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As the final season of the acclaimed, multilayered, American television drama series The Wire starts, what do those involved say about the hyperbole and history of a show that is universally praised, but buried in the listings?

The greatest TV show of all time? Since it began in 2002, critics have hailed it one of the best. The final season, which aired in America at the beginning of the year, was once more greeted with glowing reviews: “A gruellingly edgy combination of complexity and clarity, written and acted to the highest standards. It’s not just good, it’s passionately good,” said The Washington Post. The New York Times wrote: “. . . unquestionably one of the best and most original series on television in decades”.

The Wire co-creator, former journalist, David Simon, 48, doesn’t believe the hype: “I actually don’t think it is the greatest TV show of all time,” he says. “I’m not sure what is. We basically told a story. Do I see flaws in the piece? Of course. I don’t think anything someone puts their hand to creatively is ever perfect, and it’s never finished.”

What’s it about? Set in the dangerously fractured city of Baltimore and inhabited by reticular, memorable, quotable characters, The Wire combines elements of Greek tragedy with the look of a film noir and the multilayered texture of a Dickens novel. Each season, while based around fated police officers, flawed politicians and ruthless drug dealers, has explored a different social theme: drug gangs plaguing poorer neighbourhoods; power and corruption; misguided attempts to overtly control drug abuse; and deep-rooted problems within the public education system.

Simon admits he and his co-creator, former policeman, Ed Burns, 62, had grand ambitions from its inception: “We were not interested in making a police procedural, even though it was a police procedural. That it was a cop show was a calculated illusion. It seemed as if we could make overt political arguments using fictional storytelling. At the beginning of season two, we became extremely confident in our ability to tell the story of postindustrial Baltimore and, therefore, postindustrial America.”

Why Baltimore? Simon says: “I covered this city for 13 years with The Baltimore Sun. Ed Burns policed it for 20, then taught in its schools for seven, so we both know what we are writing about.”

The scarred, predominantly blue-collar city, where 65% of its population of 600,000 is African-American, is the drama’s back-drop. It has one of the USA’s highest murder rates. Boarded up or burnt-down houses still punctuate neighbourhoods.

Dominic West, one of the British actors who stars, has nevertheless grown to love the city in the six years he has been filming there. “It’s like Liverpool,” he says. “It’s not somewhere that is instantly acceptable to everyone, but it is a town with incredible cultural diversity. I never disliked being there, despite its being a dangerous, weird place.”

So, not the usual casting? West, 39, was not the only British actor cast in the first HBO series - Idris Elba, a Londoner, played a drug dealer. But the Yorkshire-born West was an unlikely choice to play the protagonist, the Irish-American cop McNulty, renowned as much for his drinking as his dogged police work. “My initial concern was, could I pull it off, and I thought, no way,” West says. “I’m a middle-class suburban boy. Why would anyone believe I was a blue-collar cop from Baltimore?”

In season three, the Irish actor Aidan Gillen, 40, who starred in Russell T Davies’s Queer as Folk, was introduced as politician Tommy Carcetti. His was neither a name nor a face Americans recognised. He believes that is part of the secret of The Wire’s success. “They never wanted to have actors people recognise,” Gillen says. “So you get them from somewhere else. You don’t get them from Law & Order.”

This casting of relatively unknown actors, from Europe or beyond, lets the series emphasise characters and story, not stars.

Is it hard to “get” it? Despite - or perhaps because of - the lack of stars, the series remains cult viewing. Shown only on the FX channel in the UK, viewing figures struggle to get above 50,000. “People tell me they feel like they’ve stumbled upon a secret and they can’t believe nobody else is watching it,” West says. He adds that, since its release on DVD, he has noticed a bigger reaction to the show in Britain than in Baltimore. “Only since then has it become popular,” he says. “It’s not what you expect from weekly television. People were unused to the idea you solve one case over 13 hours. You have to watch every episode and stick with it.”

Gillen agrees. “It’s not easy entertainment. It presents stuff that perhaps makes people uncomfortable. And it’s not driven by stars, special effects or quick payoffs. But among television shows that are regarded as the best, it’s still out on its own.”

But where are the gongs? As the series ends after 60 hour-long episodes, the fact that it has not had a single Emmy or Golden Globe award astounds. Simon theorises: “It’s about the fact it’s made on the streets of Baltimore and not in LA. And because you have to watch all the episodes to understand why any given episode is as meaningful as it is. The average Emmy voter has the attention span of a gnat.”

West thinks the show’s subject matter may also be partly responsible: “It’s probably too gritty for the mainstream.” (This year’s Emmy nominations will be announced on July 17.)

Why is it ending? Depending on who you believe, the decision to stop making The Wire is either a commercial one made by the broadcaster HBO, since the show got respectable but nowhere near Sopranos-like ratings, or by the creative team, who claim they have finished exploring the big themes of life in a challenging urban environment and it is time to move on. “We honestly feel as if we’ve said what we had to say,” says Simon. “We wanted to carefully construct and depict an American city, reveal its fundamental problems and show why we as a people are incapable of solving those problems. And I think we’ve done that.”

The theme for season five, through which also runs a serial-killer plot, is an exploration of the fault lines that have emerged in the past few years within the mainstream media. “It made sense,” says Simon. “Other attendant problems of the American city depicted in previous seasons will not be solved until the depth and range of those problems is first acknowledged. And that won’t happen without an intelligent, aggressive and well-funded press.”

But, while several new faces are introduced, the core ingredients of the series - the authentic, if sometimes confusing, street dialogue, the black humour, the moody look and the popular characters - remain. McNulty, Bunk, Bubbles, Omar, and even Avon Barksdale, all return to take their bows in Baltimore’s dark alleys.

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