The Wire: Complete HBO Season 2 [DVD]

Please note this is a region 2 DVD and will require a region 2 or region free DVD player in order to play.

The most unvarnished, uncompromising and realistic police drama ever returns for another hard hitting season. McNolty has been demoted to harbor patrol, Daniels is in the police archive dungeon, Prez is chafing in the suburbs and Gregs is stuck behind a desk. Meanwhile, on the docks of the Baltimore harbor, the rank and file scrounge for work and the union bosses take illegitimate measures to reinvigorate business, but a horrific discovery is about to blow the whole port inside out. While the detail is on ice, a new case begins...

Episodes:

1. Ebb Tide
2. Collateral Damage
3. Hot Shots
4. Hard Cases
5. Undertow
6. All Prologue
7. Backwash
8. Duck and Cover
9. Stray Rounds
10. Storm Warnings
11. Bad Dreams
12. Port in a Storm

Picking up after the dramatic events of its maiden season, the second series of The Wire achieves something really rather special: it even manages to outclass the first.

For those fresh to the show, surely the best, most intelligent piece of scripted drama to emerge from America in the last decade, the actual premise is fairly simple. Across the thirteen episodes of its season, it charts one case, and the numerous influences upon it. So it devotes roughly equal time to those committing the crimes as it does to those chasing them.

This time, the Baltimore Police Department have twin worries. There’s the continuing, festering narrative of events from the season before, along with a new problem when a container of dead bodies turns up at the nearby docks. After initial battles over whose statistics the bodies will be attributed to, a fresh case begins for the embattled officers of the Major Crimes Unit.

Yet season two is about much more than the case itself. Bubbling under the surface are characters with real problems, that take their toll on the day-to-day, while at the docks themselves there are union struggles underway, which also have a part to play. Thanks to, frankly, superb scripting, these various narrative threads are woven together quite brilliantly, and the result is perhaps the finest series of The Wire to date. And that’s no small feat.

If you’re one of the many who have let The Wire fly under their radar thus far, then you’re urged to rectify that. Clearly season one is the logical starting point, but begin your adventure in the knowledge that this second series is simple exceptional. For the rest of the US television industry, this is the standard to aim for. --Simon Brew