Jan is C.S.I month round my way as for the last 4 years, we have had the series box set as a Christmas present and the GLW insists on racing through them straight away. We've watched all 7 series on DVD but I've never seen even a single episode on TV.

Same with the Wire, 3 seasons on DVD and like most people I suspect, I've never seen one on TV.

Heroes, Arrested Development, Curb, Deadwood, and later series of 24, The Sopranos and The West Wing, all live in a DVD universe for me.

And what a fantastic trailer. I've just decided I'm going to slash out on a big season 1 to 5 box set of The Wire which I'm sure will eventually come out and re-watch the whole thing.

I use TV for sport, the news, and the odd film or documentary, but everything else comes in concentrated bursts on DVD. Curb, 24, Heroes, Lost, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, The Wire (which I won't see again until the American DVD for series 5 comes out whenever it does), City Of Men, Flight Of The Conchords... I'm even working my way through Seinfeld having missed it first time round.

...when I left my home to buy the final Harry Potter book, I was wearing ear-plugs, to reduce the chance of the ending being spoiled for me.

Since several episodes from the final season of The Wire have already flown from the HBO coop and are now roaming free on the net, I have been carefully avoiding certain message boards.

I did manage to get through the whole of series 1 in four days over Christmas, all while moaning about my runny nose and achy bones. I still got reminded it wasn't good viewing for 2 year olds, can't think why.

Now I've got to find some way of fitting in the series 2. I'm thinking about an early breakfast viewing.

Thanks for the recommendation. Great TV.

...I've not seen any "The Wire" on DVD, instead I've being getting it the old fashioned way via the gift of broadcast telly and that. So I'm about halfway through series 2, and that Malcolm X stylee maniac has just rolled up. So keep it schtum.

Admittedly, it's not so Ned Ludd down our way that I actually have to sit up and watch it as it happens or anything, because the mighty "series link" function on Virgin Media (the beardy, jumper-wearing, girl-hoisting version of Sky+) has proved itself worth it's own weight in enriched uranium on this and other audiovisual confections I and the GLW would otherwise have missed out on due to being lazy and that.

Studio 60, The Unit, Curb Your Whatsit, Sarah Silverman, Criminal Minds, Later with Jools and the like have all gone down on bended knee before that magic yellow button.

Thanks Virgin Media.

Thedia.

forget my orginal ramblings...I've never seen more than a trailer for this show. I already watch way way too much tv that I couldnt add yet more to the list. It's bad enough that I'll watch something like Heroes AND then buy the DVD box set and watch it all over again. I'm waiting for Battlestar Galactica's final season to get the full boxed set.

Just working through Series One at the moment. Put them away, Mrs Bartlet!
And on Series Three of Homicide:Life On The Street - I can't move on until I've seen the sniper episode, so don't even talk to me about The Wire. What is it with Baltimore? Doesn't look the like the prettiest place on earth to me, especially at night.

...that all British TV could go away and take the next six months off and apart from the sport I would barely notice.

The Wire - the greatest TV show ever?
True Dat.
We managed a five episode night during our series two watching.
We then had to slow down because we started to run out.
Desperate for series 4, any of you media types with a press copy laying about the office unwatched, feel free to send it my way.

"The Wire" for general brilliance (only seen series one; currently maintain Sopranos edges it for greatest TV drama ever).
"Spaced", "Bilko" and "Catweazle" for light relief whilst off work sick for a week.
"Bleak House" for my Christmas Dickens fix.
"West Wing" to accompany the real-life presidential race.

Was it coincidence that the price of the box set of The Wire Series 1 jumped to £49.99 over Christmas from a previous £17.99 following the continual recommendation of your esteemed magazine?

Thankfully the price is drifting down again and I'll be able to see what all the fuss is about.

PS it's not true what they say about us Scots.

"In the office we wear badges to indicate how many series we've watched and we're only allowed to gossip with people on our grade or above."

If you're gossiping with someone of a higher grade, wouldn't that mean that person is breaking the rules???

I hadn't realised I was posting messages to a forum so utterly CRAMMED full of Couch Potatoes!

Having been given the boxed set at Christmas 2006, I'm still somewhere around episode five of Band Of Brothers.

Life's too bloody short to spend it watching the sodding goggle box! Get off your arses you lazy sods.

Major season five spoilers here;

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/what-do-real-thugs-thin...

And here you can track crime on the streets of Baltimore - in real time!

http://crimebaltimore.com/

BTW, FX have already shown season 4, back last summer. And even if you get nailed for customs duty buying the box set from Amazon.com - as I did - it still only works out at around £45, which is well worth it.

There's nothing more pleasurable than a box set. You're in control. You don't have to wait a week to catch your favourite show, and with things like The Wire, which is so complex it needs to watched in one go, it's ideal.

We've done all the Wires, Sopranos, Survivors, Waking The Deads, etc, and currently plowing through The Lakes, Spooks, Bouquet of Barbed Wire, the House of Cards trilogy and, er, Degrassi Junior High.

