The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

oh boy, ix-nae on the 'speech patterns' comment above which sounds a little weird. i think what i'm getting at is in the italian-americans vs. native-americans on columbus day episode. i.e. i don't care about your bowling-shirt-wearing noveau-riche bada-bing jfk-loving blabla when there are sweeter things to talk about.

also i'd rather see d. west or l. reddick or lester or kima or omar or marlo or d'angelo get half-naked and laid over another half-bald fatass or nj guido scoring and then acting retarded. the combined IQs of characters on the wire >>>>>>>>>> combined IQs of characters on the sopranos.

i'm still going to watch all of the sopranos, because i like it a lot, so in re to my comments feel free to murder me and drop me into a quarry csi-style i mean pry open abandoned project apartments, leave me on the second floor, and re-staple the plywood with a nail gun you bought at home depot.

^
http://i35.tinypic.com/o7ooj9.gif

lol

i almost said goombah

http://news.filefront.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/_42222218_gall_mario.jpg

btw the pine barrens episode of sopranos may be equal to or better than anything on the wire, just for the photography.

Any TV programme is going to suffer when compared to the Wire, frankly.

and the sound design, which was written into the script!

i agree with matt's comment about the collective IQ on the wire - just about everyone on the sopranos has got almost curb your enthusiasm levels of tunnel-vision self-regard

woops xpost

wire pwns will pwn poll no competition

sopranos birthed the genre - dont say oz plz plz - but the wire perfected it w/season and series long narrative arcs

and if you vote sopraons yr a racist

i only saw one episode of sopranos and had no interest in ever seeing it again

i'm racist toward italians and new jersey though

The Sopranos had some truly great episodes. The first few seasons, in particular, were classic. But it also had so many dull and repetitive episodes and the quality went so far downhill, that it absolutely does not deserve to win. The sheer abundance of "Tony has a wacky dream" episodes, should automatically disqualify it.

The Wire, on the other hand, maybe had its ups and downs, but overall was consistently great from beginning to end.

I hope The Wire trounces The Sopranos.

Maybe I should get a new login, cause I wanna vote for both shows. I love'em both equally. I'm a lover not a hater when it comes to these shows.

btw the pine barrens episode of sopranos may be equal to or better than anything on the wire, just for the photography.

― Matt P, Saturday, November 15, 2008 7:49 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

OTM

also for the snakes

the last season of the wire was pretty awful

just putting that out there

btw the pine barrens episode of sopranos may be equal to or better than anything on the wire, just for the photography.

― Matt P, Saturday, November 15, 2008 12:49 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

YES

i mean, not objectively awful, but a pretty big drop-off.

yeah i hated the last season for the most part but the rest of the seasons made up for it. now i can't actually remember if i've seen the sopranos because i don't know how i would have seen it. i just remember something about bears and i'm not sure when or where i watched it but i got bored.

i didnt see the last season of the wire tbh, but i didnt see the last season of the sopranos either

sopranos is funnier, possibly more great moments (in a visceral sense) than in wire, but wire suits me more i guess. mainly the thing i never 'got' wrt the sopranos was how relatable the characters were supposed to be - like, that's supposed to be the strength of the show, right? how human and understandable and universal these subhuman monsters were? idk, i never felt any connection with any of them, and the only characters i had affection for were the funny ones (paulie, ralphie before he killed the stripper, furio before he turned into a puss). the incredible savagery of these ppl stuck with me a lot more than their humanity. that was probably the point to some degree, but it wasn't fun to watch imo~

agreed on s5 wire - tho i thought the last few eps were good

they werent supposed to be likeable! i mean, they were supposed to be charming on the surface, i guess, but they all plumbed the death.

i guess there's something i like more about the sopranos' storytelling, it was more ambitious, more theatrical in a way, than the wire, which was very good at being straight-up layered journalistic narrative but was maybe too unwavering in its tone, or something. and ya, i thought the plain-jane look it had, the unobtrusive cinematography, had something going for it, but i want more sometimes.

also nobody on the wire can touch gandolfini, or falco for that matter. not even close.

