Prez gets an education. Omar gets breakfast — but not the one he wanted. (“No Honey Nut?”) The Major Crimes unit gets the next best thing to finished and Carcetti gets reacquainted with his conscience. It’s “The Wire” discussion thread — episode “Home Rooms.”

I’ll go first: Even if I weren’t inclined to love this show, I don’t know how I could quit watching after that last scene. In Prez’ classroom, a girl has been slashed across the face by another girl. The attacker rages for a bit, then is swiftly disarmed by another teacher, after which she resigns herself to her fate, and curls in an angry ball against the radiators. Dukie edges close and offers her a little hand-held fan he’s been messing with. She ignores him. He puts it down next to her, a small offering. She continues to ignore him. He sits quietly next to her. He understands. They’re two wounded little animals together.

It just occurred to me, watching that, that all four of these boys are not going to make it. I think Dukie’s not going to make it.

Every great teacher I know has been something of a lecturer. I once knew a guy, who left academia with bad memories and vows of never again, and yet, at parties, sooner or later there’d be a knot of people sitting on couches and chairs, and he’d be standing in front of them, leading a discussion. Someone would make a remark, and he’d nod at them and say, “That’s correct.” And he seemed utterly unaware of it, the way a sheepdog will cross back and forth in front of you, occasionally dropping behind if you slow down, to nudge you along. It’s just in the blood.

All this by way of saying Professor Lance Mannion (Ball State University, College of Hobart and William Smith, others) is at the lectern, using “Cheers” to discuss types in the human family. Start here, then go here and finish here, although I believe the lecture still has one more part.

There will be no test, but if you’re a “Cheers” fan, it’s a required course.

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.

One of the things I read while waiting to be called for jury duty Tuesday was a review of the upcoming season premiere of “Nip/Tuck.” It was, if not a rave, certainly respectful. I watched, I think, three episodes of this show when it first came on the air, which was maybe 2.5 more than I needed to figure out its schtick. And that is? Let’s freak out the squares! Those who know me know (I hope) that I’m not squeamish about these things, language and bare bums and all the rest of it. I’m no Lileks; you won’t catch me going mano-a-mano with straw over this stuff. But I do want people who seek to break barriers and bring a new level of honesty, so to speak, to television, to be about more than saying “cock and balls” at 10 p.m. on basic cable. And I don’t think these people are.

(“To live outside the law you must be honest.” — Bob Dylan. He knows a thing or two.)

I watched, giving the NYT reviewer the benefit of the doubt. Bad move. I found the show — how is this possible? — offensive. How offensive? A mother-daughter pickup team goes to bed with one of the main characters. Mom snuggles with him while daughter goes Monica on him outside the frame. “Move over, honey,” mom says, taking her place. “I was sucking dick when you were still sucking pacifiers.” Larry Hagman does a regrettable guest turn to complain that his testicle implants don’t match his “wang,” and he wants to trade up to “kiwis.” There’s lots of dry humping, explicit boom-boom without the nudity (bare butts are OK, bare boobs not yet). Just an aside: Only on cable do so many women choose to have sex while wearing bras. Much bad language: Shit shit shit shit shit. Cock. Cock and balls. Goddamn. It was kind of like the finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” a few years back, the one in the restaurant. Kathleen Turner — Kathleen Turner! the once-great Kathleen Turner! — plays a phone-sex operator who wants something done to her larynx so her voice will sound younger and sexier. Does she demonstrate some of her patter? Do you even need to ask?

What else? I lost track. By the time Brooke Shields, playing a therapist, was bent over her desk, taking it stern-on (again, more or less fully clothed) from her client the doctor, I was thinking this is really really it. Brooke looked like she wasn’t having a very good time. I believe she was thinking, “I am going to kill my agent.”

It’s not often that a TV show leaves me feeling dirty. That’s sayin’ something.

Please, please contrast this with this very smart and honest take on “The Wire,” and ask yourself if we live in a just world. Don’t answer that; I already know.

(Thanks to Michael G for the Wire tip-off. I should look up Tim Goodman more often.)

Oh my, it’s back it’s back it’s back. “The Wire” is back, and I’ve already seen the first episode, even though it doesn’t officially debut until next Sunday. If you have HBO On Demand, you can watch them days ahead of their official release. So far, it looks as good as ever, although this season is my first watching as a Detroiter-of-sorts, so it’s extra, how you say, resonant.

Anyway, this is the first open thread of the season. Go watch, then discuss.

