I doubt that The Wire would have gotten onto the air if The Sopranos hadn’t come first. And I strongly suspect that if I put this question to Simon, he’d agree. Chase’s show kicked in the doors of people’s preconceived notions and made a lot of subsequent, risk-taking series possible.

The Sopranos is simply bigger, more important, more influential, harder to categorize or explain. It has mystery in the way that Twin Peaks had mystery. Where The Wire entertains, upsets, illuminates, and instructs, The Sopranos provokes, offends, startles, baffles, and haunts. It is novelistic, but it’s also short-story-like, and poetic, and at times has qualities of stage drama, opera, and even Renaissance painting and great twentieth-century pop music. And of the two series, which one are people still arguing about, years after its debut, as if it just went off the air last week, grappling with it the way we might grapple with a tantalizing dream that could bring salvation or ruination if we could only get a handle on it? The Sopranos.