Tagline: "This season of The Wire, it's really about the media."

Translation: We are desperate to boost the ratings for this show, so we're downplaying every aspect of it that has turned viewers off in the past!

The Verdict: This isn't a trailer so much as a preview packed with new footage and snippets of "hey, our show is smart and great!" comments from the cast and creator David Simon, but it ought to be enough to get the small but passionate Wire cult pumped for the premiere of the Greatest Show in the History of Television's final season in January. In this clip, we get our first glimpse of the fictionalized Baltimore Sun newsroom and the promise of some "outrageous" story line for the show's default protagonist and drunken self-righteous fuckup Jimmy McNulty, but the most exciting moment comes when Simon says that the season is really about "how far you can go on a lie," a claim that neatly summarizes the undiluted cynicism and outrage at the heart of the series. —Matthew Perpetua

Earlier: David Simon Deification: A Season-by-Season History