'The Wire,' Crackling With Heat

McNulty's chief opposite is Jamie Hector as Marlo Stanfield, who has risen from the ranks of the youthful mob to a position of slick, heartless leadership, executing a plan -- or ordering the execution of an enemy -- with the iced cunning of a corporate chieftain. The number of outstanding performances borders on uncountable, yet nobody comes off as too showy or with that "Look Ma, I'm Acting" smugness. Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters are both bulwarks as detectives "Bunk" Moreland and Lester Freamon, who both have to decide whether true friendship calls for unquestioning loyalty to a buddy or an occasional sobering slap in his face.

Actors playing underworld figures seem to have taken care not to come off as too "cool" in the way they look, move, talk and generally behave. Hector's Stanfield is definitely a charismatically amoral presence, however. So is Felicia Pearson as Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, so liberated a woman that she can aim and shoot a handgun without the slightest tremor or doubt, nor even a blink.

The names of the gangsters suggest updated Damon Runyon, colorful monikers being a sort of revered tradition among lawbreakers -- and "Snoop" Pearson being just one of a gallery that also includes Cheese, Bug, Beadie, Fatface Rick and, as elegantly and unflappably played by the imposing Robert F. Chew, Joe "Proposition Joe" Stewart.

Although Simon himself spent 13 years at the Sun (another "Wire" writer, William F. Zorzi, is also an alumnus) and David Mills, who authored the fourth of the new episodes, once worked in the vaunted Style section of The Washington Post, the portrait of the working press is by no means glossy or painted pretty. A desperately ambitious hotshot named Scott Templeton, played by Tom McCarthy, sets a major plotline in motion when he pulls a stunt roughly similar to one pulled by reporter Barbara Stanwyck in Frank Capra and Robert Riskin's "Meet John Doe." Only much worse over the long haul.

Templeton leaves Baltimore briefly in one episode for a job interview at The Post; at least one Post editor is portrayed as the proverbial effete snob, connected only tenuously to the real world as lived by most of the paper's readers. At least one Sun editor, too, is the hyper-tailored type who sports suspenders and crisp imported shirts and has a fondness for using words such as "Dickensian" to dignify pretentious hooey.

Editors and reporters bandy lofty words about, and claim to want more space to investigate issues of great public concern, but seem thrilled beyond words when they can seize on a juicy serial-killer saga and splash it across the top of Page One. As it happens, the story is largely a phony, wherein lies only a portion of the trouble that the cops and the press create for each other. Whether all hell will break loose in the last chapter I do not know, but quite a bit of hell breaks loose in the first seven -- enough for "The Wire" to be even more unnerving and essential than ever.

Talk of "buyouts" and "layoffs" and anal-retentive corporate owners lusting for a healthy bottom line helps keep "The Wire's" portrayal of an endangered press timely and troubling. In the third episode, there's a lovely speech by a career journalist that sums up, without rhetoric, some of what's at stake as even great papers shrink in size and circulation. The man reminisces about his childhood and how his father decreed 15 minutes each morning as inviolate and indispensable -- the time he spent at the breakfast table with The Morning Paper. Even as a boy, the man recalls, "I knew I wanted to be a part" of what so firmly captivated his father.

Although various directors worked on the series, "The Wire" is always sure-footed and straightforward. It's not about technique -- blinkety-blink editing or jumpy-bumpy camerawork. The absence of gimmickry and the presence of respect for the story and the audience give "The Wire" organic advantages over nearly all other TV dramas, whether they deal with cops and crime or birds and bees. Which is to say: If you want to see the television of tomorrow, it's on HBO tonight.

The Wire (one hour) airs tonight on HBO.