The fourth season of HBO’s great show “The Wire” is about to kick off in the U.S. and the critics continue to sing its praises. If you had to pigeon-hole this Baltimore-set show, you would call it a police procedural drama. But you don’t. It’s too audacious and compelling for that.

Created by David Simon and Ed Burns, the drama for its latest season takes place in the crumbling and, by the sound of it, woeful Baltimore school system. And by all accounts, the show’s ability to weave in compelling stories, a disparate array of characters and a damning indictment of institutions and the War on Drugs, is still as strong as ever.

If you haven’t seen the third season and thus don’t want any of the open-ended storylines that culminated at the end of the second season to be given away, check out these previews from The Associated Press and the Seattle Weekly. For more revealing reviews, see the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Daily News. There is a more in-depth feature in City Paper.