the Guardian has a really interesting series of blog posts called "The Wire Re-Up", in which journalist Paul Owen rewatches all five series of The Wire and blogs analysis of it. He's up to the season finale in series 1 and from there, you can find the rest of the series. He touches on the naturalist tradition that The Wire places itself in, in which free will is subverted by social heredity and institutions. It's a bleak and depressing way of looking at the world, and it made late-19th century Norwegian literature nigh-unreadable. But it does create some intense social criticism in The Wire.