The Wire: dumbest show to be considered smart, or fakest show to be considered real?

Reading up on Elijah Anderson, I found his thoughts on 'The Wire':

“I am struck by how dark the show is,” says Elijah Anderson, the Yale sociologist whose classic works Code of the Streets, Streetwise, and A Place on the Corner document black inner-city life with noted clarity and sympathy. Anderson would be the last person to gloss over the severe problems of the urban poor, but in The Wire he sees “a bottom-line cynicism” that is at odds with his own perception of real life. “The show is very good,” he says. “It resonates. It is powerful in its depiction of the codes of the streets, but it is an exaggeration. I get frustrated watching it, because it gives such a powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”

Had he pretty much stopped at "what they have left out are the decent people," that would have been fine.[1] But of the four adjectives he gives to describe the 'decent people'--themselves apparently a discrete category--do two of them really need to be "God-fearing, churchgoing"? Not necessarily redundant, but nothing to do with decency either.

I believe I am the only person I know with similar interests who found the show to be ludicrously bad. It didn't resonate, nor was it at all powerful in its "depiction of the code of the streets." It was organizational theory (good) and 7th grade dialogue (terribly bad). The overall result was silly. What it got right--the geography of the drug trade[2], the ongoing and antagonistic relationship between individual cops and individual young men, the attention to political constituency service--is pretty much swamped by what it gets wrong, namely, everything else.

And a pet peeve: writers in love with their own damned words. Many people, myself included,  begin papers/book chapters with a quote from one of the principals that succinctly states the argument, the puzzle, or the basic problematic that the paper is going to worth through. Would you ever consider starting, or would you take seriously a paper that started with an indented quote from your own damned writing. And yet every episode, this is what the egos behind 'The Wire' would do. And especially obnoxious: these were never thematically tied to what was going to come. They were pretentious filler, which didn't even have the merit of remotely resembling the way anybody actually talks, ever, anywhere.

[1] He could also have said "what they left out are the decent actors" of "what they left out are the decent writers." The only few characters with any charisma or presence, the only ones you actually believed or at the very least liked to see on screen, were Omar, Stringer Bell, and... I don't know, maybe Avon, once in a while.
[2] But not the ludicrous volume. Pay attention to the amount of coming/going in the high rises and projects, and then on the corners, in the first and third season. More than half of Baltimore would have to be buying from these three places in order to get that level of foot traffic.