The Wire: The Complete Fourth Season

Now we get the HUGE payoff in Season Four. By introducing the school system and following the lives of the four main schoolkids, the whole picture of the city of Baltimore emerges. We still get the cops (although McNulty is basically happy and in love so he's MIA pretty much the entire season), the drug dealers (the Barksdale gang is toast and Marlo's gang is the new force in the Western) and the politicians (Carcetti finally has some meat to his part although he's still not really a strong screen presence).

This season sees Omar still the moral compass of much of what goes down while you can see the kids being almost foreshadowing mirror images of adult characters that played out before. The labeled snitch Randy has bits of the police informant/addict Bubbles' entrepreneurial spirit in him. The quiet Michael with that boxing training could almost be an Avon Barksdale Jr. but his "code" in life seems very Omar-like. Namond is the kid with the potential that is turned off by the violence much like Wallace was in Season One but hopefully ends up better off and Dukie is intelligent and quiet man much like Stringer but without the force of personality. (And I'm probably dead wrong on some of these but it has me psyched to watch Season Five to see what all this foreshadows for these kids).

Maybe I'm stretching those comparisons a bit but it struck me after the series wrapped up.

There are more audio commentary tracks on more episodes but the piece de resistance is the two documentaries tacked on the last disc. Both look at the series itself and the actuall inner city struggles of the real Baltimore. We finally get a look at the creators David Simon and Ed Burns and why these guys do not get the "mainstream" awards and accolades for what they've done for not only us viewers but actors, the craft of storytelling and hopefully opening America's eyes up to the failure of the drug war and how the institutions of power truly do not really see what how they are failing Americans.

Season Four is easily the best of the four seasons so far as the kids, teachers and parents make this truly a heroic, yet mostly a tragic, tale worth your time.

The Wire tells it iike it is. There is much hidden from the living rooms of the well-to-do middle class.The Wire reveals things that we ought to know, but don't. Street corners, schools, the offices of elected officials, police stations, legal proceedings, newspapers, all have an enormous influence on our lives, but so much is hidden. The Wire is not merely entertaining but thought provoking. And the thoughts that are provoked are significant ones. Brilliant!

One of the discs was defective, other than that a great series. Have not wathed all of it yet