It's a great, great show. It's problem is that it's pretty lib-brained, so the only thematic conclusion it can come to basically amounts to "wow, the problems sure are bad, huh?" Critics who compare The Wire to the more sweeping, social Charles Dickens novels like Nicholas Nickleby are basically right, but I'm not sure they realize that it also has Dickens' ideological limitations. Dickens wrote these vast, penetrating examinations of Victorian England, but his only real solution for the problems he wrote about amounted to "people should really be nicer and more Christian in their behavior towards each other." But for all that, Dickens is one of the greatest writers in the English language and The Wire is probably one of the four or five greatest shows ever made.
So, whatever, you can like Dickens and you can like The Wire if you want to. None of this cultural shit really matters so much.
Communism is when you're not allowed to like things, and the more you're not allowed to like things, the more communister it is.
David Simon has a terminal case of the John Oliver syndrome. Imagine having such a deep insight of intervowen systemic problems caused by capitalism and still being a shitlib.
A spanish communist rapper made a song with his name, about poverty and how cool the Wire is at adressing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8po-XXSzV2E
"David Simon came and took away poverty romanticism"
For a Liberal show, I liked the way it investigated various institutions that most people take for granted and showed them to be deeply flawed, shortsighted, corrupt, and potentially even unfixable. It is much better than the pure fetishization of institutions we got from shows like Law and Order or West Wing - or the fetishization of cops themselves we got from the vast majority of cop shows. I don't remember gaining any deep wisdom from it, but it was an interesting show with a few cool characters.
The show is incredible, regardless of whether or not libs like it too.
