Nat King Cole’s sugar-swirled songs echo through Walmart walkways lined with stockings and ornaments.  Price-drops of epic proportions are slated for a Friday after Thanksgiving that is sure to leave at least one Midwesterner trampled to death. It’s with these staples the holiday season descends upon us and I turn once again to the annual duty of procuring a Christmas wish list from which my grandparents will glean inspiration. But this year is much, much different from the last… sigh… for I received “The Wire” box set on Christmas last year.

What more does one really need? What more is left?!?

Above is a 10-minute reminder of 100 reasons that there is no comparing “The Wire” to any other show. There is no pitting other characters and plots in a cage-match, battle-royale against Omar, McNulty, Marlo, Bodie, Stringer, Avon, Bunny, Mike, Wee Bey, and all the other play-actors of Baltimore-upon-Chesapeake.

“The Wire” is to television what Andre 3000 is to Hip-Hop — born with an unfair advantage, and retired with a brand so deep in the skin of the genre that the scar of creativity will be visible beyond a lifetime.

Unfortunately, when you own “The Wire” box set and every Outkast record, there’s few worldly possessions left to desire. If you’re LC Weber, that means you lock yourself away for a cold winter’s night with the Twilight book series and steep your spinsterdom in a mug of herbal tea. I’ve gone soft, my friends. With no Snoop to ask “How my hair look?” I become more Mary Tyler Moore with each passing day.

And so as Black Friday approaches and my grandmothers prepare their shopping lists, I suppose the only thing left to ask for is a re-up of the series that scarred this website as deeply as Hip-Hop. I’ll start back at the beginning; where thin streams of blood flow in the street at McNulty’s feet. Where he rests on a stoop with a young man from the Towers, and they deliver notable-quotable 101…

“So, your boy’s name is what?”
“Snot.”

[HuffPo]