The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

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.

^^^^

I had forgotton about gay Vito. That was terrible. They took what would have made a good episode and turned it into an interminable season that focused completely on a minor character.

This pretty much sums up the problem I have with The Sopranos: they had way too many episodes where it was obvious that they were struggling to find something with which to fill their hour each week.

i voted for the Wire which sort of isn't fair because i've only seen a couple of episodes of the Sopranos and have never really gotten into it. part of the reason is what ade was saying upthread about the unrelatability/inhumanity of the characters on the Sopranos. i kind of feel that way about mad men, too, to be honest. i have thought more than once, while watching a particularly good episode of mad men, "this still isn't as good as the Wire because i don't love/like any of these people." maybe i am reacting against some assumption that keeping sentiment out of a show makes it aesthetically "purer," which for all i know nobody who wrote for the Sopranos actually believed, but i do hate that idea and i think the wire is really brave about emotional stuff. this could all be bullshit, though, because like i said, i haven't seen that much of the Sopranos.

i also bristle at the idea that Gandolfini or Falco are necessarily better actors than those on the Wire! they just got more screen time because there are fewer characters on that show!

i miss the Wire so much.

also the last season is not "pretty awful"! it's just less good than the other four totally amazing ones!

The Wire is way more ambitious than the Sopranos in terms of the way the story is told, and the 'character' of Baltimore is fully fleshed just as any of the Sopranos' gang, if you like, and this is even before the amount of themes it credibly inserts into a cops and gangs shows.

I love both anyway and wouldn't vote.

Having said all that I think Wire and Oz are more comparable to each other.

The Wire also seems like a more "important" series in that it relentlessly skewered public institutions and policy orthodoxy and all that.

Also the Wire was basically a really long police procedural, and that's one of my favorite literary genres (I am not too embarrassed to admit).

The Wire also seems like a more "important" series in that it relentlessly skewered public institutions and policy orthodoxy and all that.

― Super Cub, Saturday, 15 November 2008 21:07 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Sopranos actually led to a shit tonne of IRL Mafia arrests though, due to NJ mobsters deciding to "take advantage" of their new-found fame

lol waht? link?

Sopranos, because it's the series I've actually seen some of. (I plan to watch The Wire, just haven't gotten to it yet.)

voted wire although im alright with sopranos - i cant believe everyone didnt point this out above but maybe after they read him say the shit about italian accents they just tl;dr'd the rest of his post but wtf @ matt p saying that the godfather's i & ii and goodfellas are "boring"

or "zzz" or whatever it was he said

Goodfellas is like the most watchable and entertaining 2 1/2 hour movie ever. I can't fathom someone being bored by it.

Next major ILx poll should be scenes from Goodfellas.

Wire character poll been done?

Race for second maybe?

"shit tonne" ftw

Omar Little vs Paulie Walnuts poll

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."