If everyone at the Manhattan Institute suddenly became raving socialists and decamped to Baltimore to concoct a sprawling, five-year missive on urban decay and the failures of public institutions in story form, you might end up with something resembling The Wire. Never before has any television series been so deeply and smartly concerned with the interplay between public policy, local institutions, and individual lives. What happens when teachers’ unions threaten the mayor’s office in a bid to get more funding and the police department budget is shorted? The Wire shows us. And not just at the political level–but also on the streets, in the lives of cops, kids, teachers, and drug dealers, as well as the politicos at city hall.

The HBO series–as far as I’m concerned, the best that television’s ever seen–ended last night with an episode that managed to be both satisfying and appropriately open-ended (Andrew Johnston has a great write-up on the finale over at The House Next Door). Sopranos creator David Chase should take note: As much as I enjoyed and defended the non-ending ending to his show, this is how to end a major series. Major plot points were largely resolved, but the intractable problems of social organization and human fallibility were not. That’s one of the marks of a genuinely great series-that it feels as if there is something outside the confines of the hours we see on screen. In that respect, no other show comes close to what Wire-creator David Simon has accomplished over the last five seasons. These stories come to an end, but for everyone in the show who survives–and, in this case, that means much of the city of Baltimore–life will go on.