Well, this is awesome - While the Season 4 premiere wasn’t all that amazing ratings wise - about 1.5 milion viewers tuned in - HBO’s given the go-ahead for Milch’s planned final storyline which he had promised to release as a novel if not afforded the opportunity to film it. Easily the best show on television, “The Wire” has never fully clicked with a huge audience or with the Emmy folks. Much of that has to do with the fact that it’s not as easily digested as most television series, leading several anonymous Emmy voter to proclaim last year that basically, the show is too smart for them to vote for.

In a statement, HBO confirmed reports in Sunday’s Sun that the fifth season would look at the role of mass media in contributing to cities’ dysfunction.

“For four seasons, we have depicted that part of urban America which has been left behind by the economy and by the greater society, and chronicled entrenched problems that have gone without solution for generations now,” Simon, the 46-year-old creator of the series, says in the statement.

According to Simon, the fifth season will focus on the economy in answering the questions: “Why? What is it that we see and sense about these problems? To what are we giving attention, and what is it that we consistently ignore? How do we actually see ourselves?”

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