The year that began with the final season of HBO's The Wire and the Nonesuch release of the series' only soundtracks—"... and all the pieces matter": Five Years of Music from "The Wire" and Beyond Hamsterdam: Baltimore Tracks from "The Wire"—now comes to a close with the release, today, of the complete five seasons in a single, 23-DVD box set with "an abundance of commentaries and features," says Paste magazine's Stephen M. Deusner, who also notes mournfully: "It’s a handsome, thorough and well-appointed cap to the show’s amazing run, but like many others, I’m just not ready for it to be over and done with."

Deusner offers this concise summary of the complex content covered over the show's run:

Each of the show’s five seasons explored a different aspect of Baltimore: the unwinnable drug war in seasons one and three, the loss of blue-collar jobs in the unjustly maligned second season, the failures of the school system in the near-perfect fourth season, and the inability of the local press to report on these problems in any sort of meaningful or committed way in the fifth.

With such a broad swath to cover in such an intimate way, he asserts,

The Wire works better on DVD, where the storylines coalesce into a brutal panorama of a city in freefall, unable to right its course ... What happens in one sphere affects all the others. That the crew was able to portray these complex systems so vividly and so naturally—making them not just comprehensible but actively absorbing—was one of the show’s major narrative triumphs.

The review concludes that "during its run, The Wire was the best show on television, denser than Lost and scarier than The Sopranos, better than any of the mythology shows on the major networks. It was—is—a monument."

Read more at pastmagazine.com. Listen to songs from the series' soundtracks at nonesuch.com/artists/the-wire.