“The Wire:” Best TV Show Ever?

Spoiler alert: There will be blood spoilers. Though there will be, blood, as well, as this is a cop show we’re talking about.

I spent the holidays up North – Bodega Bay, Sebastopol, Mill Valley – and was asked by friends who hadn’t seen much of “The Wire” what San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman was thinking when he mentioned “The Wire” on his 2007 Best-of-TV list, particularly since HBO aired no new episodes of the series in 2007. (My friends are fans of “Mad Men,” “Flight of the Conchords” and “House,” so they’re obviously pretty savvy when it comes to TV.)

Goodman said “The Wire” is the best TV show in history, my friends noted – can that possibly be true?

My question: Can that possibly be measured?

“The Wire” has as many things going for it as it does going against it. One, it really is brilliant and smart and textured and pretty much closer to reading a great novel than anything else ever on TV (this is a show you want to watch on DVD so you can watch episodes back-to-back-to-back-to-back). On the other hand, it’s really not conducive to the TV template, where you tune in once a week and watch the show and then have your whole life happen to you for an entire week and then return and watch another episode: “The Wire” pretty much insists that you pay attention, because it’s not going to blithely recap anything for you when an incident in episode six was set up by something that happened in episode two. And, kind of by definition, TV shows absolutely cannot demand that kind of attention from its viewers. So: If you can’t even run to the kitchen to grab a beer without possibly missing a narrative thread that could confuse you for the rest of the season, does that make “The Wire” great television or utterly inept television?

To be sure, “The Wire” has serious things on its mind: The whole of the series has been about how the ostensible War on Drugs cannot be won, for about a million reasons, many of which the show assiduously notes, which include but are hardly limited to lack of police resources, the government not directly addressing the myriad reasons for drug use in the first place (people live horrible lives that they try to keep themselves from remembering, etc.) and the fact that dealing drugs is, for many impoverished people, the quickest, best way to escape their ignoble origins.

Upon that, each season has, with insightful precision, examined other sociological ills: Season two explored the crumbling middle-class; season three looked at how even idealistic politicians were sodomized and compromised by real-life exigencies; season four grappled with the disintegration of the educational system and the new season, debuting tonight on HBO, eviscerates the media for its refusal to seriously cover issues that affect people and things that people should care about more than Britney Spears’ latest meltdown (while noting that budget cutbacks, not reporters’ instincts, are a huge reason for lame journalism). “The Wire” doesn’t coddle its viewers by assuring them that everything’ll be OK; in fact, it pretty much warns us that barring serious changes, things will continue to get worse.

So: Most Realistic TV Drama ever? Hands down. Most Astonishingly Well-Cast and –Acted Show in TV History? You got it. TV Show That Most Treated Its Audience As Intelligent Adults? Without a doubt.

Best Show Ever? (Like, what about "The Sopranos?" Well, "The Wire" was far more consistent...) I know a bunch of shows I’ve enjoyed watching more (“The Wire” doesn’t get you to laugh a whole lot, for one thing, and I like to laugh), but I can’t think of any that’ve addressed so many crucial issues that I shouldn’t be allowing myself to be distracted away from and does so in a way that doesn’t at all feel medicinal.

Clearly, when the history of the Emmy Awards is written, the TV Academy’s utter refusal to acknowledge “The Wire” (beyond a rote nomination here and there) will no doubt be considered a huge embarrassment if not a compelling reason to write them off completely.

Which brings us to this season, which is “The Wire’s” last season. It actually begins with an audience-pleasing stand-alone comic sequence (Baltimore cops induce a guilty plea from a perp by duping him into thinking he’s taking a lie-detector test on a copying machine), setting up the season’s theme: “The bigger the lie, the more they believe.”

It’s the first season that features a plotline that seems like a TV-show plotline (oh, and here’s where the spoilers come): Detective McNulty (Dominic West), exasperated that budget cutbacks have eviscerated Baltimore Police’s ability to investigate past crimes, cooks up a fictitious serial killer so that the local politicians pretty much have to free up money for overtime for investigations. He’s aided, without seeking said assistance, by an ambitious Baltimore Sun reporter (shades of Jayson Blair) who’s been making up stories in order to further his own career; their separate agendas neatly dovetail into something that helps out the police temporarily but soon threatens to spiral out of either’s control.

(An aside: “Wire” creator David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun before moving on to his TV career. The city of Baltimore has always considered “The Wire” something of a double-edged sword: While it brings tons of money into the city, it scarcely brings it anything resembling good p.r. The Sun knew this, but allowed Simon’s show to film in their offices nonetheless, realizing they’d probably end up looking pretty crappy. And they do.)

Here’s where I call bullsh!t, sort of: McNulty is p!ssed because the city has shut down an investigation of 22 murders (from Season Four), which, it is explained, made national news. Couldn’t McNulty simply reveal that fact to the media, which would’ve been newsworthy enough, instead of risking his career by duping them with his obfuscations?

Also: A newspaper reporter willing to just make sh!t up at random is still, believe it or not, pretty rare. Still, “The Wire” does pretty create a situation in which such a reporter could flourish (blind quotes which can’t be double-checked, etc.).

And still: “The Wire” doesn’t come close to the cheap, manipulative sort of plotting that most TV shows resort to. It took what I considered minuses and got me not only to buy them but to be addicted to them.

Best TV Show Ever? That doesn’t even seem high enough praise.

But what is the best show? Please list your favorites – with convincing arguments – in the comments section.

- “The Wire:” 9 and 10:30 tonight and a sh!tload of times across HBO’s sundry platforms over the course of the week. Check your local listings; I can’t possibly do all your work for you.