the show had forgotten about them, and even characters who'd been fired, sent to jail, or killed might pop up later in a different context, or as part of a story told by a player still in active rotation. Even when The Wire was making things up as it went along (and given the "What the hell, let's try it" nature of TV storytelling there were times when it surely was), it always felt organized and purposeful. But the category here is Formal Daring, and The Sopranos valued wildness and inscrutability, and just because those qualities necessarily admit a greater degree of inconsistency doesn't mean they should be devalued when weighing one series against the other. Fans of The Wire could take comfort in knowing that every time they sat down to watch a new episode, they were probably going to see their favorite character advancing through that season's story in measurable increments, and saying and doing more or less what you expected them to do. But The Sopranos was the enemy of such comfort. Every time you heard that opening theme, you braced yourself to face the unknown. The show wasn't just surprising, it was unnerving, sometimes upsetting. What you saw in a given episode could make you laugh, cry, or feel sick to your stomach, sometimes all three. The Wire had most of those virtues, but it rarely inspired viewers to call each other immediately after the final credits and say, "What in the holy hell did I