Exactly, Nicky. I actually just wrote about this for a genre studies assignment.

Part of why I believe "The Soprano's" and "The Wire" were so great was that they denied the patriarchal ideology inherent in most crime drama's; that is, rather then every episode or season being wrapped up nicely and returned to the status quo by the "good guys", things were often more fucked up to finish with then they were at the start. There's a moral ambiguity which means the line between "good guys" and "bad guys" was not so clearly defined.