The next week or two is going to suck, audibly. The wood for the floor was delivered today, followed by a visit from the Floor Guy. Who says the schedule is not looking good for a wrap-up this week. The wood needs to acclimate to our microclimate before it can be installed, and then it has to do some other things, and sanding is involved, and the bottom line is, if we want it done right — at this point I always want to jump up and say, “No! Do it wrong!” — it’ll probably be next week before we can reclaim our family room and living room, which is currently serving as a storage room for all the family-room furniture.

Which means we’ve been driven upstairs for our living space. The good news: Alan hooked the cable box up to the primitive tiny upstairs TV, so we can all watch “American Idol” tomorrow night gathered on our bed like a heap of puppies. Yeah, I know it sounds fun, and it probably will be.

At least the kitchen is still operable. When we did our kitchen floor in Fort Wayne, I thought I’d explode if I had to eat another takeout meal.

Because Alan moved the cable box, I got to see “The Sopranos.” Discuss.

I love the way David Chase keeps slammin’ the truth in our faces. All those weeks building sympathy for poor Vito Spatafore, taking his first tentative steps out of what had to be a very large walk-in closet, making his new home in Gaytown, N.H., and then pow — he reminds us that, at heart, like all of these characters, Vito’s just a murderin’ piece of shit. Tony, self-described “strict Catholic,” cheats on his wife, kills his nephew’s fiance, spreads evil like a slug trail… but objects to a homosexual business associate. Carmela, ditto strict Catholic, goes over to bring her destitute friend a surprise birthday celebration, wearing a fur coat and driving yet another in a long line of fancy cars purchased with ill-gotten gains. And then leans on her husband for not leaning on the building inspector harder, so she can build her spec house with substandard materials.

Sooner or later, everyone will get what they deserve. (Bobby Bacala already has, obviously.) I used to think the series had to end with Tony dead. Now I’m thinking it has to be worse. One of the kids has to go. Obviously, it’s A.J., but maybe Meadow, too. We shall see.

So: Bloggage

Mitch Harper at Fort Wayne Observed reports — and I think he’s correct — that my ex-newspaper, The News-Sentinel, is the only one of Knight-Ridder’s Dejected Dozen to have no reported or rumored buyer. I will repeat what I learned in my final years there, which may be the most important thing I learned there: Never say it can’t get any worse, because it can always get worse. Al.Ways. And probably will. Not that not having a buyer is the worst thing in the world — I doubt McClatchy will leave them beside the road like a foundling — but man, it’s gotta be humiliating. Psychological wounds are the worst.

Man, I’m looking forward to the end of “American Idol.” I don’t know how much more false empathy I can muster. Although the show has its entirely unexpected pleasures — Priscilla Presley being this week’s. I notice they never showed her in anything tighter than a long-medium shot, and that was a wise choice. She really is frightful-looking.

And what a tragedy. That woman was a rare beauty, and now…this. I’ve always thought being born beautiful was like being born rich — something over which you have no control, but unquestionably a real born-on-third-base deal. I know both situations have their downside, but ultimately, if you ask yourself, “Would I trade the set of problems attached to being rich/beautiful for the set of problems attached to being poor/ugly?” — the answer is obvious. Looks, like money, fade with time. Priscilla Presley’s 60 years old, a grandmother, financially fixed for this and five more lifetimes, has no discernible “career” to maintain, so, you know, come to terms with a few wrinkles. If you choose to turn yourself into The Joker, well, too bad.

And I can’t believe Chris went home last night. I had him at 5-2 to win the whole thing. Now it’s an Elliott/Taylor finale, IF THERE’S A JUST GOD IN THE HEAVENS, and we can all stop yakking about this in two weeks.

Someone else asked what I thought of “Big Love,” now that it’s in the homestretch. Verily, it hath grown on me. As a lifelong Midwesterner, where there are so few Mormons they’re probably outnumbered by Hare Krishnas, I find the look at that culture interesting. (Oh, I know that polygamy isn’t LDS-approved, not anymore; I’m talking about the general vibe.) I love the outfits, especially at the Compound. I’m queered by how barnyard-y the whole polygamous-in-the-suburbs scene is. But I like how the show, which I feared would ultimately sell polygamy as an alternative lifestyle, is pretty honest about how much it really sucks, along with whatever pleasures it might hold. Three squabbling women trying desperately to get the attention of the grumpy sperm fountain who lives among, but not with, any of them — it’s not my idea of family, but then, I’m no fundamentalist latter-day saint.

My favorite question about LDS was from the daffy wife in “Angels in America.” Paraphrasing, “If our divine angel was named Moroni, why are we Mormons? Why aren’t we Morons?”

Good question.

