I, like many others, came to The Wire only after I could binge the thing wholesale. Yeah. I fell for it, hook, line and sinker but not when it was first broadcast: it was the changing nature of the medium, I think that provided for it's all-at-once amaze, rather than the previous, broadcast, paradigm...

The Sopranos is every bit as good as The Wire, but it exists in a cultural tension with The West Wing, also a very good show-- the two were like competing brothers, aspiring to the best and the worst of our aspirations and imaginations... I don't think you can really watch one and not the other.

Coincidentally (or not) The Sopranos and The West Wing shared a lifetime at the end of broadcast TV: The Sopranos ran from 1999 to 2007 whereas The West Wing ran from 1999 to 2006. Each was written and structured to be shown in sequence, over time, in which you had to wait a week to see what happened. Seems so quaint, now, when I write that sentence, but that's a paradigm we used to accept as normal.

SO MUCH happens on The Wire that it actually worked against the broadcast once-a-week viewing. The first time I watched the second episode I had to go back to re-watch the first to remind myself who everyone was... Even going into later episodes I had to refer back. But once I was able to watch episodes back to back, it flowed. It's part of the charm, if you can binge it, but part of the problem if you can't.

Having said that, I have to put in a word for what I deem the most ambitious show ever, HBO's Deadwood. In terms of acting, writing, plotting, what have you, it was every bit the equal to Sopranos, West Wing and The Wire. Yet it couldn't hold together and when the cast started asking for more $$, HBO just axed it, at the peak of its tense, fragile, narrative. The recent movie was good but, poignantly, not as great as the show aspired to be.