"The Wire" on HBO

Z S you know what is an awesome quick & dirty series you can watch on youtube/torrents?

both seasons of MEET THE NATIVES

first season is in UK: http://natgeotv.com/uk/meet-the-natives

second season in USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Natives:_USA

some of these things are pretty old and I don't know many British people who would bother digging them out

american public tv's relaysh to british tv is pretty odd. i think my channel here still shows 'good neighbors' and i kind of grew up on 'are you being served.' :/

being ancient, clapped-out, and corny was so much a part of how i understood brit tv that seeing contempo shit like prime suspect when it aired was a mild shock.

BoB is the bomb

'bastogne' and 'the breaking point' are pretty devastating episodes, neal mcdonough's whole character arc in those two is subtly heartbreaking.

i think the episode with colin hanks is a weak link but still effective.

'the pacific' is just grim as fuck, it kind of lacks some of the great camaraderie of BoB but that makes it a little more otm in some ways about war, really gets more at what it is to be a soldier in an enormous military campaign.

the difference between BoB and Pacific highlight pretty well the difference between those two theaters of war -- the more traditional combat style of European theater of WWII kind of lent itself to camaraderie a little better than with the Pacific, where Pacific theater was such a fucking meatgrinder, and so psychologically terrifying as far as up-close, face-to-face brutal combat that you just kept re-aligning with new soldiers all the time because everyone was dying left and right

anyway probably not the thread to bore ppl with my wwii nerdery

In The Pacific I was impressed with how it showed the psychological devastation of coping with ceaseless torrential rain and mud had on soldiers. I don't think it was a nod to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle though.

what better place xpost

i still remember the "splish" sound of that one dude tossing stones into the dead japanese soldier's water-filled half-ripped off dome

seems to also accurately depict the pacific as a less-glamorous afterthought to those on the home front.

compared to the european front

my great-grandfather in law has some insane stories of the pacific theater, and he was just a cook on an aircraft carrier.

Britishers, how is Cracker?

xpost my grandad was a driver in WWII, unfortunately wound up in Singapore during the fall and ended up a POW in burma. he survived, amazingly. but what little I've learned of his time there was just horrible

iirc Cracker is Cracking! I used to watch it in highschool but haven't seen it in years

HAGRID SOLVES YR MURDERS :D

cracker is good

heh my grandfather was in burma too

not as a POW, with the OSS, doing "spy" shit like getting drunk and arming villagers

no shit?!

what is this thread even about now

my GGIL was apparently present on scene when ernie pyle was killed

man, cool ww2 tales guys. my grandfather was a teacher and didn't go.

i'm nothing as a man.

IO, top priority is Prime Suspect, second priority is Cracker. Also the French police procedural Engrenages (Spiral) which was on the BBC a few years ago

Rad, thanks!

Z S i have studied this question carefully and i must caution you to ignore the clamoring quality-tv fans.

the right answers, assuming you're not just looking for more things that are good, but something sort of in the same neighborhood, are

the shield
intelligence, canadian post-wire drugrunners-and-cops show
uk prime suspect
deadwood
homicide

- for some combination of naturalist / machiavellian / realpolitk / thucydidean 'realism', dramatic/narrative parity or balance between agents from conflicting social worlds, depiction of or at least alluding toward those social worlds, and... a strong focus on work-as-work.

cracker is good but too psycho-dramatic, and the focus on a civilian who doesn't have his life together kind of removes the storylines and themes somewhat from the 'work' orientation of the wire. (that makes 'prime suspect' sound quite similar but since its focus is on someone negotiating the work-world from the inside with a careerist orientation, the characterization ends up just on the other side of the lone-savant-renegade-protagonist thing.) wire in the blood is also good in a similar way i think.

mi5/spooks is entertaining for some time but becomes kind of a grind / garbagey as they cycle more and more through new castmembers and do more and more ticking clock plots.

the shield is great but it will destroy your life ime.

homicide = YES

I didn't like the first couple episodes if the shield because it was like they were trying to be like OMG, bad cop doing shocking things! It comes on too strong. But it gets so so good once they realized the show wasn't going to get canceled.

my grandfather was in the Danish resistance. He used to pick up dropped weapon crates and my grandmother would sew parachutes into dresses. Apparantly, he voluntered for an attack which would almost certainly had killed him, but the Germans surrendered a few days before it was supposed to take place.

I'm watching Battlestar Galactica at the moment, and it has so far been absolutely amazing. Forget about it being sci-fi, the first 1½ seasons are perhaps the best plotted serial I've ever seen. Just an endless devastating grind, completely consuming everyone. It has sort of lost speed here in the second half of season two, and I'm perhaps a bit worried. But check it out, the beginning is amazingly good, often as good as Wire, Deadwood, Sopranos etc.

It has sort of lost speed here in the second half of season two, and I'm perhaps a bit worried

I have some bad news for you

can't think of any other show that squandered as much

the shield got much better as it went along but its worldview was incredibly bleak and l.a. basically comes across as hell. i think having vic mackey do what he did at the end of episode 1 was something the show had trouble navigating for awhile but they closed down that storyline remarkably well in the end.

shakey mo otm

dear frederik, we regret to inform you...

every time BSG would pause for 'relevant' political episodes or actually sincere religious hoo-ha i would mentally FF to the space battles. turning starbuck into a conduit for signals from god or whatever the fuck was like han solo on endor if endor involved more ruminating and bob dylan songs.

Yeah, I've kinda heard that before... But still, from the beginning to Home pt 2 is a 20 episode stretch that is as good as pretty much everything else on tv. That is not too bad. Perhaps viewers should just stop there.

(the photocopier as a lie detector thing in the wire was first done in homicide: LOTS)

I have always avoided the Battlestar Galactica reboot, but I do recall reading someone in The Guardian saying it was as good as The Wire about 4 years ago. What the hell was that about? Recently I watched some mini-episodes of the new Blood and Chrome series that starts in February. It's trash and I watched these mini episodes, but what the hell inspired a Grauniad writer to compare earlier series with The Wire?

the 3 hr pilot miniseries and the first season and a half of BSG are actually pretty remarkable.

I heard Star Wars was good so I watched the Holiday Special

Sorry I forgot to mention someone lent me a series 3 or 4 of BSG and I really couldn't get into it. I was struggling to keep my eyes open and my missus was shouting abuse at me for even watching it. I watch a lot of shit, maybe try series 1?

Cracker is great, bought the complete box this year and have been rewatching at about a serial a month. (About to run out of Jimmy McGovern episodes iirc though)

(the photocopier as a lie detector thing in the wire was first done in homicide: LOTS)

it was first done in real life, then reported in the book Homicide that the TV series Homicide was based on, which was written by David Simon, creator and head writer of The Wire, so

lots of IRL Jay Landsman lols in the Homicide book, which came before the fictional Jay Landsman in The Wire, which came before the actual Jay Landsman got a smaller, other role in The Wire

flowchart plz

(don't front, i know you have one prepared)

I watched the first two series of Prime Suspect and it struck me as much more procedural than the Wire - like an intelligent version of Law and Order (or now, The Killing, I guess). I'm more anglophobic than philic, so maybe I just didn't connect on that.

If not Band of Brothers for next-to-watch, then Deadwood, Rome or Generation Kill.
I miss the days when 80% of my TV-watching was HBO.

I keep having Al Swearengen quotes pop into my head at random. It's great. "In life you have to do a lot of things you don’t fucking want to do. Many times, that’s what the fuck life is… one vile fucking task after another."