'Wire' Spotlight Burns Paper

David Simon put whole life, love of Baltimore into HBO's hit drama

(NEWSER) - The final season of HBO critical darling The Wire lands in January, and will revolve around the newsroom—the last unscripted setting from creator David Simon’s own experience. The show has tackled drug runners, cops, dockworkers, and inner-city schoolchildren “with sociological precision,” reports New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot, and will close with the onetime Sun reporter’s old haunts. More»

'Wire" creator David Simon scores with new series set in Big Easy

(NEWSER) - Critics seem thrilled with Wire creator David Simon's new HBO series Treme, about post-Katrina New Orleans:

• Dave Walker, New Orleans Times-Picayune : "This is the screen depiction that New Orleans deserves, has always desired, but has been denied."
• Locals want to know two things: "Is it real? and Is it good?" writes Kevin Allman for the Best of New Orleans Blog . "It’s as real as any television show ever about New Orleans" and "it’s already good…and it stands the chance of being great."

The Wire , The Sopranos , Six Feet Under , Mad Men —get the picture?

(NEWSER) - For television, the past decade has been “as the sixties are to music and the seventies to movies”—some of the worst content ever was produced, but the cream of the crop rose to the level of art, Emily Nussbaum writes. Sure, “you could easily memorialize the aughts as the Decade of Reality TV,” but then you’d be leaving out The Sopranos, Mad Men, and, most important, The Wire. The best of the best dared audiences to take them seriously and didn’t have time for those who wouldn’t. More»

HBO's miniseries captures soldiers in 'their unfettered, foul-mouthed glory'

(NEWSER) - From the mean streets of Baltimore to the meaner ones of Baghdad, the force behind The Wire scores a direct hit with HBO's new Generation Kill, writes Brian Lowry for Variety. Following a cast of Marines during the Iraqi invasion’s first 40 days, the 7-episode miniseries may make you forget it's a work of fiction as it "offers offers a chance to see those troops in their full, unfettered, foul-mouthed glory." It begins Sunday. More»

Final season 'paints realistic portrait of newsroom'

(NEWSER) - Entering its last season, HBO's urban drama The Wire "succeeds strikingly at getting what's wrong just right," Tom Shales writes in the Washington Post. “Written and acted to the highest standards of the best TV drama,” the show has dealt with drugs, job loss, and school troubles, and now explores the trials of a major newspaper. More»