The Wire Review

Simon and Burns built the show on a thesis, that institutions grind people into the shapes they need, then had the discipline to dramatize it instead of stating it. Each season swaps the lens, from the towers to the port to City Hall to Edward Tilghman Middle, and the previous season's people keep existing offscreen with their own momentum. Nothing is recapped, nobody explains, and the reward for attention is enormous. The dialogue is the strongest argument for the grade: the profanity-only crime scene, Omar dismantling Levy from the witness box, McNulty's self-sabotage rendered without a single speech about self-sabotage.

Michael K. Williams, Idris Elba, Andre Royo and Wendell Pierce work in a register that never asks for applause. The photography, by contrast, is deliberately plain, flat television lighting and functional coverage, because visual authorship would be a lie about how Baltimore looks. That choice costs it one category and buys it everything else. Season five's newspaper serial killer strains further than the show can hold, and it still lands.