The final season of The Wire is coming up fast, and CNN has a nice piece up that looks at the series’ difficulty finding viewers, the themes the show has explored over the years and the fact that Emmy voters seem virtually unable to recognize that the show even exists.

At Slate.com, one of the bastions of “Wire” fandom and analysis, Jacob Weinberg wrote: “No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political and economic life an American city with scope, observational precision and moral vision of great literature.”

Yet the ratings for “The Wire” are small. The average episode last year drew just over a million viewers, far less than the 13 million per episode that the last season of “The Sopranos” pulled in.

Awards attention has also eluded “The Wire.” Its only Emmy nomination came in 2005 for outstanding writing for a drama series. The American Film Institute at least honored it as one of the best television programs of the year in 2006.

Movie/TV