I don't find your thinking about The Wire persuasive. It sounds like you are saying that The Wire can't be compared to Law & Order because it was more ambitious, more intelligent, and contained more ideas. All that is true, but the fact is that the show conveyed all of this through the genre of the police/crime drama. It is a great show in part because it revealed new possibilities for what had become an exhausted category.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Yeah, that was bizarre. After I saw that episode where that chick left that show I was like, "Whaaaa?"