No, the show mostly graciously avoids stereotypes; a drunken detective is a stereotype, but like I said, the McNulty drunk/sex stuff could have been cut from the show with little loss. Yes the drug dealers were complicated…and Simon shows society getting worse as they get replaced by colder, more heartless, more evil drug dealers throughout the course of the show.
Some characters do basically survive the show unscathed–I’d say Bunk Moreland, Kima Greggs and Lester Freamon should mostly have good consciences.

Theoretically, a sixth season of the show could still happen; a few people have died in the cast, but mostly so did their characters. Considering how no TV show ever seems to really stay dead anymore–I swear to God, if it were possible for AI to upchuck a hologram of Matthew Perry we’d get new episodes of Friends in two years–I kind of wish this one would happen. Of course, this show was a far greater critical success than anything that ever found a big audience while it was airing, but that’s true of Arrested Development too…

Season 1 is not bad but I did find large parts of it talky and pokey. Large parts of the SHOW, period, are talky, but you have to get used to that, this is a show about how hard fighting the drug scene really is.

Deadwood was a show that lent itself to deep analysis even more than The Wire, which makes it sadly funny that its legacy is loud profanity.