(again, that's a format thing, as none of the performers on the wire had nearly as much screen time due to its total ensemble-ness)

thats true ^ but the sopranos just got soooo redundant is the main problem i have

and the wire was so much greater in scope - portrait of an american city ffs!

i guess there's something i like more about the sopranos' storytelling, it was more ambitious

― s1ocki, Saturday, November 15, 2008 11:07 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is just completely insane

xxxpost, yeah, but no one ever can anyone touch Omar.

thats true ^ but the sopranos just got soooo redundant is the main problem i have

ugh yes, this really drove me nuts by season 2 - so many episodes felt like artificial ways of extending the show's lifespan, it made me feel like i was being fucked with - w/the wire every episode felt like it had a porpoise~

http://www.chinahearsay.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/Porpoise1.JPG

the fact that the wire always seemed more ambitious to me was a big point in its favor, but i think i see where slocki's cummin from\

The Wire (the first season of the Sopranos is really the only one that to me competes at this level.) I am feeling lately that Mad Men is getting to this level of TV as well.

mad men is def in the club - tho i thought the same abt deadwood until the supremely wtf ending

mad men - lol really? i guess i need to see that huh

rulez

seen once vs never seen.

i've been meaning to watch it just for the broad w/the big tits

http://assets.espn.go.com/photo/2008/1028/page2_g_hendricks2_400.jpg

the perfect woman ;_________;

which do you like better morbs - sopranos or wire?

i guess there's something i like more about the sopranos' storytelling, it was more ambitious

― s1ocki, Saturday, November 15, 2008 11:07 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is just completely insane

― ketchup bro (ice cr?m), Saturday, 15 November 2008 16:26 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you don't get inside anyone's head in the wire - you have to gauge it all from externals, actions, surface effects - but in the sopranos that's all you ever seem to do

i don't mean ambitious in terms of scope, i mean ambitious in terms of art, in the way the story is told. to me the subject matter of a story is always going to be a distant second to that.

you don't get inside anyone's head in the wire - you have to gauge it all from externals, actions, surface effects - but in the sopranos that's all you ever seem to do

― Tracer Hand, Saturday, November 15, 2008 6:14 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that's what i like about it, the character stuff is so intense and hardcore.

yeah. i've always admired gandolfini and falco for turning what was a pretty cheesy premise - "a mob boss with a shrink!" - into a venue for great acting

that said, the scripts eventually seemed more to serve the actors than the actors the scripts

the drug game is better material to dig into because it's a business with a product that people buy. the mafia are a throwback, they really are just parasites, with a main revenue stream of leaning on people in their neighborhood. the sopranos hinted occasionally that starbucks was a greater threat to them than the feds, but the wire never loses sight of the overall material picture.

watching ppl doing what they do while caught up in the gears of an infernal machine is more compelling to me than watching a crew who are too shortsighted to see their way out of some pretty obvious conflicts over and over again.

I like the parasites / throwback thing about the Sopranos - it always felt like they were trying to live up to some great past that wasn't there anymore and that the mob was going to die out when the current generation does.

There was some of this with the Wire - Cutty seeing how different the game had become, Prop Joe lamenting - but it hits you at the end how it's never, ever going to stop and a new generation is always going to be there to take over. Dookie as the new Bubs, Michael as the new Omar, and so on. The newspaper aspect was kind of like the Sopranos, with the business dying out and only a few dreamers sticking around.

the last season of the wire was pretty awful

nowhere near as bad as the gay-vito half-season of Sopranos imo

Sopranos at its best (season 1-2) might be better than The Wire but Sopranos fell off a lot harder by the end. redundant / spinning its wheels comment was otm. big chunk of the Wire final season got ridiculous but it still overall felt like the show had something to say.

i think we have determined that the sopranos = way more "drama nerd" than the wire.

because the show feels animated by a highly parochial power struggle between two people who are both awful, in a boring way.

Ain't that America, home of the free

Was going to say--turns on CNN--that sounds familiar...

The Young Thug trial … it’s like a missing season of The Wire

"It's just like in real life" not a convincing counter argument to "it's boring" imo.

There is no counter argument to someone saying something is boring!

lol that's fair, but you can explain why you don't find it to be so, what is appealing or interesting about the dynamic to you, etc.

