The Wire 1x01: The Target

The Wire arrives on the back of 7 years' (yes, 7 years!) worth of massive hype. Is it as good as everyone says?

On the strength of one episode, it's hard to tell. Some series' brilliance strikes you clearly after just one episode -- The Wire is not one of those series. This makes it a bit of a struggle to see why it's so widely acclaimed as the greatest TV series ever made. Equally, fans go on about how it takes time to get into and the story is really spread across many episodes (as if 24 didn't do that even earlier, and numerous series haven't used the same idea since; or, indeed, as if we aren't used to long multi-part adaptations of fiction), so I'll give it more of a chance yet.

This has raised some interesting points for me, however. As many fans are keen to tell you, The Wire is more like a novel than traditional TV, actually telling one story over all 13 episodes of the season. Of course, as I've noted above, this is a much-imitated style nowadays -- it's exactly what legal thriller Damages does, for example -- but The Wire really does it: where other shows still try to make each episode function in itself somehow, this doesn't matter to The Wire, where you're served one thirteenth of the drama.

Is this a valid use of the form? By which I mean, should it actually see the episodic format as a virtue and make each episode moderately self-contained (as Damages does). If it wants to tell one long story, why isn't it a novel, where it is theoretically uninterrupted? (Of course few people read novels in one sitting, but you're aware it's one whole work, whereas a season of 13 episodes is, in one way or another, 13 separate but connected works.)

I don't have an answer to any of this, but it's something I'm wondering. We'll see how things progress over the next 12 hours.