To call The Wire a crime drama would be like calling Walmart “that place to buy Halloween candy.”

The sixty episodes that make up the five seasons of The Wire paint the most stunningly in-depth portrait of a modern American city. It’s a better sociology class than anything on which you’d spend college tuition money.

Series creator David Simon brings us inside the Baltimore he knows from his decade-plus at the Sun newspaper, from his days researching the journalistic novel Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

The Wire isn’t a Chamber of Commerce effort: It shows us Baltimore’s stats-juking and incompetent police department, its corrupt yet ultimately powerless political leaders, its crumbling school system, its decaying working-class unions, its corner-cutting journalism, its bleak street corners, its ghetto lifestyle. Its wholesale systemic failure. It shows those of us who think of Baltimore as the Inner Harbor and Camden Yards what life on the other side might look like.

To be fair, every major American city has drugs and drug violence. Every major American city has street gangs. Every major American city has some element police brass that cares more about crime statistics than fighting crime. In short, every major American city has an unflattering side hidden under that rock. It just so happens that the best piece of televised or cinematic art from the 2000s publicized Baltimore’s.

The Wire is universally praised by anyone who’s seen the show start to finish. It’s frighteningly rare to find someone who says “Yeah, I just didn’t get into it.” But here’s the one question nobody’s ever really qualified to answer: Is it, ya know, real? How much is fictional television and how much is journalism?

Baltimore’s current police commissioner isn’t about that universal praise, and he isn’t a fan of the way the show portrays the city he polices. At January 8th’s Amplify Baltimore event, Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld said The Wire was the “most unfair use of literary license that we’ve borne witness to” and called the show a “smear on this city that will take decades to overcome.”

Bealefeld then kicked it up a notch: “You know what Miami gets in their crime show? They get detectives that look like models, and they drive around in sports cars. And you know what New York gets? They get these incredibly tough prosecutors, competent cops that solve the most crazy, complicated cases.” What does Baltimore get on The Wire? Bealefeld says, “What Baltimore gets is this reinforced notion that it’s a city full of hopelessness, despair and dysfunction. There was very little effort—beyond self-serving—to highlight the great and wonderful things happening here, and to indict the whole population, the criminal justice system, the school system.” You can watch his comments in this video:

If you know anything about David Simon, it’s that he’s not about to take that characterization of his work lightly. And in quick fashion, Simon penned a response to the commissioner and sent it off to his former employer at the Baltimore Sun. You can read his typically thorough, aggressive and well-reasoned retort that places the blame on two decades of nonsense coming from the very department Bealefeld oversees in its entirety right here, but here’s an excerpt that underscores Simon’s point:

Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility. That is the police department we depicted in The Wire, give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last twenty years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O’Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work. Commissioner Bealefeld, who was present for much of that history, knows it as well as anyone associated with The Wire.

We made things up, true. We have never claimed otherwise. But respectfully, with regard to our critique, we have slandered no one. And to the extent you can stand behind a fictional tale, we stand by ours – and more importantly, our purpose in telling that tale.

His full response isn’t that long and for fans of the show, it’s probably worth your time. This would make for the most meta season six ever, wouldn’t it? The new commissioner fights with a television crew over the level of crime and corruption and fact versus fiction in its story-telling.

If you’ve never seen The Wire in its entirety, it’s time to move everything down a peg on your Netflix queue and catch up quickly. For those that have, or for those of you who are huge fans of major spoilers, re-live the greatness of the series though the 100 (subjectively) best quotes as compiled by one superfan:

(hat tip to A.V. Club)

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