Toob Notes The Wire ended early in the month, and while it didn't end on a high -- this was the weakest season -- it was still the best show on TV. (No real spoilers follow, but I am assuming you watched the show.)

The proper theme of this season was fakery. Both the police (McNulty at first, then others) and the Sun reporter invest themselves in lies. These lies did not arise in a vacuum, however. McNulty spins his web in reaction to the lies of the city's governors in an effort to win the drug war which, as becomes clear, is itself mired in falsehoods. The reporter, in contrast, lies partially out of laziness and partially out of desperation, but the institutions surrounding him fully support him since it is to their benefit.

This season featured perhaps my favorite moments in the series. The FBI is called in to profile the serial killer, which the viewer knows to be a fiction created by McNulty. The camera stays on McNulty's face as the FBI agent describes the serial killer in terms that exactly fit McNulty personally. Flawless comedy. Also we got a lot of time on Lester Freemon, the Sherlock Holmes of the 'hood, who was probably my favorite character in the series. And we had a web of dependent, self-perpetuating lies so intricate that it became a thing of beauty in itself.

But there were big problems this year. There was an over abundance of cameos of previously featured characters and a mess of contrived "full-circle" finishes in an orgy of closure. Many of the characters seemed to become mere plot devices at the expense of their humanity. And, as much as they probably tried to avoid it, there was the sound of a grinding axe running in the background as the creative team eviscerated the newspaper industry from whence they sprung.

Meanwhile, in real life, creator David Simon took every opportunity to engage in barking political crackpottery to anyone who put a microphone in front of him, as if he was Barbra Streisand or something, culminating in an embarrassing berating of viewers and critics for "not getting" what he was trying to say. Poor David suffers the fate every other pseudo-great thinker in history -- he's so wise and insightful, yet must live in a world of blind, thoughtless rabble who cannot understand or appreciate him.

One of the enduring mysteries of art is that great works can be created by people anywhere on the spectrum of humanity -- young, old, weak, strong, good, evil. Clearly loudmouth crank falls somewhere on that spectrum because despite all Simon's ancillary nonsense, The Wire was a remarkable achievement. The core idea -- the story of a dying city as a Greek tragedy with institutions in the role of the gods was brilliantly conceived and beautifully realized.

If the The Sopranos was the last word in mob drama (except for the inevitable "courageous" film about two gay wiseguys) and Deadwood was the last word in westerns (except for the...oh, never mind), then The Wire will likely stand as the last word in cop shows. True to the theme, but so very much more. Time to move on to new paradigms.

And perhaps that is exactly what HBO has been trying to do, but with little success. In Treatment, a show which I came to late, just finished its first season and I have a sneaking feeling that's all it's going to get. The show was about people in therapy and the gimmick was that it ran each day of the week with a different patient on each day. It was decently done and the dialogue was never mawkish. The challenge was to hold a viewer's attention through a half-hour show that consisted almost entirely of a conversation between two or three people. In some ways it was reminiscent of classic TV drama from the fifties, when the actors and the dialogue had to carry the entire production. I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it again, but it was about as well done as that sort of thing could be.

Less successful is John Adams, a Tom Hanks' guided dramatization of the bestseller by David McCullough. This entire production comes off as little more than a retelling of key scenes from the book, no humanistic background added. Really, it is very sterile and quite aimless from a character point of view. A huge backslide from the superb Band of Brothers he did a few years back. Give it a miss.

Following HBO's lead, other networks are taking risks on more interesting projects. AMC followed up its excellent Mad Men (season 2 can't come soon enough for me) with Breaking Bad, about a high-school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with a nearly hopeless case of lung cancer and so takes up cooking meth with a sleezebag ex-student so as to have something to leave his family. Over time the motivation morphs into having enough money to pay for exceedingly expensive uninsured treatments in an effort to stay alive. At the close of the first season it is clearly heading towards a conflict where he is trying to make money to survive cancer and if he lives he will find himself to be a drug dealer, living on borrowed time. Good supporting cast of a ball-buster wife, a kleptomaniac sister-in-law, and a DEA agent brother-in-law leave open lots of possibilities. If these guys can keep the plotline tight, the direction fresh, and the conflicts uncontrived, Breaking Bad will continue to be a winner. Another season 2 I am anxiously awaiting. Well done AMC.

Dexter, from Showtime, is my most recent guilty pleasure. Dexter Morgan is a serial killer who only kills other murderers, who he has ready access to through his work as a forensic blood analyst for the Miami police. It has completed two seasons and I have been through both on-demand. While there were occasionally tedious back stories, it was very well done on the whole, and the acting and concept seemed to improve over time as everyone involved got into a groove.

I could tell you that it is really a thought-provoking parable about Man's need for morality and rules (the Code of Harry, in this case) to channel his dark, fallen nature into something good, but that might be a bit of a stretch. I'll stick with guilty pleasure for my purposes. During my viewing of both seasons, once I reached about the half way point I ended up so engrossed that I stayed up until about 3 AM to finish in marathon sessions. The following mornings were brutal. Dexter killed me.