Meanwhile, HBO's "The Wire" closed its fourth season Sunday, notching its biggest audience for the past two seasons. An influx of 1.9 million viewers was enough to bring the drama's season average higher than the previous season, to 1.6 million.

But "Wire's" premiere numbers tell only part of the story. HBO made the unprecedented move this season of making episodes of "Wire" available on its HBO On Demand platform for six days before each premiere data. In its first week, the six-day preview attracted 188,000; that haul rose steadily over the course of the season, peaking at the finale with 650,000.

The big thematic heavy lifting was done in Seasons 1 and 2, when Ed and I were figuring out what we wanted to do: how many seasons, etc. We came up with five. We talked about many things; nothing seems substantial enough for a Season 6. When other writers came onto the show, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, we would throw it at them: This is what we came up with, five things. If there's anything else you have, any ideas for extending the series, say so. There was no general agreement on anything but the five. When I've done my begging with HBO—and begging it is—it has been on behalf of those five seasons. To be honest, one writer came up with another idea, and a really good one, but we realized that it would require so much research on our part that we couldn't do the work quickly enough to keep it in this dramatic world.