Take, for example, a moment from the first season when Det. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), and his partner Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce), examine a murder scene that may or may not be work of D'Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gillard Jr.), the morally conflicted nephew of a Baltimore drug lord. It's a clever scene, the cameras suggesting the geometry of the shooting, where the bullets came from, how the murder went down. Moreland notices white spots on the carpet, McNulty swings open a refrigerator door. They find a shell casing outside a window. The dialogue between the two consists almost purely of the repeated word "Fuck!" As the scene ends, they look like they've reached a conclusion of sorts -- and it's still unclear to the viewer what that conclusion might be.

That answer finally does come -- six episodes later, in the season finale, when McNulty and Moreland interrogate D'Angelo. Simon explains in "The Wire: Truth Be Told" that "when D'Angelo explains that he had brought cocaine to the woman, who told him she would put it 'on ice,' the detectives acknowledge the connection to their crime scene with a single word: 'Refrigerator,' says Bunk. And McNulty nods casually." To faithful viewers, the exchange prompted cheers and a deep sense of satisfaction. Can you image one of TV's franchise crime shows, with its strict 44-minute formula, stretching the denouement over seven weeks?

"The reward for such committed viewers would come not at the end of a scene or the end of an episode, but at the end of the season, indeed, at the end of the tale," Simon writes. That could sound like incredible hubris, if it didn't pan out so beautifully.

Part of what makes the "The Wire" so convincing is Simon's passion. A Baltimore journalist who left the profession in disgust over the toothless nature of most newspapers, Simon still talks like an old-fashioned muckraker, and the stories he tells have the zing of a good exposé. The first season, which focused on McNulty's obsession with a far-reaching drug-running Baltimore crime family headed by the mysterious Avon Barksdale, was not a crime show to Simon. Instead, it was "a dry deliberate argument against the American drug prohibition -- a Thirty Years' War that is among the most singular and profound failures to be found in the nation's domestic history." The second season, which eventually found McNulty and crew probing a foreign crime syndicate operating out of the Baltimore port, was really "a treatise about the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class, as exemplified by the decline of a city's port unions." One thing's for certain, this guy Simon is angry. Maybe that's why his show crackles with such fierce conviction.

"The Wire" may be populated by a killer cast of unknowns and scripted by a writing crew (including Richard Price and George Pelecanos) that will appear legendary years from now, but Simon doesn't hold back in giving credit to HBO, which, free from the demands of commercial TV, doesn't place the same sort of demands on him ("How [would] I help my sponsors sell sports utility vehicles and prewashed jeans to all the best demographics while at the same time harping on the fact that the American war on drugs has mutated into a brutal war against the underclass?"), the sort of demands he felt as a writer on "Homicide," after NBC executives had read a script ("Where are the victories?" "Where are the life-affirming moments?").

There's nothing obviously life-affirming about "The Wire." The two characters who grappled with morality and tentatively tried to do what was right met vicious ends. We're never quite sure whether McNulty, the show's glue, really cares about justice or just about being right. We're just as likely to cheer for the iconic Omar, a stickup artist bent on brutal revenge against the Barksdale clan, which he blames for killing his gay lover. It's a swirling moral universe these characters exist in, and it can be a disorienting one. But at a time when most television (entertainment and news) seems programmed to provide quick titillation and social reassurance, "The Wire's" insistence on seeking out truths and raising important questions is more welcome than ever before.

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