On one hand I’m proud of myself for burning through half a season in three weeks. That’s an unusually productive period of TV watching for me. On the other hand if you take the entire 12-episode season into account, I finished season 2 in August and season 1 a year ago, so bragging is not in order.

The usual stable of directors is joined by TV’s Leslie Libman, oscar-nominated filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, Alex Zakrzewski (lead cinematographer on Homicide: Life on the Street) and first-timer Christine Moore (who’d later work on CSI episodes). That’s twenty directors! The hardcore auteurists must go mad trying to figure this out.

Dead Men and Women:
Omar’s gang member Tosha: Edwina Findley, who went soap opera before landing in a new movie co-written by George Lucas. Main man Stringer Bell: the great Idris Elba, soon to appear in The Losers and Kenneth Branagh’s Thor. And Johnny, Bubbles’ junkie friend, in the least-surprising development in the entire series so far, dies of a drug overdose: Leo Fitzpatrick, who I didn’t recognize as Telly, lead character in Kids. Since The Wire he’s been in Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim.