With an authenticity that verged on documentary-like, The Wire is a towering achievement which has lost none of its potency two decades on.
It only fails to make our top 10 because it’s not purely a crime drama, rather a panoramic portrait of a decaying city and the entire US justice system. Each series revolved around a different part of Baltimore society – the drug trade, local government, the education system, the media, the unsexy-sounding port authority – but it always came back to policing. Detectives like Jimmy McNulty ( Dominic West) and Bunk Moreland ( Wendell Pierce) were among this Dickensian epic’s most memorable characters. With an authenticity that verged on documentary-like, The Wire is a towering achievement which has lost none of its potency two decades on. Read our The Wire review