whom one can at least imagine as great men — or the closest a dying American inner city is likely to get to that unfashionable phrase.It does not feel cynical, although it can be remarkably bleak. Its pessimism about American politics and policing — and journalism, and public policy — feels earned, and never cheap. It also tells immensely exciting stories, chronicling duels between gifted detectives and their sometimes extremely able adversaries, while never neglecting the much larger numbers of mediocrities, and for that matter idiots, on both sides.

My opinion of The Wire zoomed after the fourth episode of its first season — it starts slowly — and rose vertiginously a few years later, when a friend, a novelist who had grown up in something very like the ghetto world it describes, agreed to watch it on HBO On Demand, during a period when all of it was available. She was initially scornful that any television serial could accurately depict the milieu that had destroyed or grievously damaged most of the people with whom she had grown up, and then she was oddly furious when its seemed to come impossibly close to doing just that. Pretty soon she was watching three or four episodes a day, and began phoning in threats — if this or that or a third thing did not happen, then The Wire was a lie, and she would stop watching immediately, because sooner or later those things all happened to everyone in that world. And then this, and that, and the third thing all happened, and now, like most of The Wire's admirers, she remains dazzled by an amazing demonstration of just how good the best American television can be.