Several reviewers have called it the best show on television, including TIME,[75] Entertainment Weekly,[67] the Chicago Tribune,[76] Slate,[56] the San Francisco Chronicle,[77] the Philadelphia Daily News[78] and the British newspaper The Guardian,[38] which ran a week-by-week blog following every episode,[79] also collected in a book, The Wire Re-up.[80] Charlie Brooker, a columnist for The Guardian, has been particularly enthusiastic in his praise of the show, both in his "Screen Burn" column and in his BBC Four television series Screenwipe, calling it possibly the greatest show of the last 20 years.[81][82] In 2009, TIME listed it as the best television series of the 2000s (decade).[83]
'The Wire Files', an online collection of articles published in darkmatter Journal critically analyzes The Wire's racialized politics and aesthetics of representation.[84] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "The deft writing?which used the cop-genre format to give shape to creator David Simon's scathing social critiques?was matched by one of the deepest benches of acting talent in TV history."[85]
President of the United States Barack Obama has said that The Wire is his favorite television series.[86] 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, wrote a very positive critical review of the series in the Spanish journal El País.[87] Internationally, the mayor of Reykjavík, Jón Gnarr, has gone so far as to say that he would not enter a coalition government with anyone who has not watched the series.[88]
