Having already had an early look at the first episode in the final season of “The Wire” (premiering this Sunday on HBO), I’m ready to be as effusive as I have been in the past about what is clearly the best show on television and — bear with me as I flirt with hyperbole here — arguably the greatest achievement in the visual arts of the past couple of decades (I think I might have said that about “Deadwood” once — but I would stand by that paradox with my very life).

The power of the show is its ability to both be an uncompromisingly realistic portrayal of life on the toughest streets of Baltimore and at the same time, present the conflicts on those streets as microcosms of a variety of broader American conflicts — economic, bureaucratic, educational, etc. Working at both the level of realism and allegory, the show can be a very heady literary experience, requiring multiple viewings in order to catch all the verbal and visual symbolism as well as simply to have time to contemplate all the issues that emerge.

The chief allegory of the final season is clear and complex right from the opening scene as a detective exploits the gullibility of a suspect. The interactions of cops, politicians, drug dealers and the rest of Baltimore is a complex dance of deception, subterfuge and manipulation — a play of power that depends as much on the performance as the truth.

Just like the interaction of the media and the American public in the 21st century.

To explore that connection more fully, the Baltimore Sun newsroom becomes a major setting for the show, and we see how the sausage is made.

Brilliant. Mind-bogglingly brilliant.

But regular readers of this blog or almost any other respectable cultural criticism these days wouldn’t be very surprised by that assessment. We’re all stumbling over each other to praise David Simon’s masterpiece. Part of that unbridled enthusiasm certainly comes from a sort of desperation as “The Wire” spent its first few seasons reaching an unfathomably small audience and would have been on the verge of cancellation if it weren’t in the good graces of HBO. But the enthusiasm also comes from a sort of hypnosis; we are under the spell of an exquisitely crafted work of art. Even though it’s our job, we’ve lost all sense of perspective.

That’s not to say that “The Wire” isn’t as amazing as we make it out to be. But it should give us pause and encourage us to give space to the rare dissenting view — especially when it comes from a formerly true believer who also happens to be writing from ground zero.

David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun, who has seen the first seven episodes of the final season, doesn’t think the present season measures up:

Newsroom scenes are the Achilles’ heel of Season 5 - with mainstream entertainment sacrificed to journalistic shop talk, while fact and fiction are mashed up in the confusing manner of docudrama….

The best thing about the narrative is that it stars Clark Johnson as Augustus “Gus” Haynes, a no-nonsense city editor. Johnson, who was superb in his understated depiction of Detective Meldrick Lewis on NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street,” enlivens every scene in which he appears.

But Simon, who is so skilled in creating multifaceted characters elsewhere in the series, makes Haynes a one-dimensional figure without flaws. He is a repository of all things good when it comes to big-city newspapers - things that the series claims have been mostly lost in devotion to the bottom line by media corporations.

Almost everyone in the newsroom is a cardboard character - in part because Simon writes it like a morality play. Just as Haynes is goodness, the villains are pure duplicity and evil. It is difficult to get involved in the lives of such characters - unlike last year, when poignant classroom scenes led viewers to care about deeply troubled but highly promising teenagers.

More problematic still is the way Simon links certain newsroom characters to real-life journalists through words and actions - and then depicts them exclusively in a negative fashion. Simon moves deeper into docudrama when he does that, and “The Wire” suffers as a result.

The docudrama genre, which has come under increasing fire in recent years, combines the look of documentary film with the literary license of theater - giving viewers the sense that what they are watching is true even though facts have been rearranged and actions invented.

Beyond blurring fact and fiction and ignoring any sense of proportionality, the genre also telescopes and confuses time. Simon left the Sun in 1995, and his newsroom villains are patterned on editors and a reporter long gone from Baltimore. But Simon presents his story as if it is taking place at The Sun today.

Ultimately, the most disappointing aspect of Season 5 is that Simon offers such a simplistic critique of media and their effects on mass consciousness. To say that even the most respected newspapers sometimes have ethical lapses will hardly be news to any HBO viewers who have ever heard of Jayson Blair and The New York Times.

Newspapers have changed exponentially since Simon left 12 years ago. When he was in the newsroom, cable TV was still considered new media - and most newspapers were at least five years away from the realization that they would soon live or die by the Internet. The first seven episodes of The Wire have almost nothing to say about the biggest story in newspapers: the vast technological change sweeping through media today. And that is most surprising given how up-to-the-second - even prescient - the series has been about the use of the latest technology by criminals.

Zurawik’s problem with the “authenticity” of Simon’s portrayal of the Sun newsroom alludes to a drama behind the drama. In Margaret Talbot’s fascinating recent New Yorker profile of Simon, William Marimow, former editor of the Sun, gets a little more personal and asserts that Simon actually has some distorted axe to grind.

If Simon does, however, he covers it up very well with articulate explanations of what he is trying to do. And, in any case, “The Wire” has the last, very profound word.