The Wire: Complete HBO Season 4 | 
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| Actors: Dominic West, Michael K. Williams, Sonja Sohn
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: £40.99
Buy New: £26.91
You Save: £14.08 (34%)
New (12) Used (3) from £24.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 154
Format: Pal
Language: English (Unknown)
Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Number Of Items: 5
Running Time: 749
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.7
EAN: 7321902173429
ASIN: B000XPC4ZG
Release Date: March 10, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW - SEALED - PLEASE NOTE - ITEM MAY ONLY BE PARTIALLY SEALED DUE TO THE UN-PACKING PROCEDURE
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
Even if you missed the first three seasons (the character guides and thorough episode recaps on HBO's website are recommended), and with only one season left, it's not too late to get in under The Wire. In fact, season 4 is an accessible introduction for those who know The Wire only by its street cred as arguably the very best show on television. For them especially, this season will be, as befitting its theme, a real education. Without resorting to melodramatics that other ratings-challenged series employ to gain that frustratingly elusive audience, The Wire shakes things up this season in a way that is true to the series and its characters. A major character, Dominic West's McNulty, plays a minor role as a contented street cop and family man, while a former supporting player, Jim True-Frost's Roland Pryzbylewski, goes to the head of the class as a new eighth grade teacher at beleaguered Edward Tilghman Middle School. It may take a couple of episodes to orient yourself to the Baltimore backrooms, squad rooms, classrooms, and street corners where The Wire's intense dramas play out, and new viewers may miss something in character nuance, but they will easily grasp the big picture. A politically motivated shake-up sends Major Crimes detectives Freamon (Clarke Peters) and Greggs (Sonja Sohn) to Homicide. The gloves come off in the mayoral race between black incumbent Clarence Royce (Glynn Turman) and idealistic white challenger Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen). Gang leader Marlo (Jamie Hector) quietly and deliberately becomes the city's new drug kingpin, managing to subvert all surveillance efforts. Meanwhile, while "Prez" tries to reach his students, four highly at-risk kids will be drawn into the drug trade.
Mere synopsis does not do The Wire justice. The series deftly juggles its myriad storylines and characters, all of whom make an impression, from Marlo's cold-blooded enforcers, Snoop (Felicia Pearson) and Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe), to boxing instructor "Cutty" (Chad L. Coleman), determined to keep his young charges off the corners. There is not a false note in the performances or the writing. Richard Price (Clockers) and Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) again contributed episodes. That this series has only been nominated for only one Emmy (for writing) is a travesty. As engrossing as the finest novels and in a class by itself, this isn't television; it's The Wire. --Donald Liebenson
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
Best show on TV June 26, 2008
In its 4th season, The Wire continues to deserve its oft given title of "best show on TV".
This season concentrates on the school system, adding it to The Wire's already complex mix of crime, politics, trade unions and more. Teachers deal with growing violence and also have to fight against a school system that is more focused on meeting targets than actually helping the children in their care. Sounds familiar...
All the (surviving) favourites are back, but the real plaudits should go to the new "corner kids" who seem to be doomed to end up as drug dealers. The child actors are all astonishingly good, and fit in well with the stellar cast.
Highly recommended.
Simply fantastic May 20, 2008
This is simply one of the finest shows ever to be created. The quality of the show is astounding. The show never ceases to suprise and simply wont pander to populist choices in how the story unfolds. The child actors are brilliant, their stories are portrayed realistically yet they twist, turn and unfold in ways that you dont expect. Different characters are to the fore yet it doesnt diminish your enjoyment from previous, this show has been getting credit but not what it truly deserves -its remarkable.
If you havent seen any of The Wire - get series 1, watch it, then you'll soon have bought and watched the rest.
OMAR May 16, 2008
OMAR would appear to have more detective capabilites then the whole of the Baltimore Police Dept put together. You dont need a wire tap just follow the King Pins then Jack the Consignment. "You Feel Me"
This is the best show on TV, cant believe no one in the UK has broadcast this on main line TV. Just hope that London never ever gets as bad as Baltimore. Got all 4 Box Sets and cant believe have to wait till Sept to get hold of season 5. Are Sept a great month as the NFL kicks off again and my gambling habit goes back into overdrive.
Here's what the FT had to say April 14, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Here's the Financial Times article on Series Four that initially alerted me to The Wire's existence. Since reading this article, I've bought - and been bowled over by - the first three series, and am about to get going on the fourth. I've never watched anything that has given such an in-depth, nuanced, balanced and entertaining insight into so many important issues of the day. It stays with you and makes you think about its message long after you stop watching it. There just isn't a better series than The Wire - it's unquestionably sui generis.
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A black underclass gets its own Dickens
Published: September 14 2006
The Wire, a US police drama that has just begun its fourth season on HBO, is the best television show ever broadcast in America. No other programme has ever come close to doing what it does, namely portraying the social, political and economic life of an American city with the scope, precision and moral vision of great literature.