The wire completely upset/changed my post kids bed/work routine and er my life.

From late summer thru autumn myself and the wife watched *together* all 50 episodes cribbed from DVD and for season 4; bit torrent pretty much every night for six weeks. (she's now watching the whole cycle again in prep for season 5)..
I remember having a bit of fright at the end of season 2 thinking that i *needed* to have season 3 ready to go and rushed off to virgin (couldn't wait for amazon to deliver) to buy it so it would be ready *that* night.

We never really watched more than 2 episodes in one chunk and frequently watched episodes again. It was probably the most tv we've watched together since we'd met.

I'd watched most of season one on the train (a long commuter) before this session but hunched that she might get hooked. It took about 30 mins. Omar, McNulty, Stringer.

I bought her copies of Homicide and The Corner (all recommended) for Christmas which she read in a matter of days. I now have 2 episodes of Season 5 ready to go and a growing online obsession (via blogs /forums/vids etc) see: http://del.icio.us/jemstone66/thewire/

I also started buying box sets for my friends and relations who became even more hooked than me. One has watched 2 whole seasons in weekend binges and one watched the last 7 episodes of season 2 (well its great isn't it) in go.

And we got into the soundtrack and especially pleased at the new soundtrack... Especially that greek number from the montage at the end of season 2.

The Wire. It did wonders for my marriage i can tell you.

I spent much of Christmas Eve on the train to Cornwall with my five year old son. Normally I don't like it when he watches too much TV, but I'd just got Series 2 of The Wire for my birthday and hadn't seen the last few episodes. So I gave Henry my iPod and said he could watch Toy Story, while I opened my laptop, plugged in my headphones and gorged myself on the best episodes of The Wire I've yet seen.

Some rather profane teenagers got on around Taunton. They thought I couldn't hear them, but the first thing they said was "Oh, decent, man! That bloke's got a MacBook and his kid's got an iPod!" (they spoke like Londoners even though we were approaching Plymouth). Anyway, terrible parenting; but it was Christmas. And it's The Wire. You've got to, really, haven't you?

From what I've seen of it, House is one of those shows that's probably not that bad but looks very poor compared to the good stuff. It particularly irritates me when the camera goes inside a human body and shows us a virus attacking a cell. I mean, we're not all CSI watchers who like to have everything spelt out for us. Then again, I have only watched four episodes so far.

I have ordered the first series of The Wire to watch, looking forward to it.
Apart from the news, the odd music programme and docummentary, I too spend most of my time wacthing DVD box sets. Currently working my way through the first series of Frasier again. It was great to be able to watch the third season of LOST with no commerical breaks. It was so good though, I will have to curb my withdrawel symptons and watch it again soon.Will soon seeing if "Heroes" lived up to all the hype and I need to finish the third season of Battlestar Galatica. Whilst we're on this subject, fans are in for a treat if you haven't yet seen the special episode "Razor" released just after Christmas.
With all these box sets flying about, there's not enough time to listen to music these days.

2 episodes to go in Series 2 and then straight into Series 3. Will then get the Box sets and watch again at leisure. Series 2 and 3 are at £17.99 with Amazon.
Simply the best TV ever. Big thanks to The Word for pushing me in it's direction.

.....is The Larry Sanders Show. So very very good - and influential of many of the current shows. Get the "Not Just the best of Larry Sanders" - episodes and also loads of interviews and bonus features which are just as funny. Bought in the US but Amazon UK have it.

Hey Now!

I bought Series 1 of The Wire about a year ago and have only watched Episode 1 so far (whilst suffering from gastro entiritis in a 4 star Moroccan hotel in August). I wasn't that gripped. We've been busy with Heroes, Deadwood, Battlestar (mostly downloaded thanks to the Sky/Virgin fallout), then there's The Riches and Flight Of The Conchords and now Damages, Primeval, Shameless, plus I still have about 20 episodes of NYPD Blue to watch and the last 6 or so of The Sopranos. Then we have the rest of Firefly (not too impressed), The Shield (had it 3 years haven't actually started it yet)...not to mention Ace Of Wands (the title song is still great but the programme isn't as good as I remember). I don't know how I find time to go to work.

All this sounds so familiar! My first brush with the boxset was when I rented a couple of discs of S1 of Alias about 3 years ago. I got hooked after the pilot episode and my wife soon followed suit. Speedy Amazon purchases of S1 and S2 meant a steady 3 or 4 episode per night fix until we cleared all 44 episodes (hey we have young children and we're too tired to go out). Constrained by UK release dates, boxsets of Series 3 & 4 followed as soon as possible, by which time (March 2006, a year later) S5 was ready to air on Bravo. 88 Episodes in a year, we wore it like a badge of honour! Four episodes into S5 and with the knowledge that it was to be cancelled in the States we err. . . stopped watching it! It had just gone too far, with characters killed off and brought back to life, and plotlines left hanging for entire series, we felt cheated. Oh, and one episode per week - ludicrous!