We have a Pomeranian living a few doors down. Looks like a fox crossed with a powder puff, but a very cool dog. Spriggy doesn’t meet many dogs that make him feel like a big one, so occasionally they touch noses and tangle leashes and play.

Maybe I should keep them separated, eh?

OK, then.

It occurs to me these days that I have very little to say. Others, they would let their blog lie fallow in these times. Others would fill the space with enervating accounts of trips to Target. Me, I aim for something in between. Truth to tell, the world is calling me outdoors, and the wifi doesn’t reach past the back door.

So let’s take the coward’s way out — another Sopranos thread. Personally, I think this season is off-the-charts great, but the restless crowd at TVWoP begs to differ. Last night’s episode revolved around comic relief Artie Bucco, but I didn’t even care. Christopher’s gift-basket grab was hysterical. What do people want? Non-stop whackage? The only thing that makes these awful folks tolerable is seeing their little moments of humanity. Yes, even when Artie killed the rabbit.

Back after oxygenation.

Busy today, so I’m declaring this an open “Sopranos” thread. What’s going to happen with Vito? Poor, homicidal, confused, yearning-to-breathe-free homosexual Vito? I’m almost afraid to think about it, and whenever I think the show has underlined this particular plotline a little too heavily — the end-credit music of “Fourth of July” was a bit much for a man trying to both break free of mob life and find a new identity as an obese queer in rural New Hampshire, especially when he seems to have wandered into, as one TVWoP poster put it, “the magical town of Gay.” Still, I think, a network show would have made him more attractive. We all know his biggest sin was dancing, because men who weigh more than 300 pounds are not permitted to dance. So give them credit.

So what about Vito? What happens to Vito? And why did Vito bother with a goomar? And who’s taking bets on how long Finn stays in the picture?

One more round of proofreading, and the Busy Period draws to a close. This will be followed by a Fallow Period, then a Broke Period, then a Panic Period, followed by another Busy Period.

Ah, the circle of life.

My goal is to become John Scalzi, freelancer and blogger, who just revealed the shocking news — to me, anyway — that he typically tops 100K in a single year. Most of it, he says, is for “corporate work,” which may have the disadvantage of being highly boring, but hey — cash money has a way of taking the sting away.

(Note: This Busy Period will also be followed by a Housecleaning Period; a tumbleweed of dog hair just blew past my feet near the kitchen door. And the sunshine is bright and clear today, revelatory of every flaw in my rather lackadaisical housekeeping. Best start Swiffering. Today.)

So what’s on the agenda on this unscheduled Wednesday? How about a little Sopranos dish?

I think David Chase writes these shows with all the high-quality screenwriting bells and whistles, including Big Themes and Seasonal Arcs. In the past, they’ve been, of course, the Nature of Good and Evil, Corruption, the Bystanders, etc. We’ve had it shown to us time and again, starting in season two, that Tony is not just a big suburban shlub with an unusual line of work and a fondness for animals, but a true monster, bred by monsters, breeding more monsters, fouling all that he touches. If some mobster entertainments have taken pains to show these guys are only playing a game that everyone enters with open eyes, give “The Sopranos” credit for showing that there really are innocents in “our thing.”

Look at what being a Soprano has done for Tony’s children. Remember the second-season plotline with David Scatino, Tony’s old high-school buddy with the sporting-goods store? Scatino joins Tony’s “executive card game,” loses big and opens the door for a bust-out of his business. Tony takes Scatino’s kid’s car in partial payment and tries to make a gift of it to Meadow, who rejects it — she knows it belongs to one of her classmates. But when that classmate, Eric, yells at her about his father’s indebtedness to her father, she defends him. Daddy’s girl, and not even out of high school.

This season, I suspect, will be All About Choice. And I think the person to watch will be Carmela, who has obviously found the salve for her tortured conscience, and it has lots and lots of zeros on the end. Because I saw a lot of old episodes in the run-up to this one, I remembered the one where Tony buys her a giant sapphire ring for her birthday, out of guilt over his new mistress. She knows what’s behind it, not the specifics, but the general idea, and can’t look at the ring without a little frown, and finally puts it away in her dresser drawer.

But look at how she pees her pants when Tony gives her a new Porsche Cayenne in the first episode, how she flaunts it to her less-fortunate friends. No more tortured confessions to Father Phil for her. She’s decided a possible eternity in hell is nothing compared to a lifetime of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

And I suspect the last victim will be revealed this season, and it will be A.J. He’s the last one left who’s still somewhat salvageable, if only because he’s dumb enough that he could be steered in another direction. But he never had a father to do that, and his mother just gave up the job, too.

I like his new hair this season. He’ll make a fine mobster. Discuss.