Sopranos, Deadwood, or The Wire, There Are No Other Choices

There's a long and necessary roundtable at The House Next Door on what I have long said is the most pressing cultural question of our age: Which is the greatest TV show of all time, The Sopranos, The Wire, or Deadwood? Still coming down from the last, fantastic season of The Wire, I'm inclined at the moment to give it the nod, on the following grounds:

* The Sopranos went on too long.
* Deadwood was too short.

A Deadwood that received its fourth, apocalyptic season—culminating in the devastating fire that destroys the town in 1879—might have eclipsed The Wire. But until we get it, we're still missing the last act.

And I'm pretty sure The Sopranos, distilled of all the filler, red herrings, and plot diversions—distilled, I'm saying, into essence du Sopranos—pretty easily beats all comers. Take out nearly all of season 4, half of season 5, and the second half of season 6a, and you've got a show that can easily go head-to-head against The Wire. In this sense, for my money The Sopranos is the better show—its valleys may be lower, but its artistic peaks are higher.

But like it or not, we have those superfluous seasons, and we have to take them into account.

With its huge cast of fully fleshed-out characters and total inhabitance of the city of Baltimore, The Wire has no fluff and wastes none of your time. Episode to episode, it's nearly flawless and always utterly pitch-perfect. From a political standpoint, too, if that's your thing, we must concede that its critique of late capitalism is far more devastating than either Deadwood's or The Sopranos's precisely because there is so little fantasy content to distract us from the brutal reality of what we're seeing. The Wire is the thing itself—there's nowhere to run.

But it's a close, close race, and it'll be a long time before anything cracks this top three.