Next Week on "The Wire"

Next Monday, the Quick and Ed will be launching a new feature, a weekly analysis and discussion of the HBO television show "The Wire." For those of you have never watched it, it's time to start. "The Wire" is, by a wide margin, the best show currently on television and part of any serious discussion of the greatest television shows ever made.

Created by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon and former Baltimore homicide detective Ed Burns, "The Wire" follows the lives of a group of police and drug dealers on the West side of present-day Baltimore. That makes it sound like a typical cop-and-robbers show. It isn't. In fact, "The Wire" is unlike anything else on television. Using dozens of characters and multiple, interlocking storylines, "The Wire" is nothing less than the story of the life of an entire city, in all its messy, fascinating complexity.

More than any show now running, "The Wire" treats its viewers like adults. The characters don't stop for unnatural conversations designed to tell you what you just saw or what happened last week. The vernacular of criminals and police isn't watered down. Each episode isn't shoehorned into a neat three-act structure with a tidy emotional and dramatic conclusion, because life doesn't work that way.

Each character in the sprawling cast is complex and multidimensional–"The Wire" doesn’t' glorify its heroes or demonize its villains, although it has plenty of both. In addition to a top-notch cast of actors, "The Wire" also benefits from a writing staff that includes experienced Baltimore journalists, as well as novelists like George Pellecanos and Dennis Lehane.

Every season, "The Wire" uses its huge canvass to explore a specific theme related to life in urban America. The first season looked at the struggle of individuals in modern organizations, the second season examined labor and the deindustrialization of cities, and the third season focused on the challenges of political and social reform.

Season Four will focus on education. In addition to ongoing storylines involving police, criminals, and politicians, the show will follow four middle-school boys and a frequently dysfunctional school system struggling to deal with the consequences of drugs, poverty, and our society's crushingly ineffective efforts to fix those social ills.

This all might sound horribly, take-your-medicine-bleak and boring. Trust me, it's not. "The Wire" is also tremendously entertaining. The only danger is that once you rent the DVDs you won't get any work done that week because you'll be up all night until you've seen every episode, possibly more than once.

Joining me each week will be Craig Jerald, a D.C.-based education analyst and writer who wrote a great paper on high school reform earlier this year. A former Teacher For America corps member, much of Craig's work has focused on closing the achievement gap for low-income and minority students. Like me, he'll be breaking down each episode and what it means for contemporary education policy, asking whether policymakers at all levels are working hard enough and smart enough on behalf of students like those in Baltimore.

Stay tuned.