The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

"The 'hopper' in The Wire who shot Omar

How could you do it? HOW COULD YOU? You ruined everything!"

fuck that noise.

!!!!!!!!!!!

We only have three more eps before we finish. :(

a totally unrelated question: which will "age" better? will anyone be watching these shows ten years from now?

not suggesting that effect their quality now, but curious if whether the supposed realism of a show like The Wire will "date" it, or at least reveal the seams in its' worldview.

probably one for a b'more to answer, but a lot of the wire seems to apply as much to the 80s and 90s as right now. eg the towers that the barksdales run in s01-02 had actually been demolished sometime in the 90s?

dunno,

Sopranos is about the human mind and depression and family, all of which never change. The Wire is very built into the contemporary drug trade, media, unions, slang, all of which can be wildly different in 10 years time.

(also, the sopranos is coming up for its tenth anniversary, 'the wire' for its seventh -- they seem to be holding up ok.)

lolz Tombot doesn't have kids = can't appreciate Sopranos. okay

other boring shit about dads: the Bible, Hamlet, etc.

the ppl I encounter who love Tony are poseurs by default and the ppl I encounter who love Omar generally are able to point to an aspect of their own life and say "they did this part exactly how it is"

― TOMBOT, Tuesday, 16 December 2008 10:04 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You don't know any Catholics, huh?

well, im not suggesting certain things "never change"--but is the sopranos more a self-contained universe? and is the Wire dependent at all upon an effect of "oh wow THAT'S how it really is" for it's emotional or thematic weight?

the is Wire dependent at all upon an effect of "oh wow THAT'S how it really is" for stuffwhitepeoplelike.com

is the Wire dependent at all upon an effect of "oh wow THAT'S how it really is" for it's emotional or thematic weight?

no

ok. just asking! (i've only seen 1.5 seasons)

sopranos is about a lot of irl shit too, though! it's not totally self-contained.

i reckon people, maybe especially non-americans, do watch 'the wire' partly to learn about the world in some sense. no shame in that.

yeah i don't mean to suggest that the Wire isn't about the way things are; i just think sometimes people are overly simplistic in their characterization of the show's realism.

also the impact of its realism is not timebound--for one thing, institutions do shape people's lives and the way the Wire represents that remains powerful even if the institutions have changed. also, i just watched season 2 and the real thing that it represents seems like a fundamental shift in American history.

institutions do shape people's lives and the way the Wire represents that remains powerful even if the institutions have changed

this, for me, is why i voted for The Wire.

not suggesting that effect their quality now, but curious if whether the supposed realism of a show like The Wire will "date" it, or at least reveal the seams in its' worldview.

― ryan, Tuesday, December 16, 2008 11:44 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Sopranos is about the human mind and depression and family, all of which never change. The Wire is very built into the contemporary drug trade, media, unions, slang, all of which can be wildly different in 10 years time.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, December 16, 2008 11:48 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The Wire will have more historical weight when the era it directly depicts has passed, and will help future generations better understand what happened. The Sopranos will be a latter day artifact of the 20th century pop culture fascination w/ the mob, but it'll be secondary to a lot of superior films. In my opinion.

not to be all TIME WILL VINDICATE MY PERSONAL TASTE but since it was brought up, i mean

to clarify, i think the Wire is realist in its commitment to represent something about the world but the representation itself is dramatic; it's not necessarily formally realistic. i'm thinking of things like D'Angelo, Wallace, and Bodie's discussion of the chess game in season 1; those moments are less about what a person might actually say if they were in this situation and more about how can a dramatic monologue economically encapsulate some larger insight. moments like that are where people might locate the Wire's "thematic weight"
if they're interested in that.

also i don't care what year it is people are watching season 4, they are going to cry and have violent nightmares.

also some dude otm

institutions do shape people's lives and the way the Wire represents that remains powerful even if the institutions have changed

sopranos also represents this idea. (the family being an institution.) and both shows use changes in criminal behavious as an analogue for changes in capitalism -- an old idea but an effective one. series 2 of 'the wire' is pretty exceptional in being directly about changes in capitalism (a lot of the time).

and both have a big waterfront development thing going on.

but the sopranos does all that and has some female characters too.

some dude pretty much OTM (except for maybe secondary to a lot of superior films part.)

"but the sopranos does all that and has some female characters too."

