The Wire

I have been a fan of the Wire since about halfway through the first season, when I first began
to have any idea what the fuck they were talking about and what was going on beneath the surface. For one thing, this is a show that shows rather than tells in a way that practically none of the fiction I've read recently has. Everything's in the little details, the way Bunk and McNulty gradually begin to see the same details, the missed clues that allow them, wordlessly, to reconstruct the events of the murder that took place in a room, the same murder we've listened to Dee Barksdale guiltily describ, all without uttering a word to one another other than several muttered "Fuck"'s.
What I really like about the show is the subtle use of parallel story-lines between different groups, usually the street drug-dealers and the police. In TV shows they love to use parallel stories, where the big brother learns the same lesson as the little brother, and its always heavy-handed, eye-roll-inducing and forced. Somehow the Wire manages to nail it. While the police finagle their budgets, Stringer Bell takes community college business classes where he learns the same lesson the police are failing to, and applies it not just to his "legitimate business", but to his drug-dealing operations AND city councilor (and later mayor) Carcetti struggles to find a way to balance his budget for both the police, and the business venture he doesn't realize Bell has been involved with.
In season five, which we just started, the show gets just a tiny bit meta, in a was that another show (Six Feet Under maybe) would have belabored to the point of ridiculousness. At the end of episode two, McNulty steels himself to do something he knows is wrong, that rankles his bent but still strong sense of ethics and the greater good, in order to disturb the details of an accidental death to make it look like a murder. It's like a twisted reflection of the scene with Bunk that I referred to above. Wordlessly, McNulty alters the position of the body, implying a story that is totally unlike what they assume really happened, which presupposes that the rest of the police will now read a new story, the one McNulty wants them to, interpreting the details in a totally new way. Everything is a story, and the way you present the details completely changes the way the 'reader' will interpret those details.
Meanwhile, the fourth group, which is new to this season (the drug-dealers, now joined by Michael and Duke; the police, and the city government) are the reporters. There job is to read details they see in the world, find out what happened, the story hidden (on purpose or accidentally) within the details, and then present the same details in the paper so that the reader will come to the same conclusion that they did. The have to balance presenting the facts objectively, with bringing out the story they think is the right one. They spend all their time arguing abut and worrying over the best way to tell a story, the little details of writing.

...
Everyone wants to come to the same conclusion, that the criminals need to be stopped, but the police can't afford to devote all their time to that one project, the government can't "sell" the story to the tax payers, so they can't pay for the police wire-tapping project, the reporters want to report on the developments of the story, but they need the police to continue with the investigation or them to do so, so McNulty bends the rules to create a plausible story that will allow them to get funding to continue their investigation. But, there is of course a real story, a real criminal, but because of all these inter-depending details, they can't unearth the 'real story'--he has to concoct a fake story to make it possible to pursue the real one.