We’re going to have to fig­ure out a way to han­dle the Wire dis­cus­sion threads. HBO is mak­ing new episodes avail­able through its On Demand ser­vice start­ing a week before their offi­cial air dates. So while the rest of you suckas just watched the pre­miere, I spent my lunch hour yes­ter­day watch­ing episode 2.

I was one of those who would have been heart­bro­ken if the show had been can­celled after three sea­sons, but not dev­as­tated. Which is to say, I thought the cir­cle had been closed on all the major plot­lines, to what­ever extent that’s pos­si­ble. We knew what hap­pened to the Barks­dale crew, and who would suc­ceed them as west Baltimore’s drug-dealing Wal-Mart. We knew how Jimmy McNulty would set­tle his tor­tured soul. We knew the Major Crimes unit was a done deal. The beat went on. So if HBO had pulled the plug, I’d say, “Very bad deci­sion; this is the best show on tele­vi­sion,” but I wouldn’t expe­ri­ence series inter­rup­tus, so to speak.

Well. I was wrong.

Every sea­son this show keeps get­ting richer. Sea­son one: Cops and rob­bers. Sea­son two: Cops, rob­bers, working-class heroes. Sea­son three: Cops, rob­bers, politi­cians. And now, in sea­son four: Cops, rob­bers, chil­dren. After only two episodes, it is already break­ing my heart.

What “The Wire” seeks to do, among many things, is to show urban Amer­ica to the rest of Amer­ica. This is no small task. When we first moved here, sev­eral moth­ers con­fided in me that they never went to Detroit, out­side of the safe-for-suburbanites down­town attrac­tions (sta­di­ums, the­aters, a few restau­rants), for any rea­son, and that I shouldn’t, either. I told one that I’d recently gone to the East­ern Mar­ket (also safe for sub­ur­ban­ites), and she, a life­long Detroi­ter, said she’d never been there. In her life.

“It’s really very safe,” I said. “There are thou­sands of peo­ple there on Sat­ur­day morning.”

“It’s not the des­ti­na­tion,” she said. “It’s what might hap­pen on the way there.”

This is not an irra­tional fear. Detroit is a big, poor, rav­aged city with all of the asso­ci­ated prob­lems. The hus­band of one of Alan’s coworker’s was car­jacked at gun­point at a gas sta­tion in a not-particularly-bad east-side neigh­bor­hood recently. City offi­cials are always point­ing out that things are look­ing up, that the city’s not as bad-off as it was, and they’re right — the crack epi­demic of the ‘80s/‘90s was the agreed-upon low point — but, as Ving Rhames says in “Pulp Fic­tion,” things are still pretty fuck­ing far from OK.

But in the city, life goes on. Peo­ple live and die and go to church, the mail is deliv­ered, babies are born, leaves that are green turn to brown. “The Wire” seeks to show us how everyone’s doing. Of course the bot­tom line is: Not good, but it’s not all bad, either. Part of the genius of the show is how its rov­ing spot­light can find lit­tle suc­cess sto­ries, too, some­times right along­side the bad, some­times part of the bad. In the episode I watched yes­ter­day, in the estab­lish­ing shot at a shabby box­ing gym one of the char­ac­ters is run­ning, we see a poster on the wall under the leg­end, “Our Plat­inum Patron.” It is of a young Avon Barks­dale, whom we already know as a mur­der­ous drug dealer. But he was once a boxer, and he bankrolled the gym when it was get­ting started, and now his drug money is being used to keep young men away from the cor­ners, away from drug deal­ing. In the city you can’t get on your high horse about where money comes from; there’s just not enough of it to go around, and so you don’t ask questions.

The show’s writ­ers also like to show us how iden­ti­cal atti­tudes com­pare to one another at dif­fer­ent lev­els. In the same episode, a cor­rupt state sen­a­tor throws a fit in his friend the mayor’s office. The sen­a­tor is the mayor’s deputy cam­paign chair­man, and he’s just been sub­poe­naed; the police are inter­ested in the source of some of his cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions. He feels per­son­ally insulted by this atten­tion: “How am I sup­posed to finance the whole ticket? With con­tri­bu­tions from Korean gro­cers? Am I sup­posed to ask a man where his money comes from?” And guess where some of his money came from? From Avon Barks­dale. It’s all connected.

This season’s main nar­ra­tive looks at a quar­tet of four boys at the tip­ping point, in mid­dle school, when their des­tinies are still in ques­tion. One is the son of an incarcerated-for-life exe­cu­tioner, whose mom is liv­ing well on the sub­sidy paid to good sol­diers who take the rap and keep their mouths shut; one has one of those fiercely pro­tec­tive moth­ers who has a decent job and a keen inter­est in her son’s future; one is being raised by wolves, so to speak, and the wolves are so impaired and dys­func­tional they can’t even feed him; and we don’t know much about the fourth, except that he has his own ideas. More will be revealed.

In screen­writ­ing class, we were taught that every minute counts — that you can’t waste valu­able pro­duc­tion time or risk your audience’s atten­tion, so you must move the plot along in every scene — “raise the stakes.” This is one rea­son your life prob­a­bly isn’t as excit­ing as a movie, because life raises the stakes on a much more leisurely timetable. One of the things TV can do, because a sea­son runs 13 hours rather than 90 min­utes, is show us some of life’s smaller moments. There’s a lovely one in episode two, where Namond, the kid whose dad is in prison, vis­its him there, along with his mother. I’d wager very few read­ers here ever vis­ited their father in prison, and expe­ri­enced the odd author­ity of a jailed father. The com­pet­ing influ­ences of that scene — dad behind bars, but still the source of the family’s money, and hence some­one who must be respected; a kid who’s still embar­rassed to have a dad in such a place; a mother who must keep the man happy to keep get­ting her grub­stake — were dizzy­ing, and yet they were all there in about two min­utes of screen time, includ­ing a ten­der moment between father and son on oppo­site sides of plex­i­glas that still felt entirely nat­ural and unforced.

That, my friends, is hard to do. (I should add: And still the plot was moved along, and still the stakes were raised. I’m going to be think­ing about how the writ­ers did that all day long.)

One more thing, and then I’ll shut up: One of the per­verse rewards of low-budget TV is the chance to see new faces, actors who haven’t made their bones yet and are will­ing to work in an off­shore (from Hol­ly­wood and New York, any­way) pro­duc­tion. There are hardly any rec­og­niz­able actors in this show (the cor­rupt state sen­a­tor turns up in com­mer­cials some­times), and that helps the audi­ence lose itself in the sto­ries; we really feel we’re eaves­drop­ping on real life. But the child actors, this sea­son, are incred­i­ble. These are not Dis­ney Chan­nel faces; the kid in the mid­dle even has a lit­tle acne.

Today brought some good news: “The Wire” has been renewed for a fifth sea­son. The show’s cre­ator, David Simon, says next year will “look at the role of mass media in con­tribut­ing to cities’ dysfunction.”

Sea­son four has barely started, and already I can’t wait for sea­son five. That, folks, is good TV.