I did try to start a thread on the series on Village Pump last month after watching the first couple of series.

Great stuff, won't say more about Omar beyond the guy seeming to be indestructible. There was a short I picked up in a d/load package that shows him at the age of 8(?) coming to some ethical conclusions and presumably getting the scar.

Might get the box set or individual series after watching it through once.
Not sure what extras you get though.

But yeah awesome tv, utterly superlative. Not sure what else touches its standards. Had some discussion with my brother's girlfriend about HBO since it seems to be producing great standards of tv. I'd thought it was terrestrial tv competition to ABC etc & apparently it's subscription. Latter of which might explain the amorality of a lot of sympathetic characters (though maybe I need to restructure the perspective of that sentence, & may edit this later). But if it was terrestrial it would probably be commercially dominated & corporations/comercial concerns would probably be trying to dictate more. & definite moral boundaries be drawn or certain groupings wouldn't advertise. Subscription tv circumvents this I think, since the paying audience is paying for quality. Presumably there are alternatives where paying customers are paying for schmaltz or other alternatives, extreme ethical b+w depictions etc?

Anyway The Wire is great. I need to pick up the books it's based on. & have been told that Hill Street Blues had previously used themes from that source.

Noticed that a few of the central character actors later wound up in Fringe so wondered if there was a connection. Possibly just HBO?
Stevo