In 2002 a very funny, bloody, and sexy American telenovela called Wire began running on HBO cable channel. It was a weekly continuing comedy drama that nominally concerned a series of drug-related murder investigations conducted indifferently and inadequately by Baltimore police homicide squad. Each season, however, it expanded over weeks into a broad consideration and indictment of contemporary American urban life. Its large canvas depicted all social strata from streets to suites. We met everybody: adolescent and preadolescent hoppers on corner selling their trademarked pellets of cocaine; dead-eyed thug enforcers wielding their prison-pumped muscles and their Beretta 9mm automatics; mysterious underground capitalists who managed delivery of brick or the raw to its packagers and retailers; police, most of them timeservers who could not care less about anything but overtime pay, along with a very few who knew what they were doing and wanted above all else to take down villainous drug crews; working men of docks who cooperated with drug smugglers as they watched their own jobs disappear; kids in schools, which were underfunded and besieged internally by some students who would rather have been out on street corners slinging dope and making some money; writers working for Baltimore Sun, hog-tied in their investiga tive efforts by both corporate fixation on bottom line and their own incurable ignorance of life on streets; and, at top of heap but with little real power to change anything, politicians, self-absorbed self-seekers who wanted more than anything except their bribes or still higher office to be home in time to catch themselves delivering today's sound bite on evening TV news. Wire was never as big a hit as Sopranos, other HBO crime soap opera. David Simon, creator of Wire's characters and scenario, has sug gested that, since most of characters were black, it may have been too black for a mass American audience. Nor did show ever achieve nearly as much attention as Sopranos from bestowers of awards. It never won a single Emmy, TV equivalent of Oscar. Told this in a promo film for show, journalist and novelist Joe Klein responded: The Wire never won an Emmy? Wire deserves Nobel Prize for Literature! But it never won that, either, and, perhaps as a result, Wire, like city of Baltimore, was underfunded by