In a cultural void where "must see" TV means American Idol, HBO's dramatic series The Wire stands out like Shakespeare. The Wire is almost too good. The writing, the texture, the characters, the reach. The Wire is a cop show the way Hamlet is a ghost story. There is murder, betrayal, intrigue and despair. But the ghosts that haunt The Wire hide in plain sight, demanding nothing, not even our belief they exist.

They just stand back and let it all be. The hungry and the hunted huddled in hoodies on the corner. The doomed innocents walking to school through fatherless streets, The shirking politicians. The turf-obsessed bureaucrats who see nothing and like the view. The valiant minority who try to make a difference. The furious few who rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

That's why McNulty has become a serial killer. That's why Bunny Colvin legalized drugs in Hamsterdam. That's why longshoreman union boss Frank Sobotka turned to the Greek mob for money to save union jobs in Season Two. "I knew I was wrong, you know," he said. "But in my head, I thought I was wrong for the right reasons."

The number of flawed heroes in The Wire is surpassed only by the number of oddly principled assassins. "Man's got to have a code," says the killer named Omar. The bad guys are almost more appealing than the good guys because their motives and actions lack the hypocrisy endemic in public institutions.

That is the disturbing image in the mirror The Wire holds up to every American city where crime is not a failure but a lifestyle, from teenage crack dealers to pay-to-play City Hall insiders to perfectly legal corporate newspaper ownership that cannibalizes its journalistic soul by cutting newsroom staffs in half while doubling profit margins. That's the theme of The Wire in its fifth and final season -- the civic consequences of the self-inflicted neutering of big city daily newspapers like the Baltimore Sun or the Philadelphia Inquirer, where once bustling newsrooms are underpopulated and eerily quiet.

The Wire questions what happens to a city when half of the experienced watchdogs no longer watch and those remaining are too overworked or discouraged to bark, let alone bite? Ask not who let the dogs out? The answer will break your heart.