I think nabisco gave an interesting and even handed account there of how he feels about the show and just don't see how finding a certain situation dramatically inert is supposed to be changed by turning on the news and seeing that there is an equivalent situation happening irl

How is it "dramatically inert" if:

The end of the season manages to pay this off by asking great questions about whether these people want their children to follow them into this culture or abandon it for something else — but for a while there it really does provide some tedious and depressing television that leans into the narrowness of their world.

The "tedious" part is in the eye of the beholder. I think the discomfort in the show slightly manipulating the viewer to root for Tony, who is nearly as bad as Ralphie, when Ralphie is actually probably correct in accordance with the rules of the game, is interesting.

I just loved the timeliness of the phrase "a highly parochial power struggle between two people who are both awful, in a boring way" in connection to Trump/Musk--messaged it to friends last night.

Sop s2 e7 when Chris is forced to choose between the outside world (Alicia Witt and screenwriting) and Tony’s world and he chooses the latter

the show slightly manipulating the viewer to root for Tony, who is nearly as bad as Ralphie

100% agree that Ralphie's function in this stretch is to work the show's usual viewer-complicity-with-Tony thing, tempting you to see him as the defender of some moral line or code (just as people within the show keep wanting to). You could say there's similar stuff in The Wire, with its suggestion of new generations of gangsters growing steadily more sociopathic and rapacious, until Marlo makes the last batch feel like they're on the side of good. But that alone isn't enough of a dramatic engine to move things, either — as always with that show, it's mostly interesting in terms of how you see different characters navigate the changing systems around them. With Sopranos I think it really is that sense of narrowness that makes this stretch of episodes non-fun for me; I can never feel very invested in their organization in and of itself. But like I said, the stuff about children that follows strikes me as some of the richest stuff the show ever did, specifically because of how it questions that narrowness and how the characters feel about it.

Tl/dr

I guess, for me, the stuff with the kids in the Sopranos seemed hollow in comparison to the narrowness of opportunity other kids in America face … like in Season 4 of The Wire. when watching this arc of the Sopranos, I felt like shouting, “Cry me a fucking river! These are white kids from upper middle class families who can get middle class jobs.”

I always thought the show was aware of and sometimes calling attention that. Both Tony and (especially) Carmella would regularly offer reality-checks to their kids.

there was not a single moment where I thought AJ or Meadow were meant to evoke any feeling but disdain

profiting from the horrors without even taking part and sharing that moral responsibility is the greatest sin imaginable to the gods of the Sopranos universe

These are white kids from upper middle class families who can get middle class jobs.

Oh but this is exactly the kind of question I mean! Some of these guys' children are raised in nice suburbs and sent to nice schools; Meadow goes off to Columbia and adopts the habits of an upper-middle-class Ivy Leaguer (and dates a posh biracial guy). This is an ordinary conflict you see all the time with people who get wealthy, or upwardly mobile immigrants — worrying that the kids have lost touch with your background and values and become like other people you never liked — but then in this case it's totally blown up by the mob stuff, because what some of them are facing is: would I rather my kid followed into my little world, like I followed my father into it? Wouldn't I maybe love and respect them more if, instead of becoming wealthy oncologists or whatever, they kept the traditions of the family business, and excelled at it? Do I envy the next guy along, whose kids are helping murder people or being good mob wives? I mean, IIRC this is the season that ends with (1) one of the next-generation "kids" who wants in to crime doing it in such a disastrous way that they end up killing him, (2) Junior singing Italian opera at the wake, and (3) Meadow, who kinda knows what happened, heckling him and leaving. They don't just commit crimes to get ahead; it is, for them, part of this extremely specific culture they actually prize and halfway resent and disdain their own children for not embracing or being suited to.

(My memory on this isn't great, but isn't it in fact that Tony spends the season trying to keep Jackie out of their stuff, because he had dated Meadow, and then Jackie's disastrous move is to try and replicate a type of robbery he heard Tony and his father had pulled at his age? Basically you just see this absurd dissonance inside them about whether they think "their thing" is good and worth preserving or whether it's something you'd never want your loved ones to be a part of, and their inability to reconcile or even think deeply about this stuff leads them to either consume or else abhor their own children.)