Uh yeah so does the Wire.

okay, yeah, i know very little about the Sopranos. i maintain that the Wire is more generous emotionally because it loves its characters and it's okay with the viewer loving its characters, but that is based on a comparison with, like, three episodes of the Sopranos, so i don't really know what i'm talking about.

I haven't seen the Wire (yet) - is it really male dominated...? One of the best things about the Sopranos is the totally amazing female characters/acting (Carmela, Janice, Livia, etc.)

i don't know, the female characters thing is my only criticism of the Wire. it has female characters of course, but it's way less successful at representing women's lives than men's. i always figure simon genuinely has trouble doing that and knows it and kind of stayed away from it.

the family being an institution

i think the Sopranos uses the family more as an idea. and by the end of the end on the Sopranos, i didn't give one shit about any of the characters except for Christopha. the Wire seems to have richer characters

Shakey, there are female characters on the Wire and some of them are great, and the actors are all fantastic, but the show doesn't seem to me to be about women's lives in the way it's about men's.

there are no female characters in the wire as strong as carmela or livia. one other aspect of s05's relative badness is they basically wasted amy ryan.

I'm not getting that impression (about characters) through seasons 1 and season 2 (so far)---The Wire could be seen as radical (again, so far) in that it DOESN'T allow any great characters...people seem pretty much caught in the ant-farm.

Kima would be the exception, and maybe this is bullshit of me, but it seemed to me that it was easier for the creators to write her because she's a lesbian.

there are great characters on the Wire that is crazy talk!

Well it's not a show about characters. None of the characters are as strong as Carmela frankly.

it seemed to me that it was easier for the creators to write her because she's a lesbian.

wtf

there are no female characters in the wire as strong as carmela or livia.

None of the characters are as strong as Carmela frankly.

i dunno, i feel like 90% of the characters on the wire are more interesting/strong as carmela or livia

also, another possibly dumb question:

sopranos = postmodernist?
wire = modernist? (i said above it reminded of Naturalism in the Dreiser mold, almost)

i know how that sounds, but so many of the other female characters appear mainly through their connection to the male characters, as girlfriends + mothers. desire for women seems to be so central to the way characters are written on the wire...kima fits in with that better than most of the other women on the show. i fully acknowledge that this could be total bullshit.

xpost to Shakey

eh its okay I was just perplexed at what you were getting at. (Again, I haven't seen the Wire yet)

"i dunno, i feel like 90% of the characters on the wire are more interesting/strong as carmela or livia"

In this case, I think strong = developed.

and both shows use changes in criminal behavious as an analogue for changes in capitalism

^^ the reason i love the wire and only like the sopranos is due to the structure of both 'businesses'. talking about the drug game, you can't help but deal with the nature of capital cos it's a parody of a business ('buy for one, sell for two'). your customer is degraded and addicted but the methods run in parallel to real business ('i may be just a gangster i guess -- but i want those fuckin corners')

the mafia system is pre-capitalst, it's basically feudalism. the sopranos' money was always vague. i guess in one sense it left the show 'free' to dig into family and psychology and all that stuff. i've said all this before somewhere, probably on this thread.

the wire never had any fucking dream sequences either

other boring shit about dads: the Bible, Hamlet, etc.

Both about sons, surely?

I'm not doing the comedy being-a-dick thing anymore, but part of my Sopranos issue is that despite loads of watching it I never really felt like it was about anything, or about anything that wasn't sort of mundane and badly captured; I tended to feel like it was just telegraphing Great Dramatic Significance and self-seriousness atop drama that was actually quite conventional, even hackneyed, and difficult for me to care about or even relate to due to the weight of Great Dramatic Significance being loaded onto it.

people spend a third of their lives dreaming, y'know

dreiser is not a modernist, so no fkn way.

sopranos is kind of "postmodern" in that it makes big references to godfather/goodfellas.

but 'the wire' is straight-up pre-modernist storytelling. as is 'the sopranos' really.

I mean there isn't one character in the Wire who gets as much screen time as Carmela gets. Her arc is a centerpiece of the entire show. Maybe McNulty gets that kind of development in the Wire, but he's basically the only one and the entire fourth season basically ignores him.

they're both great shows and "which has better characters" is a pointless argument. for me it boils down to the wire's journalistic realism style vs. the sopranos' more personal, idiosyncratic and IMO more artistically accomplished approach and i will probably always lean towards the latter.

yeah, enrique is right. lol dickensian aspect, but i would compare the wire formally to the nineteenth century realist novel + to shakespeare.