'The Wire' aims higher: TV's finest hour is back

At right: Bunk (Wendell Pierce) and Omar (Michael K. Williams), two sides of the law, get close on "The Wire."

A television program about a city that has had its soul crushed by pervasive poverty, failing schools, feckless government and an unrelenting drug trade sounds like a news special you might watch once.

Yet this is the drama at the heart of “The Wire,” which, when all 13 episodes from the fourth season showed up in their mailboxes recently, made a hundred TV critics’ hearts leap.

HBO’s finest series returns Monday to its On Demand service and 8 p.m. next Sunday, Sept. 10, over the HBO channel. The star remains urban Baltimore, and the combatants remain the police on one side and the dealers on the other. The municipal bureaucracy stands somewhere in between, talking a good game but effectively ensuring that the war on drugs will not be won in this or any decade.

As it has done each of the last three years, “The Wire” has shuffled the deck between seasons. The main players have scattered. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), the detective whose passion for the hunt made him a pain in the neck to every superior whose posterior he was supposed to be kissing, is now on humble patrol duty.

When his partner Bunk (Wendell Pierce) bumps into him, it’s at a Homeland Security briefing. McNulty is recycling the three-ring binders the cops toss on their way out the door of this waste-of-time lecture. His kids need school supplies.

School will serve as the motif for Season 4, just as politics did in Season 3 and the container ports of Baltimore did for Season 2: not merely for new subplots but as another symbol of how corruption and indifference eat away like rust at everything in America’s worst neighborhoods.

School is where Prez (Jim True-Frost) winds up. The Polish word-solving schmo who cracked the drug dealers’ code on the wiretaps (from which “The Wire” takes its name) is now teaching in a Baltimore middle school.

On the other side of the law, the scene is as Wild West as ever, yet eerily, not so. No bodies have been found in Baltimore for months, even as a new slinger in town, Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), has consolidated his turf. It doesn’t add up.

“How do you hold that much real estate,” Bunk wonders out loud, “without making bodies?”

Meanwhile, a group of boys — some of whom will sit in Mr. Prez’s math class — are being initiated into the social circles of the drug trade. In the tug of war between education and gratification, it’s not even a contest.

And in the middle are the politicians and the pole-sitters. Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), the white councilman said to be modeled on Baltimore’s real-life mayor Martin O’Malley, is running for mayor against a black incumbent.

Something as depressing as “The Wire” can work only if it is loaded with unforgettable characters, intricate storylines and scenes that stick in the mind’s eye.

That is what show creator David Simon and his writers have done. To me, what allows “The Wire” to surpass “The Sopranos” in the pantheon of greatest American TV shows is its ambition and its anger. It has the ambition to tell the whole story of how second-tier cities like Baltimore (where “The Wire” is filmed and in whose urban bowels it unapologetically rests) are allowed to suffer and bleed while its leaders, their eyes firmly fixed on tonier, tourist-ready zones, declare the city is “back.”

It shows its anger that no one except its chroniclers seem to give a damn. Life is cheap on the streets that “The Wire” captures, but that doesn’t mean a lost life goes unmourned or made into a throwaway joke, the way it can be on “The Sopranos.”

Simon has a five-season story arc in mind. Given the modest ratings for “The Wire’s” first three seasons, HBO won’t come to him the way it did “Sopranos” creator David Chase, begging for a sixth.

But as he told critics in July, at least he will have been able “to depict an American city at the millennium … and ask why it is that the richest, most powerful country in the world can’t solve its fundamental problems when it comes to places like Baltimore. And there are a lot of places like Baltimore.”