During its first year, it was possible to mistake The Wire for merely an unusually shrewd crime saga. But the programme has become richer and more ambitious with each season and now fits only into a category it defines by itself: the urban procedural. Its protagonist is the broken metropolis of Baltimore, depicted with obsessive verisimilitude and affectionate rage.
Its fundamental concern is the isolation and degradation of the black underclass, a subject that has, with the exception of a brief blip after Hurricane Katrina, disappeared from the American political radar screen.
If the national conscience is ready for another sleepless night overlives wasted in the ghetto, I expect that The Wire will be what keeps us awake.
It is a mark of this programme's artistic courage that while homicide and detective work remain its bread and butter, it dares to focus this year on an urban environment not ordinarily associated with commercial television: an all-black middle school in West Baltimore. The show's creator, David Simon, has had the self-assuredness to drop the Hollywood convention of the white cop as hero.
At the centre of this season's drama are the compelling characters of four adolescent African-American boys, played by unknown actors so preternaturally talented they do not seem to be acting at all. Watching The Wire this season feels less like watching these four children navigate their cruel world than like adopting them. At 12 and 13, they can still go either way. The central drama is whether "the game" of drug dealing will exert its gravitational pull on them, or whether they will somehow beat the odds pointing them towards jail and violent death. The programme reverses your expectations while breaking your heart.
Several critics have commented on The Wire's "literary" quality. In particular, the programme echoesthe Victorian social panorama of Charles Dickens (who gets a mention this season as an obscene anatomical reference). The story cuts from the top of the city's social structure toits bottom.
As with Dickens, the excitement builds as the intricate plot unfolds in addicting instalments. But the deeper connection to Dickens is the programme's animating fury at the way a society robs children oftheir childhood. In our civilised age, we do not send 12-year-olds towork in blacking factories. Today's David Copperfield is instead dragooned into slinging drugs onthe corner, where his prospects are even bleaker.
The other main theme this seasonis urban politics. A white candidate tries to win election as mayor by cynically splitting the vote of the city's black majority. Yet this ambitious white politician is also an idealist frustrated by the waste of lives all around him.
The election plot line, along with another about the venal police brass trying to manipulate crime statistics, captures the realities of American government and the compound motives of politicians in a way that leaves West Wing in the dust. The programme's political science is as brilliant as its sociology.
In past seasons, The Wire has won praise from critics but suffered from weak ratings. That may be less because it leaves you drained and disturbed at the end of an episode than because of the challenge of keeping track of its many characters and narrative threads. There is also the difficulty of absorbing the black dialect it represents as faithfully as it does all its other carefully studied details.
While The Wire feels startlingly lifelike, it is not a naturalistic depiction. That style of realism better describes an earlier series of Mr Simon's, The Corner, which was based on a work of journalism of the same name that he co-wrote, also set in the same Baltimore ghetto. The HBO version of The Corner, whichis almost unbearable to watch,seems to have been a crucial life study for The Wire, a programme that attains the dimensions of tragedy without being depressing.
How this manages to be the case is the most interesting aspect of the programme's artistry. The sparkling writing and bravura cast make viewers root for dozens of rich characters, including several despicable ones. Everyone's favourite survivors from earlier seasons are back this year, including two truly Shakespearean figures: the vagabond snitch "Bubbles" and Omar, a gay stick-up artist whose personal code involves never serving any other masters and not cursing.
What ultimately makes The Wire uplifting for all the heartbreak is its embodiment of what America's leading black politician, the senator Barack Obama, calls "the audacityof hope".
It is filled with characters who should give up but do not do so, not only the boys themselves, but teachers, cops, ex-cops and ex-convicts who lose their hearts to them. Thisrefusal to surrender in the face of defeat is a reality of ghetto lifeas well.
The writer is editor of Slate.com
Audacious achievement April 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Though it lacks the muscle-tightening thriller elements of previous serieses, Season Four is The Wire at the height of its powers. Only a show with The Wire's track record would have the confidence and ambition to attempt a commentary on both the education and political systems in Baltimore, and then use this merely as a backdrop for the main event: a cracking human interest story of boys-to-men, heart-rending and inspiring by turns.
There is a bit of "Stand by Me" and - even further back - "Lord of the Flies" in the teenagers' unfolding drama, but this is a much harsher picture of progression to adulthood: poignant, pitiless and (often literally) pitch-black. The characters Randy, Dukie, Namond and Michael are introduced to us in the first scene, and their fates give the series its dramatic undertow.
Old favourites provide continuity. Proposition Joe, more immobile, sweatier, still holding his own though - just. Marlo Stanfield, street kingpin, man of few words, ruling with a chilling stillness. And - of course - Omar Little, a Robin Hood for the 'hood, whose epigrammatic utterances have more than a touch of Oscar Wilde.
In the "Special Features" part of the DVD, writer/creator David Simon claims the Wire is about "sociology and economics, not good and evil". Do leave off Dave; The Wire is ALL about good v. evil, and its dramatic realisation of that eternal conflict is what makes it so watchable and compelling.
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