A GRITTY DRUG WORLD, FROM ALL SIDES

Baltimore's travel bureau, if Baltimore has a travel bureau, might just
want to give up and adopt the slogan "Danger! Don't Come Here!" Barry
Levinson's Baltimore films, a series of backhanded compliments to his
hometown, have been relatively benign, but there has also been that nasty
crime wave featuring the city: "Homicide: Life on the Street" in the
1990's; the HBO mini-series "The Corner," about drug dealing, in 2000.

This weekend, things get even uglier. On the big screen, a chunk of the
city is destroyed by a nuclear bomb in "The Sum of All Fears," based on a
Tom Clancy novel. And on television, HBO again puts Baltimore's drug
traffickers in the spotlight with a new series called "The Wire." What
would H. L. Mencken make of it all?

Even Mencken, often called the Sage of Baltimore, might not have been sage
enough to decipher the opening segment of "The Wire," which has its
premiere on Sunday night. The show seems to go out of its way to be choppy
and confusing, not giving viewers the traditional "This is who's who and
what's what" opening. "The Wire" is determined to be as different as
possible from "Law and Order," "C.S.I." and all the other network police
dramas. Some viewers may find it a little too different; others, though,
may be grateful for the change.

The 13-episode series was created by David Simon, who shared an Emmy for
writing "The Corner." The idea is to take a good, long look at one
drug-dealing universe, from all sides: police, dealers, users.

This being HBO, that look is rather frank. "Gritty" is a word that has long
been applied to police dramas, but, as any sandpaper user knows, there are
degrees of grit. Label this one "coarse." You can assume, for example, that
any dialogue quoted in this review has been sanitized before publication.

In any case, 45 minutes into the opening episode, the fog begins to lift
and the premise of the series emerges. A homicide detective, McNulty
(Dominic West), has told an inquisitive judge that cases involving a drug
lord named Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) are being regularly lost because
witnesses are being intimidated by Barksdale's henchmen. The judge orders
an indifferent police department to investigate, making McNulty extremely
unpopular with his colleagues, and a group of misfits and malcontents is
assembled to carry out the investigation.

Subsequent episodes track the investigation as well as the inner workings
of the drug gang. Some nice parallels are developed between the two worlds
- - for instance, at the same time that McNulty becomes a pariah for sharing
information with the judge, Barksdale's nephew, D'Angelo (Larry Gilliard
Jr.), suffers a humiliating demotion in the drug gang for committing the
unnecessary homicide that drew the judge's attention in the first place.

It's all served up in dialogue heavy with police-speak and dealer-speak,
sometimes unintelligibly so. The language is supposed to be realistic and
maybe it is realistic, but it often feels self-conscious, like an overly
thick Southern accent. That's too bad, because when Mr. Simon and Edward
Burns, who are credited with the writing of the first five episodes, pull
back a bit, they sometimes achieve a rough eloquence.

"That's what I don't get about this drug thing," McNulty tells D'Angelo in
the second episode. "Why can't you sell the stuff and walk away? You know
what I mean? Everything else in this country gets sold without people
shooting each other."

The real questions about "The Wire," though, involve not the style, but the
audience's level of tolerance. This is a series that requires commitment;
it's difficult to imagine a viewer dropping in for, say, Episode 3, then
checking back again at Episode 8.

Yet "The Wire" doesn't have the pulsating, addictive urgency (or the
obvious good guys and bad guys) of "24," which just completed a spectacular
first season on Fox. It shows us a more realistic version of life, complete
with down time, yack sessions, drunken story-swapping. Police officers (and
drug dealers) are human!

Trouble is, it's been a long time since a police show focused only on
crime-busting, so the human side of these characters may be of minimal
interest; we've seen it before. For instance, we learn early on that one
detective, Greggs (appealingly played by Sonja Sohn), is a lesbian, and it
seems as if something may be made of this in a future episode, but who cares?

And, of course, this is June, July and August we're talking about. Many
viewers who might be drawn into "The Wire" at another time of year are
going to be camping, traveling, jogging, whatever. With its unappetizing
subject matter, "The Wire" may find it hard to compete with a moonlit
summer evening.