The Wire
Before last year’s US presidential election, Barack Obama was asked to name his favourite TV character. Without hesitation he cited Omar Little. Who, you’re wondering, is Omar Little? Well, he is a lithe, swaggering, gay Robin Hood figure on the convention-exploding cable TV series The Wire. Obama wasn’t endorsing Little, or his lifestyle, but the raw, street-hard authenticity with which he is delivered. In many ways, he is like a signature figure for The Wire. But then the five-season crime series set in Baltimore is full of them.

The Wire, produced for the cable channel Home Box Office in the US, has defined the slow-burn show. It never really achieved big numbers until it gained traction on DVD. None of the terrestrial channels on this side of the Atlantic got behind it. By the time they began to take notice last year, the show, which launched in 2002, had almost completed its 60-odd episode run on HBO. More than any other series in the recent history of the medium, The Wire has helped to fashion a new way of watching television – by box set. Many Irish viewers will have heard of it first by word of mouth and experienced its quick-talking, flavour-rich, multi-character delights on DVD.

Created by former Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon, The Wire does a full sweep of the city, taking in the docks, the drugs-riddled suburban flat blocks, the politics in City Hall, the police department and ending at Simon’s alma mater, the local newspaper. It is a hugely ambitious undertaking, equal to any classic book series you can imagine. And the credibility of its delivery matches that ambition. It is adult television of the most sublime kind. It is best watched on DVD because first, you probably won’t want to wait until next week to see what happens to crucial characters and will devour it two or three episodes at a time. And second, because the story arcs will carry you, riveted, from one episode to another.

Omar Little swaggers through the streets of Baltimore like a gun-toting dandy with his long coats, exotic head-scarves and surprisingly articulate command of the English language. He is a mine of insight and wisdom on the ugly broken world in which he lives. Who are the other characters and what are the other TV series who live up to the standards so generously set by Omar and his creators?

Mad Men
Like The Wire, what is striking about Mad Men is its bravery, its ambition and its command of the environment in which it is set. It is like looking over a wall at a time and period we recognise but have never seen like this before and being shocked at the vividness with which they are portrayed. It is set at that cockpit period in the “American century” when the repressed, conservative conventions of the Eisenhower era were giving way to a new, freer approach as a younger man occupied the White House and society began to experience consumerism like never before. Most of the action takes place in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue – hence the title – in New York at a time when sexism, homophobia, racism, and misogyny were rife and smokers enjoyed the last guilt-free years of the cigarette. (Smoking is used as a metaphor for the difference between what was acceptable then and now.)

John Adams
Network television in the US is being assailed from all sides. The collapse in the American economy has had a fundamental effect but, more than anything else, viewers have been moving away from the networks in large numbers in recent years towards the more adult, more challenging cable services and to different ways of organising their viewing lives. It is now widely recognised that the best of TV drama – in fact the best of any kind of drama whether on TV or in the cinema – is coming from the cables. This has helped them to build and sustain new standards of production. John Adams is an award-winning example of what is being achieved – it is the story of the second US president from his beginnings as a young Boston lawyer through his support for the Continental Congress, his part in drawing up the US Constitution, his role as ambassador to France, as vice-president to George Washington and finally as a not-always-popular president. This is a mini series, in seven parts, but unlike any of the historical mini series (Captains And The Kings et al) which the networks ran in the 1970s.

Lewis
Morse is not dead. His spirit lives on in the form of his once put-upon sergeant Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whately) and his new association with an erudite young Oxford detective, James Hathaway (Laurence Fox). For those of us who love the eating-and-drinking of a good two-hour crime show, Morse was the master and it looked like the series, and everything about it, was gone after the death of its star John Thaw. But veteran producers like Ted Childs and Chris Burt have ingeniously managed to reverse the central relationship that was so crucial to Morse to give Lewis a distinctive personality all its own. Lewis is set in Oxford and it follows the police-procedural format of the old series. Now, Robbie Lewis is an inspector but he is still the common-man type we recognise from Morse, while Hathaway is his human, cultured, classics-loving subordinate. The production values and the quality of the writing are equal to Morse and the chemistry of the central pair carries it.

Deadwood
This is a gloriously colourful, vividly produced, character-rich series set in the lawless town of Deadwood in 1876, two weeks after Custer’s Last Stand. Mixing people like Wild Bill Hickcock and Calamity Jane with a bracing array of fictional characters, it portrays a hellishly entertaining vision of the frontier. All three series are available in 12-part box sets.

Battlestar Galactica
This series re-imagines outer space for grown-ups. It is the story of a lone military spaceship that protects an ever-dwindling population of humans from the relentless onslaught of a race of sentient robots after a nuclear apocalypse. You may be put off by the memory of the Lorne Greene show from the 1970s that bears the same name as Battlestar Galactica, or the idea of sci-fi itself. But, believe me, this series is as passionate and intelligent as The West Wing when debating war and terrorism, or as emotionally articulate about death, loss and love as Six Feet Under and sometimes even as trippy or as deliciously baffling as Twin Peaks. What show could offer more?