The Wire 1x04: Old Cases

The more The Wire continues, the more certain I become that it is indeed a grower.

Some shows start and grab you immediately; they can then either build on this or throw it all away (more often than not it's the latter, sadly). Others are quite good and improve, others are just bad and stay bad. But The Wire is that very rare thing -- possibly unique -- where you start off uncertain because it only works the more of it you see. And, I suspect, its true quality (however high that may or may not be) is only revealed once you've seen the complete season -- or, to put it another way, the complete story.

Also worthy of note from this episode... well, many things, I'm sure -- but the one bit I wanted to mention is a great sequence in which Detectives McNulty and Bunk analyse a cold case crime scene without saying a word bar variations on the word "fuck". (In practice, this is less Tarantino than it sounds here.)