I liked it, a lot. It took a few episodes to get into it, but it was 5 pretty good seasons. I never knew that George Pelecanos and Ed Burns were so involved. I think I enjoyed the whole arc and how the characters ended up, except maybe Duquan. But gritty is what gritty does. Bubs’ ending was great.
I preferred Homicide: Life on the Streets
Less politically motivated and more full fleshed, non-cartoon characters.
Both are based on the writings of the same guy, but Homicide is episodic where The Wire has story arcs.
One of us! One of us!
We have quite a few threads here on The Wire, but I’m always willing to revisit it. There are things I love now looking back that I didn’t appreciate as much at the time, for example S2 or Prezbo’s arc. But yeah, Duquan and Wallace….
Now go watch the new “We Own This City” show from HBO. It’s literally “The Wire, the Next Generation”. Still set in Baltimore, and with a lot of the same actors in new roles. Duquan and Marlo grow up to be cops! 
I re-watch The Wire every few years, and it took at least a couple of viewings before I realized:
Omar is faking his limp in his last couple of episodes, as he’s trying to call Marlo out. He did legitimately mess up his leg jumping off the building, but over the course of a couple of episodes, he gets mostly better. But then, in the scene where he tells Michael’s crew what a bitch Marlo is, he’s back to using a crutch, and limping very badly.
But after that, when he goes into the Korean Grocery to buy Newports, he’s walking almost normally. He was faking the limp to make Marlo look even more like a bitch for not coming out to the streets.
Wallace was bad, but hey, when you’re in The Game, you have to expect things like that to happen.
But Duquan messed me up. He, like all the kids, knew what drugs did to people, he saw it in his own family, as well as the whole neighborhood. And he was a smart kid, probably smarter than every other kid there. And yet, he still ended up getting into the drug scene, because he didn’t have anything better.
We just finished watching the whole series.
It’s great, but very, very depressing and cynical.
Welcome to the game, yo.
I marathoned it many years ago, and I think the first four seasons are as good as television gets. The fifth season kind of fell off the cliff for me, but was still a passable 7.5/10.
If someone put out a version that cut out all the fake serial killer business, and just focused on the money problems the cops had, and the case against Marlo, it would still be pretty good.
Maybe even keep some of the serial killer stuff, just edit it to make it so it’s not a fake - just end with the copy cat killer getting arrested, and leave the “real” killer at large. Since that kind of thing happens a lot in real life, it just adds to the depressing “all this will happen again” ending.