HBO's 5-Part Political Crime Drama Was Officially The End Of An Era For TV Procedurals

Published Sep 5, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Few television genres have evolved quite as radically as the police procedural. Back in the heyday of Dragnet and Columbo, it was all about the case of the week. At the beginning of every episode, a crime was committed, and by the end of every episode, our wisecracking detective had solved it. But, as the years went on, and increasingly disturbing reports of police brutality and systemic negligence started flooding the media, those old cop shows lost a lot of their magic. Hill Street Blues was the first police procedural to dig a little deeper and explore the detectives’ personal lives through a more nuanced portrayal of law enforcement. In a post-Rampart, post-Rodney King America, The Shield took it a step further and made a bunch of crooked cops the protagonists. At the end of the very first episode, our supposed “hero,” Vic Mackey, guns down one of his fellow boys in blue. The real watershed moment for the police procedural was when The Wire premiered on HBO. David Simon worked as a crime reporter in Baltimore for years, so his cop show wasn’t influenced by the tired tropes and well-worn conventions of other cop shows; it was influenced by his own lived experiences with real crime scenes and real police investigations. The Wire Changed What A TV Crime Procedural Could Be The Wire’s biggest revolution to the procedural genre was that it threw the case-of-the-week formula out the window. Until The Wire came along, it was a given that procedurals followed a very episodic format, with a new case each week. But real police investigations are rarely that clean and cut-and-dried. Sometimes, the perp gets away; sometimes, the case slips through the cracks; sometimes, detectives make crucial mistakes. It can take years to build a case against a powerful criminal figure like Avon Barksdale or Marlo Stanfield, and The Wire built those cases across multiple episodes (sometimes multiple seasons). But, more broadly, The Wire completely reinvented what a procedural could be. There’s more social commentary than procedure, and it’s a holistic, multi-layered, and multi-dimensional view of law enforcement from several perspectives. Each season looks at a different broken institution keeping American cities like Baltimore mired in crime and corruption and class inequality: police, local government, underfunded public schools, etc. Old-school cop shows like Dragnet are a glamorized Hollywood fantasy; The Wire is the real deal. The series has an almost documentary-like sense of realism, with fiercely realistic writing, beautifully naturalistic and lived-in performances, and a fly-on-the-wall filming style. That’s what set The Wire apart from other cop shows: verisimilitude. This wasn’t just a cock-and-bull cops-and-robbers story; this felt like we were being given access to the day-to-day activities of real police officers (warts and all). After The Wire, there was no going back. You couldn’t make a show like Starsky & Hutch in a post-The Wire world. No Procedural Drama Has Ever Topped The Wire In the years since The Wire went off the air, we’ve seen plenty of imitators try to recapture its intense realism: Snowfall, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad. But no subsequent crime drama has ever topped The Wire, or even come close. The Wire is one of a kind. In fact, the closest we’ve seen to a crime series that matches The Wire’s greatness is Simon’s other HBO dramas. After The Wire, he made Treme and The Deuce and Show Me a Hero and Band of Brothers’ true successor, Generation Kill. We Own This City is a miniseries about police corruption in Baltimore, and it’s the closest we’ve gotten to The Wire season 6. The Wire isn’t just the best cop show ever made; it’s arguably the finest achievement in the history of American television, so nothing compares. The Wire 10/10 Release Date 2002 - 2008-00-00 Network HBO Cast Dominic West Jimmy McNulty Lance Reddick Cedric Daniels