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 ou have probably heard that The Wire is the best show on television. What you probably have not heard is that The Wire is the sexiest show on television. I think it is. I realize this idea will be a hard sell, because The Wire is not sexy in any conventional way. For one thing, there is not much sex. There is also not much nudity (and what skin is shown is mostly unthrilling, a bored blur of pasties and G-strings). In a television landscape populated by full-frontal romps like Tell Me You Love Me, the bodice-ripping antics of Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, and the skin pageant that is Dancing With the Stars, it's hard to think of a show less invested in titillating its viewers than David Simon's Greek tragedy, an epic about nothing less than the decline of the American empire. In each of its five seasons, the show has tackled a different urbanreality — the War on Drugs, dying unions, the political process, an anemic school system, and this season, the media — and portrayed its essential doom. The Wire is bleak, devastating and difficult. So why does it get me so hot? Theory #1: Sixty-Minute Parade of Testosterone
Let's start with McNulty, the detective played by Dominic West. A talented British actor who suffered such indignities as 28 Days with Sandra Bullock, West has matinee-idol good looks, but as McNulty, he's a mess. Suit rumpled, eyes bloodshot from Jameson; you can practically smell the self-hatred from across the bar. (Though he'd have a much better shot picking me up than, say, Chris Meloni from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a man forever clenching his jaw and turning into the light.) In season one, McNulty's story is paralleled by that of D'Angelo, a hustler with a conscience. As D'Angelo, actor Larry Gilliard Jr. looks like another kid who could be sifting fries at McDonald's, but as D'Angelo, he's a drug dealer who can turn a game of chess into an allegory for the dope trade. (And this is the brilliance of Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns. That they can, in one scene, teach me about street hustling and explain chess so that it makes sense for the first time.) Season one tugs the audience between both men — magnetic, original thinkers undone by pride and stubbornness — and has the temerity to let neither win. A few other men deserve mention here — Idris Elba as Stringer Bell, a Machiavellian killer so smooth he could make the most upstanding housewife moan into her sheets; Irish actor Aiden Gillen has yuppie appeal as mayoral candidate Tommy Carcetti; as Avon Barksdale, Wood Harris deserves an Emmy for best acting done by a pair of lips — but we really can't leave this discussion without talking Omar. Has there ever been a sexier, more compelling gangster? He steals from drug dealers. He's gay. A mysterious scar is slashed across his face. He's a murderer who never curses. And he lives by his own moral code, which includes never killing on Sundays. Omar is one of the only characters we ever see give passionate, loving, open-mouthed kisses — yes, always to a dude — and he even scored one of the show's most memorable re-emergences, showing up for the first time in season four impressively full fronta. Theory #2: The Wire as the Anti-Sex and the City Consider that The Wire is the inverse of HBO's romantic girlie fantasia: One is a valentine to New York while the other is a eulogy
I found the bedroom acrobatics of SATC's fabulous foursome sometimes funny, sometimes tiresome, but almost never hot. After a while, all the screwing dissolved into shtick; in my mind, every episode involves Samantha and a fireman. On the other hand, I could rattle off the rare sex scenes in The Wire like baseball stats: There is season one's late-night rendezvous between McNulty and Rhonda, the redhaired ADA ("Did you . . . ?" he asks after rolling off of her, to which she scoffs, "Like you care."); in season two, there is Stringer Bell's seduction of D'Angelo's baby mama, and the tight shot of his nimble fingers unzipping her pink jogging suit was so full of heat it was used in the opening montage for later seasons, too; there is the sequence in season three when ex-con Cutty, just released from prison, gives himself over to a woman for the first time in years; there is Carcetti, in season four, taking a break from firm handshakes and polite smiles to enjoy a quick shag on the dryer with someone other than his long-suffering wife. None of these are romantic moments (we'll get to those later), but they're collisions born of desperation and hunger. Theory #3: Obsessive detail as its own seduction The first time it occurred to me that The Wire was hot was during the opening montage of season one. (I have it on DVD. I watch it when I can't sleep.) The first time you see it, the opening montage is an incoherent jumble of images — a phone number scrolling across a computer, a camera flash, the sizzle of a cigarette being inhaled — that, over the course of the season, begins to make sense. They are flashes forward to pivotal moments in the season, something like a random grab bag of clues, one that isn't so different from the random grab bag of clues the show's detectives use to work their case. "I think the opening collage is a kind of poetry," said the crime novelist Richard Price, one of the show's writers, in the DVD commentary for season three. The opening is also a giant tease, the kind of visual puzzle that would only seduce wonks who find an erotic charge in tiny details. Oh, and the opening montage is set to a Tom Waits song. Theory #4: The gutter is sexier than the beach
There is a shared aesthetic between The Wire and Waits — both are critical darlings with a little dirty-sexy in their swagger. Both Waits and the creators of The Wire write about the down-and-out, and they certainly find more beauty in crack houses and trash piles than they would strolling Laguna Beach. 
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