I've completely given up on the Americanized version of The Office. I tried to watch it again last night, and I couldn't get through but a few minutes. They got they painful part right. I was cringing the whole time. It's just not funny. Not at all. It's just impossible to watch.

I have been investing my TV time with a far better endeavor, watching the HBO series, The Wire. I hadn't even heard of the The Wire until a friend from my ski house lent me the DVDs for the first two season. I've watched the first season. Now I'm hooked.

The Wire is a crime drama focused around a homicide cop in Baltimore, Jimmy McNulty. He's a hard nosed, hard drinking divorcee who would be something of a cliché were it not for the fact that he's willing to buck to system in order to get police work done. And in The Wire, that system is broken.

There are elements of corruption, cronyism and incompetence that you see in other cop dramas, but what underlies The Wire is careerism that drives criminal and legal decision making and forms the subtext of the series. Sergeants want to be Lieutenants. Lieutenants want to be majors. Majors want to be commissioners. The Commissioner wants to move into politics. The lawyers want to become judges. Judges want to be reelected. I can't remember seeing this as the focus of any other series on TV. Not Hill Street Blues. Not NYPD Blue. Not anything that I can remember. McNulty is constantly swimming upstream against a sea of decisions made by cops, commissioners, lawyers and judges who want to move up the latter rather than right for justice. This conflict makes for great drama.

The cast of The Wire has no major stars, but the acting is exquisite. I wonder how HBO can routinely fashion ensemble casts of such high quality. It makes me believe that there is a seam of great acting talent out there that most of us are just simply not aware of. You certainly don't see much of it on over the air television. Or it could be the dearth of great writers, on which HBO seems to have a minor monopoly, makes good actors look bad. I haven't really thought about it enough to make up my mind.

I love watching shows on DVD. I don't have HBO and probably won't have it anytime in the near or distant future, so it's convenient for me to be to rent or borrow the DVDs and watch them at my leisure. Beyond that, the ability to watch show after show with no commercials or waiting is the way all TV should be viewed. Then I can back and really enjoy this cinematic creation that the magicians at HBO have pulled out their the hat.