Having not learned our lesson we now have Battlestar Galactica S1 and Firefly lined up. We now think nothing of consuming an entire season of a US sitcom in a few nights (both series of the excellent How I Met Your Mother made for useful washing-up-dodging excuses in the past couple of months). Somehow, watching just one episode of something doesn't feel right. . .

Yo - lissen up: (OK I'll stop)

We discovered The Wire c/o The Word a few weeks before Christmas and immediately made our way through Series One, one or two eps per night. Ordered Series Two but it was delayed due to the Delightful Holiday Season. We attempted to fill the hole by reverting to our latest Seinfeld Box set and LoveFilm movies but this awful ache persisted, like Bubbles' pathetic heroin addiction: must have the Wire!

So we watched Series One again from start to finish and like all great works of art, it's even better the second time around. Chortle as Jimmy McNulty seals his fate on the Harbour Patrol very early in Episode One; better understand Daniels' ambivalence about getting in too deep; marvel at Kima's amazing bone structure. We started Series Two last night; even more complicated! The question now is do we proceed to Ep Two or go straight back to Ep One?

At the same time, I'm re-watching all of The Sopranos on More4, courtesy of my wonderful Freeview recorder, the very model recommended by The Word around a year ago.

As Blanche Dubois put it: I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

From reading Andrew Collins' blog (whose opinion I trust in all regards excepting his inexplicable (for such an obviously intelligent man) love for pseudo-science and "Dr" Gillian McShit), I got into The Wire about a year ago. My (non-existent) God! It's not overstating the case to call it the best show on telly. It trusts the intelligence of its viewers to follow the byzantine curlicues of the plot, has a cast and crew to do justice to the brilliance of the script and doesn't cheapen its effect by taking the simplistic good-vs-evil-everything-sorted-in-45mins approach that nearly spoils the likes of CSI and Law & Order.
This really is the Golden Age for TV. With shows of the quality of The Wire, BSG and QI (not to mention all the documentaries you can find from channel 520+ on Sky), only the terminally nostalgic would think the past was better (remember The Black & White Minstrel Show? What were they thinking?!? Minipops?!?) Add Sky+ and the BBC iPlayer to the mix and I can fill every night with stuff I really want to see, never watch an advert, and end up worrying about the ever-decreasing free space left on the Sky+ hard-disc because I can't fit it all in with all the other stuff I want to do (he added before the couch potato accusation inevitably comes flying in: "summon Bevets", as Fark would have it…).
And has anyone else noticed that our favourite show and magazine have only two consonants to differentiate between them? I sense the mystic hand of something or another that can be better explained by science at work…

There's a cd of music from The Wire due out soon, and yes, featuring the four different versions of Way Down In The Hole. See link below. Also a mention for the novels of George Pelecanos, one of The Wire's staff writers. They cover similar ground, albeit set in Washington rather than Baltimore. Possibly the best crime writer out there.

http://www.play.com/Music/CD/4-/3595637/Various-And-All-The-Pieces-Matte...

The first season of The Wire IS very slow- I remember trying to force my then girlfriend into watching it, an immense struggle. I think we are romanticising it to say it hit the floor running; I saw the good points from the outset (watched it about 4 years ago) but it had half the humour it currently does. Also, McNulty was an absolutely one-dimensional ass. Now, I adore every character.
I am literally worried that this Boxed sat business is killing my creative time: The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Monk, House (which, no, is not as remarkable as The Wire etc, but is very funny and never has a flat episode), and, previously: Arrested Development...shouldn't I be DOING something.
Luckily it's all ending. I've got 4 episodes of The Sopranos left, one season of The Wire left, Deadwood is already dead...I either need to start thinking of how to use my spare time more productively, or HBO need to pull their fingers out fast.

Watched series one box set in 10 days flat, helped along by weekly commute to Manchester and back (two episodes there, two on the way back, that's the discipline, etc.). Then major panic as couldn't find series two for l nor m, so went straight into series three, and am halfway through when l and b series two shows up in the local HMV. Help me, fellow Wire fiends. Do I keep on watching three till the end, then do all of two, or do I stop three right now, do two in its entirety, then go back into three where I left off? Or do I make like a civilian and get a so-called life? Most of my waking (and dreaming hours) are now consumed by it, and I've started trying to walk like McNulty and talk like Stringer Bell. Make it stop, daddy. Though not for just a little while yet . . .

The theme of the main story in series 2 is so different from that in 1 and 3 that it won't cause too much of a problem. There are a couple of threads running through that you'll know the resolution of as they develop in S2; you'll realise that McNulty's situation in episode 1 of S2 is going to change, but finish S3 and in peace and just look forward to another treat that can start as soon as you finish it.

I want my brother to read last summer's article from The Word alerting us all to the joys of The Wire. Of course, I could just get him to read it next time he's round, but does anyone know if it's available online anywhere? I know that some Word articles are.