The Wire as Dogma

Yay, back to back (using the term loosely) posts on roughly the same topic!!! Do I know how to alienate my (mostly imaginary) readership or WHAT?! But, you see, I'm still hung up on HBO's The Wire and the more I think about it the more I like it.
For me the thing which makes the show works is something which I hinted at in my last post, namely that The Wire does characterization better than almost every other work of TV or Film that I can think of. ALL the characters are real and believable, the 'Plot' happens as a result of the characters rather than the characters being used to make the plot work. The result of this is a show which has far more in common with naturalistic film movements like Dogma or French new wave than other examples of of the Police Drama sub-genre.
Films like Gummo and The 400 Blows redefined the focus of film by emphasizing Character above all. Both used improvisation which I don't believe is an element in The Wire, but the idea that PLOT is the result of (and far less important than) the actions of people is essential in all three.
People are people and what motivates them is as different from person to person as it is from moment to moment. In a entertainment universe where it's still rare to get moral shades of gray it's simply staggering to see a show which doesn't moralize at ALL. Bad things happen to be sure, but they are all the logical result of the collective actions of all the players of the game. Each one plays their part to the best of their ability, each choice passed through the moral and empirical values of each character.
What, to me, is most amazing is that all of this takes place within one of the most plot driven of all genres: Police Fiction. Not that there isn't a strong tradition of character driven police fiction, rather that those characters tend to be fairly flat archetypes brought into the mix merely to accomplish the requisite action down the line. In The Wire it is the character's three-dimensionality rather than their blunt flatness which makes the action work, driving the plot.
Cases get assigned on the basis of political back-biting, the personal becomes political, the political becomes the financial... all working together to create a baroque web of inter connectivity. They say 'Shit Happens' and it's true, it does. And when you're living in the shit it's often hard to see why it happened... if you could only view it from the outside you might be able to see the lines and make the connections. Dogma tried to make film relevant again by shifting the focus to naturalism and the individual... The Wire makes the Police Drama relevant again by doing the same thing.