The Movement of the Seasons

On the topic of Levy being the real villian: I think you're probably on to something. I'd have to watch the series again (which I will), but it seems to me that the the show moves from bottom to top, or from outside in, or perhaps from effect to cause. That is, season 1, the drug trade, is one of the effects of the politicing corruption in the goverment, all boiling down to greed at much higher levels than the top drug dealers. We move from the street to the docks to the cops, and then to the politicians who, with alot of noise, fail to change anything. And then, finally, in season 5, we get the real problem, the law, the government, the politicians, and the way public perception limits in every way the only tools that are at the police' and the education systems' disposal to find a solution to the problems the whole series was examining. I think David Simon did an admirable job of following the problem up, not resting full blame on anyone, but doing a great job in showing how everyone is complicit, to some degree or another, and how this prevents any one agency from really solving anything. It would be very interesting to re-watch this series with a focus on the way Simon structures the plot, with special attention to the content of each season, what each agency can and cannot accomplish, and particularly to try to extract a reason for the order in which he chose to deliver each season, ie. drugs, docks, cops, politics, press/education/government.