^ these are great, well articulated points. there's a parallel in the Wire too with Stringer and Avon's ultimate falling out - the suit-wearing businessman vs the gangster who just wants his corners (I'm sure there are closer analogues involving parents and children too, esp in S4-5). Does the material success that comes with being a kingpin serve the purpose of escaping the violent criminal milieu that's the only world you know, or to help your kids/friends/community escape it? Or when the opportunity presents itself are you even psychologically able to do that? or do you even want that? I think both shows engage with those questions pretty masterfully

The difficulty with The Wire is that almost none of those kids see any other likely path. The main time it comes up is when Colvin wants to take in Namond and Wee-Bey is immediately like yes, let the kid go do something better. Namond is like Jackie Jr. with a happy ending. Remembering that Jackie Jr. arc actually really makes me want to rewatch some of it: I mean, there was a period when Tony liked Meadow being around Jackie Jr., because he was one of them, and then he spends a while in a losing battle to make this kid just go to Rutgers and stop trying to be exactly what Tony himself already is (and relating to Meadow exactly as Tony relates to Carmela).

Tony sees the better path for his daughter and Jackie Jr. and in his own way tries to make that happen, but I think part of Chase's point is Tony's corrupting influence on everyone around him which ultimately causes the whole thing to fall apart.

There’s also the thing where Jackie Jr is just really dumb, the idea of him going on to great things outside the family business is a total fantasy because there’s hardly anything there. Whereas the kids on the Wire are set up to break your heart with how much potential in different areas - social skills, entrepreneurship, attention to detail, etc - gets left by the wayside as they’re routed to their bleak futures.

Thinking of Cutty and the boxing gym on The Wire vs. Tony Blundetto (Buscemi) on The Sopranos, both trying to walk the straight and narrow after prison time.

Jackie Jr.'s future was clearly as a tournament-level Scrabble player.

a friend of mine doesn’t like the wire on hardline ACAB principles. he says the fundamentally based on the flawed premise of the possibility of the existence of a good cop. when i asked him if there are any police procedurals that met his criteria he didn’t have a good answer. i haven’t watched the shield, would that count?

The Shield walks a similar line, it depicts cops who are utterly corrupt but also ultra competent at their job, and the homicide detectives are pretty much presented as "the good ones".

a friend of mine doesn’t like the wire on hardline ACAB principles. he says the fundamentally based on the flawed premise of the possibility of the existence of a good cop. when i asked him if there are any police procedurals that met his criteria he didn’t have a good answer. i haven’t watched the shield, would that count?

The best depictions of police work on TV IMO are Southland (drama) and Barney Miller (comedy). Both depict the job as pretty boring, and filled with lots of time spent sitting around bullshitting. That's broken up by showing up at the worst moments in people's lives and being relatively powerless to help.

a friend of mine doesn’t like the wire on hardline ACAB principles. he says the fundamentally based on the flawed premise of the possibility of the existence of a good cop

That's kinda silly imo, a series that shows that "good" cops still won't fix any problems and will still ultimately be used for repressive means is a better way to drive the message home than to just make them all pantomine villains from the get go.

The Shield is even worse. The criminals are portrayed as genuinely evil in a way pretty much nobody is on The Wire, so the cops seem more necessary.

We Own This City might be what he is looking for.

Yeah I don't think The Shield would appeal to someone turned off by the Wire. I never actually finished the last couple seasons, but it takes the "you may not like his methods but he gets results" cliche and pushes it into intentionally murky and uncomfortable places. Which is interesting sometimes but it also means accepting a lot of reactionary depictions of criminals and the evils of the big city, even as it shows you horrible and corrupt police behavior and suggests that after a certain point corrupt cops can't be redeemed and destroy everyone around them.

The Shield has my favorite ending to any show.

"a friend of mine doesn’t like the wire on hardline ACAB principles. he says the fundamentally based on the flawed premise of the possibility of the existence of a good cop"

This feels like an overcorrection but...does your friend like Columbo?

Season 3 "The Telltale Moozadell" has some classics. Two cops interrogating the pizza guys like an episode of Dragnet, "you're an accessory after the fact" + "Edgar Allan Poe - good writer, what a fucking nutjob."