It’s not all reality or reruns: ‘The Wire’ premieres its final season in January
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- December
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The best show you’re not watching will premiere at 9 p.m. Jan. 6 on HBO.
The Wire’s fifth and final season was reduced from an initial order of 13 episodes to 10, but I’d bet those 10 hours have more bang for the buck than an entire season of anything on broadcast television would.
BuddyTV reports the premiere date and time, along with the news that Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam premieres immediately after, at 10 p.m.
The fifth season, as I’ve previously written, focuses on the media and its part in the downfall of a great American city.
Its first season focused on the police. Seasons 2 was the dockworkers; Season 3, the politicians. Season 4 focused on the education system in a city where the politicians care about test scores and teachers struggle to find ways to actually get through to students and teach them in ways they can relate to.
Buddy TV quoted show Creator David Simon, talking about what makes the series different from the traditional cop drama:
The American obsession with police procedural and crime drama usually only allows for villains  in large part, black and brown  who exist as foils, to be pursued and destroyed by cop heroes. We’re addressing ourselves to where the ‘villains’ actually come from, and whether we have any right to regard them as somehow less human than the rest of us.
This year, we follow the four young men we were introduced to last season as they started going their separate ways in middle school. Considering the lives they came from and the lives that await them, I wouldn’t accept any happy endings.
But Simon, a former police reporter for The Baltimore Sun and creator of the late great Homicide: Life on the Street, and his writing partner, Ed Burns (a former homicide detective, not the actor), know that real life doesn’t always have happy endings.
Especially in the inner-city ghettos in cities like (fill in the blank).
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 4:41 pm by Amy Vernon.
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