Ban happy nanny state San Francisco thought they could get rid of the Happy Meal by passing a law that says meals that don't pass certain nutritional standards can't be marketed to children or give away free toys. Please. There is no stopping corporate giant McDonald's.

Many people have likened bygone critical favorite The Wire to a Dickens novel, but Sean Michael Robinson and Joy Delyria went a step further and reimagined the series as an actual Victorian novel. The results and just as fantastic as the show itself.

In Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Berlin Johnson showed how television drama had become more complex over the decades, and made the contrarian claim that popular culture was making us smarter. The Wire, which returns tonight, ought to clinch the argument. The HBO drama, about crime and politics in Baltimore, is so convoluted that it takes several episodes, and sometimes several viewings, to make sense of the plot. And that's what's so engrossing: the show is a puzzle as much as it's entertainment. Bonus for media junkies: much of the action in this, the last season, takes place at the newsroom of the city's dying newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. One of the characters is a familiar figure in American publishing, the corporate executive who tells his dispirited reporters to do "less with more." 9pm, Sunday nights, HBO. Trailer after the jump.