The fourth season of HBO’s cop drama “The Wire” is, simply, television at its best. And that statement isn’t just hack critic boilerplate: Television is now minting hour-long dramas of such unusual quality, you’d think the lunatics had finally taken over the asylum. Luckily for couch jockeys, the lunatics in question appear to be a generation’s worth of writers, directors, actors, and producers who treat the medium like an art form; it’s by the grace of their talent that we can flee the sallow routines of modern life and run into the richly entertaining worlds of “24,” “Battlestar Galactica,” or “The Shield.”

Those three are merely a sample of the satisfying escapism that the boob tube currently offers. “Prison Break,” “Lost,” the upcoming twist-fest “The Nine,” and long-in-the-tooth “Gilmore Girls” are all compelling reasons to avoid the multiplex. It’s a new golden age for television, and not enough credit is given to the originator of this trend: critical darling and Emmy Award flypaper HBO.

It’s actually to the channel’s discredit that it’s never known how to sell “The Wire,” since veteran creators David Simon and Ed Burns churn out a show that never spends the usual base currency of HBO’s fleet of dramas — namely graphic sex and violence. “The Wire” is a breathtakingly layered narrative that demands your rapt attention, and generously rewards it. But unlike its siblings on the subscription-based channel, it truly is for adults.

The real-world rituals of police on the hunt supply natural verisimilitude and conflict; it’s a paint-by-numbers formula that “Law & Order” has turned into a science. In the wrong hands, cop shows use procedurals as crutches and pad the normal course of crime scene investigation, arrest, interrogation, and trial with car chases and macho puffery. But “The Wire,” which is more concerned with the tap-tap of typewriter keys than the rat-a-tat of lawmen’s peacemakers, does away with these clichés.

“The Wire” is a life-and-death ballet of multiple storylines that dovetail and climax over the course of a single season. Each episode is an exercise in inspired plotting, eschewing cliffhangers and other TV drama devices designed to keep viewers coming back. It’s a series that one must consume whole; watching it ad hoc will prove frustrating. But watching it unfold episode by episode is like staring at one of Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings by focusing on one dot, then slowly stepping back until each dot eventually reveals itself as a part of a complete painting.

Each season of “The Wire” observes the urban wasteland of west Baltimore, and the cops and robbers who ply their trade there. But the series’ creators aren’t satisfied with something that simplistic, and while “The Wire” is firmly a show about badges and bad guys, it’s more a vast social commentary, a fictional record of the shadow cast by the colossus known as the United States of America.

The drug trade, labor unions, and the courtly intrigue of municipal bureaucracy account, in that order, for the story up to the point where the fourth season takes off. The upcoming season, which makes its premiere Sunday at 10 p.m., tackles the education system, painting it as a heartbreaking theater of war, where the stakes are nothing short of the future of our society.

As this particular arc is launched, we’re teased with a patient setup that follows at least a dozen small stories that slowly converge and collide in immensely satisfying ways. It’s almost quixotic to describe the story — true to life, “The Wire” doesn’t order reality around simple conflict resolution. Instead, it embraces ordinary chaos and leaves the viewer to interpret the tea leaves left behind. But aside from the core theme of public schools as arenas of combat where cops and drug dealers move children like pawns, there are also arcs following a mayoral race, a new drug lord replacing the menacing Avon Barksdale from the first three seasons, and, of course, the fortunes of Baltimore’s beleaguered finest.

As usual, one of the treats of the show is how backdoor politics, favors, and entangling red tape are realities shared by those standing on both sides of the thin blue line. Another theme involves local and state resources being siphoned off in order to fund the war on terror, as if more people are murdered by terrorists than by the domestic mullahs of the war on drugs. While many a soldier displays valor on foreign soil,”The Wire” reminds us that many more do so in the alleys of every American city.

To single out one performance is likewise impossible. One weakly written or performed character would cause the series to collapse like a house of cards. The ensemble gathered is a marvel of repertory acting, but there are, as always, standouts. As “The Wire” starts up, the cast that devoted viewers have become attached to has been cast to the wind. Every character has been tasked with finding his or her destiny, answering opportunity’s knock or just hunting it down.

As the morally ambiguous but nonetheless noble cop McNulty, Dominic West is sidelined for most of the start of the season, content with life on the bricks and newfound domesticity. Sonja Sohn and Clarke Peters return as Detectives Greggs and Feamon, and both find the heroism in fools’ errands. Aidan Gillen is excellent as ambitious councilman Tommy Carcettti. The sheer number of fantastic minority actors is a credit to “The Wire,” but more so, it suggests that Hollywood seriously fails at creating programming with well-written characters of color. That would explain how one show could command such a stunning cast.

“The Wire” refers to the surveillance detail that’s slowly been built over the last three seasons. It also refers to the secret world of police work into which the viewer is allowed to peer. Messrs. Simon and Burns are no strangers to this world, with Simon having produced the equally terrific “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” and Burns having worked as a homicide cop. But mere voyeurism isn’t their goal. In lesser hands, a show like theirs would sink into vapid gunplay for boys, a parade of gruff stereotypes, or condescending proselytizing. “The Wire” aspires to define our times through the power of well-crafted narrative, and after watching this season, all else will pale. Ruin the other television shows this year for yourself and tap “The Wire.”