'WIRE' WORTH HANGING ONTO.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

AFTER WORKING together on the landmark, Emmy-winning HBO miniseries ``The Corner,'' David Simon (whose reportage inspired the film) and David Mills went their separate ways, and their subsequent works were telling.

Simon created HBO's ``The Wire,'' an extension of ``The Corner,'' really, focusing on Baltimore cops trying, in the first season, to clean up a drug-riddled neighborhood. Last season moved deliberately, operated subtly and virtually defined reality in TV terms, proceeding for long stretches of time without anything of apparent incident occurring. Mills created NBC's limited series ``Kingpin,'' a colorful, explosive, sometimes wildly overheated exploration of the drug wars on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Working together on ``The Corner,'' Simon and Wells brought out the best in each other; working separately, flaws crept into their work. Simon's show has a mesmerizing quality to it, but is cluttered with what seem extraneous characters and can go entire episodes without anything happening, while Mills went for broke with ``Kingpin'' and sometimes looked a little silly.

Simon's modus operandi is hardly as sexy or provocative as other HBO hits, so ``The Wire'' didn't become the same sort of media sensation as ``The Sopranos'' or ``Six Feet Under.'' Nonetheless, the series is back with a second season and it's shifted venues, after basically burning its bridges in the drug trade: Last season concluded chaotically, with a couple of bad guys put away but not for long, with city and inter-office politics essentially undoing the ambitious work of the dedicated cops on the front line.

Homicide detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), the show's lead character, severely irked the powers-that-be last season and for his sins has been assigned to harbor patrol. If there's somewhere he'd less like to be, he hasn't thought of it yet. It's a life of towing boats whose engines have gone out - until, that is, McNulty drags a dead woman out of the water and another dozen corpses are found in a cargo hold on the docks.

Here, cops spend a lot of time bickering over jurisdiction. Had the bodies been found alive, they'd be an immigration issue; dead, they're cargo, so customs is saddled with them: ``All you've got right here is a lot of paperwork,'' one cop cynically informs the officer who found the stash. And no one will be seated while McNulty researches the tide charts to prove that the body was dumped in the jurisdiction of the official who dispatched him to harbor patrol, creating a headache the guy did not want.

This season will explore the hardscrabble lives of dock workers, their diminishing expectations and rows with unions, as well as the smuggling industry. We also catch up with a few of the characters from the first season, whose stories are peripheral to this year's story arc.

``The Wire'' can be a little difficult to get into on the basis of any one given episode, but watching several back-to-back gives the show a cumulative power and fascination. So fire up the VCR or TiVo and wait a couple of weeks; then, you may find yourself hooked.

THE WIRE - Three stars

What: Season two of the complex series about Baltimore cops.

Where: HBO.

When: 10 tonight; also Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; HBO2: Monday.

In a nutshell: It may take more than an episode or two before viewers realize how interesting the show really is.