Seems one of the best television shows of the past decade I had ignored, manly because I have an adverse reaction to “cop shows.” It’s the like a rash that I can’t stop scratching until the correct oinkment has been applied, in this case, switching to another channel, poking myself in the eyes, or reaching for a frying pan to hit myself over the head with.

24 came very close to being like that when it first started and that was one of the reasons why I fell asleep during it’s first season, along with the fact that everything was so drawn out to the point of wanting the terrorists to win so it would end. Not even the vapid eye candy known as Elisha Cuthbert enough to stop me from switching to the porn channel that resides in my head.

That show I kind of watched on and off but to be honest, I couldn’t tell you what the hell was supposed to be going on, as really it’s one of those shows you do have to watch from the beginning to get some of the references in later episodes, and considering I couldn’t stand the first season, it wasn’t a price I was willing to pay.

Cut to this weekend, and given my success with defrosting the fridge, doing the washing up and having my annual bath, I decided to wander out to the local store to pick up something different to watch.

The first season box set of The Wire was available at a cut price, and as it had been mentioned by friends and also Charlie Brooker during ScreenWipe as being something you just had to see, I picked that up instead of Hot Tub Time Machine, and put on the first disc.

What I began to witness in the first few episodes of this particular drama, was a compelling narrative between two sides of the same coin, with no real way to know who really is the bad guy at the end, and that’s just for starters.

The police drama type thing is set in Baltimore, not the first time it came up, it’s been home to Homicide: Life on the Street as well, and according to the internet, it’s one of the main murder hotspots in America, also being dubbed in the process “Bodymore.” How wonderfully cheerful. Makes walking through Stoke look like a fun day out.

You see the cops with their internal bickering over who should do what and not, why things don’t make them look good etc, effectively you’re seeing puny-minded empire building at it’s finest, reminiscent of what goes on in workplaces every day. Just it seems that there are slightly worse consequences if you cross the wrong man.

The sort of main cop character (I say sort of, as there are dozens of characters, all contributing to the atmosphere and each also contributing to the story in their own way, without it ever being forced or being out of place) is Jim Mcnu…nutty….err….(looks up name) Jimmy McNulty who effectively starts the whole thing off by having a chat with a Judge who he’s friends with. It then all just builds from there, and that was just off the back of a case where a bloke got off for shooting someone.

From that side, the team or band gets put together, with people who clearly don’t want to actually try and crack a drug kingpin, with various misadventures along the way, and again it all feels like you’d be in the office with them, effing and jeffing all over the place, which for one crime scene examination, is precisely what they did, with f**k basically forming the entire conversation. None of it, again is out of place, you believe the characters fully that they act in that fashion.

That doesn’t even come close to the time spent seeing things from the supposed bad guy’s perspective.

These people are just doing things to make money so they can live well. They have real concerns for family, considering what they are doing, again a rich storyline for most of the characters once more. In one scene, we see a couple of the pushers and where they live, as they wake up for a new day. They walk through a seemingly abandoned apartment, getting a whole group of kids ready for school, and you get the real feeling they are just doing this to provide for others, to keep going.

In many ways, you cannot help but feel for these people, despite some of the truly messed up things that happen as a result of the drug running that goes on, which some of it, they instigate with full force. The show doesn’t shy away from hitting some of the buttons of this lifestyle, such as opening with a shot of a corpse lying on a car or showing the ill effects of being hooked on £60 worth of white powder or as some prefer to tell the police, “sugar” you’ve just injected into your veins.

It also brings into the fold all walks of life, from massive fat people that would give me a run for their money, if they could run that is, to the gay people, and how that may also affect certain characters as time goes on with one key event I won’t actually spoil here. This show is not afraid to tread into areas for fear of backlash, which in the land of the free, is not that hard to believe.

That’s probably why HBO have made The Wire, instead of the mainstream networks in America, somehow it would be less real if it was subject to being toned down. You couldn’t imagine anyone from the BBC trying to create something like this, best we’d come up with is someone using a credit card to cut up Lemsip pouches while having a gippy tummy.

Though the subject matter may be grim, that’s not to say the show’s not without any humour, the crime scene with the one worded dialogue has already been mentioned and there are certainly more of that kind of thing to see during the show, just that the majority of the content is based down in gritty reality, as the nature of the material would warrant and The Wire certainly delivers on that.

I’m only a few episodes in, so knowing that events are building up to something, but not being sure what the end will hold, I can only continue to watch, knowing probably the end of the season’s not going to give me anything that I would expect from a “cop show” that I’ve seen before from the likes of Law and Order.

Given that as a result of the viewing so far, the fact that the world is grey, that everyone featured brings a little more to the overall picture and reacts to events in a very real and somehow makes them all more human that I could be (I’m just a withered husk by now), I don’t know what to truly expect from the outcome, and maybe that’s the best thing about this show.

Maybe this was the show people actually needed to watch, instead of watching another bunch of wasters stealing our air, caged in the Big Bother house on a sadly temporary basis.