"The Wire" on HBO

Did this get posted somewhere already?

5 seasons in 5 mins

i admit i am kind of hoping she already bought herself one. then i will keep it and get you a nice new spool of DVD-R's!

xpost to max

I'm on two episodes a night. Can't stop. So many other things I should be doing, but all I want is more Wire.

A lot of complaints about the packaging on Amazon. Maybe I'll wait for them to re-package?

I finished all 5 seasons in a week. It was a weird week.

We're getting through very slowly due to our schedules. Just about to start Season 5.

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e51/burgersub/dukie.gif

i received the complete series in the mail today and promptly mailed it to my sister. feeling sad + virtuous.

My copy came in yest. Horseshoe u r a saint

omg big hoos you're her sister??

shh

HOOSshoe

i dug out this thread only yesterday having only just finished watching first season. 7 years old? fuuuuccck...

it's probably been said in this thread, but the date thing is less pressing, in a way, coz the show is or could easily be set in the 80s. loads of stufff in it is taken from stuff in d.simon's book, which was written in the late 80s and refers to loads of pre-1988, even pre-crack wars stuff.

Shamefully, I'm only now finishing season 1 and the 80s thing occurred to me too - most obviously how it all seems so pre-internet: all that lengthy exposition and montages of legwork going round city offices getting the paper trail of businesses etc. Plus, you know, how they are always using lol typewriters and lol tippex.

(id actually argue that it 'is' set in the 80s, the first season. spoiler but the high-rises were 'in reality' demolished in the (i think) early '90s; in the show they are demolished at the start of series three.)

would they have had pagers on the streets in the 80s tho?

Stevie - newer technology makes its mark in subsequent seasons in interesting, sometimes amusing, ways.

Whenever I see the pagers I can't help thinking 30 Rock's Beeper King could have made a killing in Baltimore.

"Excuse me, I 'm expecting a call - from 1983."

haha

The only thing that gave me any sense of when episodes were filmed was brand names that they had for the heroin they were selling - WMD, Pandemic, Bin Laden, Brokeback, etc.

and the whole disposable cell phone thing, I imagine

Yeah, I was really curious about the police technology in the first season -- I couldn't decide how much it was dated due to Simon's era and how much it was pointedly dated to point up that the department is aging, technologically behind, under-endowed, etc.

I guess the combination of those two things is convenient, since pretty much anything will fly

i always assumed it was the latter viz. the FBI having all the good shit

yeah, also i feel like the diegetic music in season 1 is pretty late '90s?

like i feel like i remember black star playing in someone's car+ lucinda williams playing in ronnie's apartment...

the credits theme is so lush

in one episode Omar is jamming Spearhead 'Rok The Nation (Tuhoe Nation Mix)' in his jeep and i was thinking no way would this guy be down with Franti ha ha

there's also that moment in season 2 when ziggy and nikky are searching on MSN for what potassium permanganate is used for and nikky is like, "so you type in questions and it just tells you the answer" and ziggy explains the internet? this seemed like a thing about how some communities were being left behind, rather than exposition for the benefit of the audience or a product of the books/research be old.

sorry, that was illiterate. you get it though.

obviously it's not 'actually' set in the 80s -- think the first ep mentions 9/11 -- but it is just odd how much stuff, even little stuff, like herc blasting 'theme from shaft', is in the (c. 1990) book. moreover the show 'homicide' is way more NINETIES than 'the wire' was NOUGHTIES if you see what i mean. (i think i just mean they had more arguments about political correctness in 'homicide' really.)

that is true.

The technology speeds up pretty rapidly by the second series, all that GPS stuff for instance.

I only watched the show starting about a year ago, so it was fun to be able to tell when the episode was originally aired by the rap songs playing out of cars.

sorry not Omar i meant Avon

haha yes when everybody was playing 'the blueprint' xp

yay - just got the box set in the mail!

like i feel like i remember black star playing in someone's car+ lucinda williams playing in ronnie's apartment...

― horseshoe, Thursday, February 5, 2009 10:33 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think this was more an issue of them not really thinking out the music programming or letting the actors throw their favorite cds on ... at one point the guys in the pit are bumping j-live:

http://www.amiright.com/album-covers/images/album-JLive-All-of-the-Above.jpg

who i like fwiw but is definitely not typical projects radio. they became more careful w/ this in the later seasons

not to generalize about projects radio but yknow

lol yeah that makes sense. lucinda williams seems in character for ronnie, though.

i was gonna say that. that's one reason she was character i would least like to kiw

i bet cedric turned her onto some good shit tho

cedric is listening to coltrane in at least one scene iirc

I did hear, though, that David Simon wrote "Homicide" after "It Takes Two" came out, and was drawing from his experience during the time when it was the hit song that summer and purportedly you'd see people dancing to it next to crime scenes and all, which explains why he'd depict early 2000's West Baltimore blasting it in public, for instance. Although I guess they contemporized by season 2.

having spoken to the music supervisor, Blake, yeah, the first couple seasons he wasn't thinking too hard about realistic song choices, so you'd hear like 2 late '90s Mos Def songs in one episode that's ostensibly set in 2002. later on he got better at using contemporary radio hits, and in the last couple seasons, a lot of the local Baltimore artists that ended up on the soundtrack, some of which were getting radio play.

And I still think it's great that Chris went around asking about Baltimore club music to scout out who the New Yorkers were.

While it makes sense that Lester would be a jazz dude, or Butchie love the old school Rn'B, some of the other musical associations were a bit odd to say the least. I swear there's some episode in season one where Prez is listening to a new wave station that sounds like its playlist comes straight from the 1980's. I'd never take Pryzbylewski for an OMD fan.

Gotta wonder what's on Rawls' playlist.

madonna.

City police raid turns up 90 pounds of cocaine

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-md.ci.bust21feb21,0,790170.story