Before The Wire, before The Shield, before CSI and all of it’s mutant offspring, even slightly before NYPD Blue came Barry Levinson and Paul Attanasio’s Homicide: Life on the Street based on the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets a real life account of twelve months spent by the author David Simon along side the Baltimore homicide unit.

Part two of this double episode examining Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson's 1990's cop drama based on David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

Part one of a two-part examination of NBC's triumphant 1990's Baltimore-set cop drama. Based on David Simon's excellent true-crime novel Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

The BBC has to endure quite stiff criticism at times. U.S television programming has sadly left our national output years behind, and very little produced here today has much in the way of global impact.

The magnificent BBC adaptations of John le Carre's Cold War novels, released in 1979 and 1982. The greatest television productions to ever come out of the UK. Their existence provides a shameful contrast with the hollow and sensational nonsense produced today.

We are living in the Golden Age of American television, the surge of multi-stranded long running story lines, the television DVD industry, the internet, and the plurality of modern television channels all interconnect to bring us the current climate of high quality, high production dramas with international audiences and critical appeal.

A special extended episode this week examining all five seasons of David Simon and Ed Burn's excellent Baltimore set series The Wire. For the uninitiated; this is an examination of the series as a whole, and does not reveal major plot points.