The wife and I finished watching the fifth and final season of The Wire today. I must say, that was some damned fine television of the sort that really makes you rethink your view of the world.

The show, if you haven't seen it, primarily address the drug trade in Baltimore, Maryland, but it does it by showing all sides of the issue. So we have the police, but also the dealers, and in the later seasons some of the younger kids who are inevitably drawn into the trade. Some of the most heart-wrenching scenes are in the last two seasons where you really realize that a lot of these people have no other option and that they're only going to get out of it by an Act of God.

The show is also beautifully presented with a decompressed plotline that nonetheless remains intriguing and with a highly diverse cast that even changes from season to season as different characters take main stage.

When the last words were spoken in the last episode, when one of the characters said, "Let's go home," I had a feeling of inexplicable but real sadness. It wasn't that I was going to miss these characters whose lives that we saw presented over several years (though I will), and it wasn't that I was going to miss David Simon's wonderful writing (though I have hope he'll continue to write other things). It was that I was never again going to see his very realistic vision of Baltimore again.

Despite its gangs and its drugs, despite its corruption and its rough edges, I'm going to miss the Baltimore which I met in The Wire (and to a lesser extent in Homicide: Life on the Streets, though that show was more about the characters and less about the city). Sadly, I won't ever get to go home to it again.

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If you haven't seen The Wire, go rent the first DVD right now; it's TV that you must watch before you die.

It started out with the new Doctor Who. I increasingly noted that in each two-part Doctor Who episode, at the end of the first episode there was an extended period of a minute or two where the characters screamed, ran about, and generally kept repeating the same actions to make it bloody clear that we had a cliffhanger.

I marked it off as being just Doctor Who, an homage to its cheesy scream-filled roots.

But then last night I was watching the first part of Hogfather, and I noticed a very similar pattern. There was a moment or two when we kept cutting back through the same scenes again and again. There was no revelation, no change, just this heavy-handed repetition. Perhaps it was supposed to raise tension or something, I dunno. It usually makes me hope for the credits.

Thinking back, I realized that the first season of MI-5 ended the same way, with a full minute or two of repeated action.

Now here in America, people know how to write cliffhangers. There's a sudden shock or surprise of some type, then we hit the credits running. None of this ridiculous, hey it's the same person doing the same thing. (Except maybe on 24.)

So why the difference? Group director think? Cultural difference?

DVD Menus are often a pet peeve for me. Any producer that decides that it's cool to waste my time by showing worthless animations at startup or (even worse) when I make selections on a menu should be shot. Well, at least removed from making DVD menus. I've seen some pretty atrocious ones. I remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Scrubs as wasting my time in particular.

But, I have a new winner for all-time worse DVD Menu EVAR. That's season one of MI-5. It's a fine British spy show. No Sandbaggers, but still very nice, but the DVD Menu ... shudder. There's all the slow transitions that you'd expect from STOOPID DVD design, including a full minute to get to the first menu. But, here's the kicker:

THERE'S NO WORDS ON THE MAIN SELECTION SCREEN. Instead you have to pick among visual elements on a desk. For example, there's a pile of DVDs on the main menu, and so that's the episode selection. A pile of DAT tapes lets you change sounds. There's two bits of paper on the desk. One led to the special features, and I have no idea where the other went.

To try and help guide you there's an audio which instructs you which elements to click for each thing. You know, like those instructions you get when you call up some company and you get thrown into a hell of phone menus? That's right, someone thought that'd be great for a DVD. And it only plays once, so if you step away (say, because you always load up a DVD a few minutes before you're ready to see it, because of outrageously long startup graphics), you'll have no idea what to do.

Bad Spooks! No biscuit!