Esquire‘s Jozen Cummings posted a story yesterday morning about how HBO’s decision to put out “episodes on demand” of The Wire is leading to plot spoilers getting around. (Any spoiler whiners out there who don’t know what he’s referring to should stop reading this item right now.)

Michael K. Williams, a.k.a. “Omar Little” in HBO’s The Wire

“In about two weeks, The Wire — HBO’s critically-acclaimed, gritty drama about Baltimore’s drug trade and how it intersects with union labor, media, and education — will end for good,” Cummings writes. “But instead of speculating on how the show’s final few episodes will conclude, fanatics of the show are giving away its secrets, posting spoilers on their Facebook pages, logging unseen episode information into Wikipedia, and posting about it on IMDB.com’s message boards.
“Even the urban lifestyle magazine Giant features cast members of the show on the cover of its latest issue along with a cover line that says, ‘How It All Ends.’
“How is this happening? Blame HBO. The cable network makes new episodes of The Wire available on its ‘HBO On Demand’ channel a full week before its ‘official’ airdate. It’s unclear what HBO hopes to gain with this strategy. In the fall, HBO’s head of program planning, Dave Baldwin, told the media that HBO was experimenting with its schedule “so we can learn more about how our viewers prefer to watch our programming.”