I, too, am a huge fan of the show, and, like Jack, have a huge hole in my week; it was the finest show ever put on television, in my opinion, and I truly cared about those characters–so much so, that if I ran into Lester or Bunk here in LA, I’d have to restrain myself from not gushing to them how much I loved their work (and I never speak to celebs unless they initiate a conversation).
Really, folks, the show was that good: complex, thoughtful, and brutally honest. And the political position of the show, contrary to the leftist grandstanding of David Simon outside of the show, was often hard to get any kind of read on, and I am always on the lookout for cheap , lefty boilerplate; the writers were too smart and too worldly to try and sell the usual lazy fare like to see on LA Law or West Wing. What David Simon and his excellent writers created was a work of art, unflinching, humane, moral, and, at times, genuinely tragic.
If, at the end, you did not feel the emotional nobility of McNulty’s symbolic wake, as the cops all sang “I’m a free born man of the USA,” then you should probably find another world that will have you. My wife and I danced around the house with a bottle of Jamesons toasting entirely imaginary people. I’m a better man for watching “The Wire.”
