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The Wire: Seasons 1-4

In these meager times, when our entire culture is on a mission to convince itself that the sexual misadventures of blond heiresses, the results of big-budget karaoke contests, and the inane one-liners of sitcom drones actually mean something, what does it say that a television show like The Wire is allowed to exist? That even in a world obsessed with the bottom line, where artistic souls are tossed away unceremoniously to wallow in dark, self-funded alleyways, a major television network sticks by a small show with a small viewership set in a small city (a black city, no less) populated by people living small lives? It says that there just may be hope for us after all. Which is more than you can say for the streets of Baltimore, which are filled with guns, drugs, despair, corrupt politicians, suspect dockworkers, clever junkies, drunk cops, stone killers, and enough intersecting lives and moral murkiness to make Balzac sit up and take notice (if he were still capable of sitting up and if he owned a DVD player, that is).

This set is the perfect gift for that certain someone on your holiday list who likes his shows novelistic and his humor black; it represents the high-water mark of the medium, so far beyond the intellectual and artistic scope of almost every other TV show that came before it as to constitute its own category of entertainment. In addition to all the full, uncut episodes from The Wire's first four seasons, this set features commentary tracks from the show's creator, David Simon, and other members of its writing staff – including novelists George P. Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Richard Price, who together constitute their own "murderers' row" of crime-fiction scribes. Outside of Charlie Rose, these commentaries are probably the closest we television viewers will ever get to seeing inside a writer's mind. That being said, you'll never see a shotgun-toting, Newport-smoking stickup artist like Omar Little on Charlie Rose, so there's really no comparison. The fifth and final season of The Wire starts Jan. 6; catch up now or be forever condemned to a life of Two and a Half Men and CSI: Hartford.