The Wire is as true as television gets.

In the end, there will likely be a lot of unhappiness, dead bodies, same-as-it-ever-was institutional failure, lack of responsibility and the triumph of self-interest over the greater good. Not exactly a Hallmark card, but one hell of an artistic achievement.

HBO's brilliant and bleak The Wire may have saved the best for last.

The fans, no doubt, will be content with the conclusion of the brutal street politics--usually the best aspect of each season--as we witness a brilliantly stormy resolution of the unrest between Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew), Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), who continues to expand his power, and the charismatic, elegant brute Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), a murderous thief worth cherishing.

The episodes that kick off this last 10-show run don't feel perfect. But they almost always feel intuitively right.

As the last of my DVD screeners ended, and I found the story wrapped around me, constrictorlike, I had to agree with old Gus: It feels true. Very true.

While the police story line has never been stronger, the first seven episodes made available for preview contain nothing that matches the emotional power and sociological insight of the show at its best--namely the classroom scenes from Season 4.

I took to long to see the Wire. I enter to HBO GO because of (guess) GOT, but then, I decided to watch WestWorld, and then The Wire. And Man! The Wire is the Dad of all this new series. The best dialogues, characters, plots. It feels real. What else has Ed Burns wrote? Guess will have to find out. For many it may be no "easy to watch" because it not depends on gimmicks to move forward the story, it moves naturally. At the end... It left a hole in your heart. Like Justified, you have to smile at the end.

An average end to a great show. The most troublesome arc was Mcnulty's. The Mcnulty we saw from throughout last season was a satisfying conclusion to his character I think. It is hard for me to figure that the writers disagree since they brought him all the way back around to where he was. Then to top it off his colleagues give him a send off worthy of the smart determined detective we saw throughout this series. Certainly not the criminal,bungling police he became in this season. Compound that with the chicken fight he gets into with an equally criminal reporter, and you have by far the worst story arc of this series. They did some things right with certain characters this season, most notably Marlo and Bubbles. Also introducing a new character, Gus, who I wish we could have seen in a better story line. The newspaper angle had the potential to be very good, I wish it would have lived up to it. Plenty of shows have gone one season too long, that is my opinion of what happened to The Wire. But when I remember this show, i will remember the glory days, and the plethora of great characters that ran through this series.

Weakest of the 5 seasons (by far). Everything suffers, especially several main characters forced to step far out of character to toe the somewhat silly story line. Very disappointing to start. After a little chewing and forced swallowing, it gets better.

Season 5 was an even bigger disappointment than season 2 and honestly a waste of time. You can literally watch the script fall apart as the creator tries to put more and more of his b.s. newspaper writer perspective into the story. Nobody cares about the Baltimore Sun or any of the half dozen poorly developed characters that are introduced for no apparent reason. Maybe if he hadn't spent so much time trying to add the Baltimore Sun, or B.S. perspective into the script, maybe then there would have been a valid conclusion to what could have easily been an overall 9 of a show, but with this season I just don't feel it anymore.

I thought the WIRE was the best TV I'd ever seen - so it was really a shame to end on a low. The final WIRE season was a great disappointment. A number of well-known characters suddenly became two-dimensional and behaved in ways that were totally at odds with how their behaviour had built over previous seasons. New characters were introduced that did not show any depth (unlike in previous seasons, the newsroom crowd did not become real people, compared to say the dock crowd). The plot became unrealistic to the point of farce, and rushed. I wonder how much of this was down to creative exhaustion, and how much of it was down to the reduced series length (in terms of numbers of episodes). Yes, my expectations were very high. But I realise that if I had come to series 5 of the Wire before any of the others, I would have thought it was just another slightly hyper-real gritty cop show.