There is no TV show quite like HBO's "The Wire." Co-creators David Simon and Ed Burns drew on their respective backgrounds as a newspaper reporter and a homicide detective to bring the city of Baltimore to cable TV, warts and all. Across the show's five seasons, "The Wire" managed to turn what could have been an elevated take on a cop show into a deeply felt and nuanced tableau of life in America, where the War on Drugs has turned our streets into a war zone.

Building off their success with the dark NBC procedural "Homicide: Life on the Streets," the series strived to blur the line between real life and "The Wire." They went so far as to create characters like Avon Barksdale , who were inspired by real criminals running the Baltimore drug trade, and then cast their real-world counte

See Full Page