"The Wire" on HBO

Season 5 is underrated imo

I need to revisit 4 and 5. I have both on DVD, but haven't gotten around to watching them again since the first time.

I read this thread along with watching the wire recently and managed to buffer my expectations for the 5th season to the degree that I enjoyed it quite a bit. There is much that is good about it, serial killer stuff aside... and even that didn't bug me because it illustrated such prime McNulty assholism.

just started rewatching and had forgotten how inept and dumb prez starts out as

Prez was a superb example of the way this show creates characters. To think of him at the beginning of the show, as you describe, to the end, his last appearance ("I think I won't see you again... for a while") is one of the highlights of the series.

yeah prez has such a great redemption; he goes from such a punchable turd to almost my favorite dude on the show

yup. by the time he's telling the kids not to cooperate with the police - totally different person.

Prez was a superb example of the way this show creates characters.

yea definitely. characters like poot or bodie that i didn't give a shit about in the beginning (or was even mildly annoyed by) i ended up really loving and caring about, seeing the characters develop and grow over a few seasons

lol waht even Poot? Boadie is an obvious turnaround, but I never really got a sense of character development from Poot, probably because he ended up becoming a tertiary character.

yea i think b/c poot was able to get out of the game? working a job at foot locker while all this other shit was going down kind of endeared me to him, made me feel relieved for him

been a long time since i've watched the show, so maybe in my head that development was more significant than i thought. but seeing characters get deeper and deeper into some shit and then seeing others escape it, even if it wasn't a heroic escape, seemed significant

"so maybe in my head that development was more less significant than i thought."

That job should've been Duquan's. >=(

right!

Carv looms larger every time I watch, with Seth Gilliam's portrayal being on of the best 2 or 3 acting jobs on the show.

Carver's development is an amazing personal transformation, in a show full of them.

yes, he's easily my fave

Interesting the bait and switch they had with Carver and Herc -- Herc apologizing to Boadie's grandma for storming their apartment, then the season 1 finale where he's telling the recruits about not busting heads but building strong cases.

even herc is done busting heads by s5 though isnt he? iirc

well, yeah, he becomes a P.I. for Levy

ohhh shit thats right

I guess it wasn't a brutality case, but he did stop and then arrest that one pastor(?) in the fourth season.

Herc is one of the all-time great stupid characters

he wasn't as stupid as the young thugs that shot Omar's grandma's hat on Sunday morning

No but Herc's was a deeper, more nuanced kind of Stupid.

there was no deeper stupid than the 40 degree day guy

who was that again?

the one in season 3, after Stringer's rant about his crew's non-existent accomplishments, comparing them to a "40 degree day" (that no one gives a shit about), repeats the phrase with a sincere smile, totally not getting it. He was also one of the hat shooters.

Forgot how funny that was
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttbQTz8tAE

marcos otm, poot's invulnerability is funny and a lil bit exhilarating. only ever cares about getting laid and comes through in one piece.

on current rewatch guy who plays herc started to feel like one of the best actors in the show. it's not that easy to play such a range of dumb without ever ceasing to be dumb. his facial expressions alone.

favorite still probably bunk tho. a shot in s4 where he+lester are partnered in homicide and lester is scouring the city for marlo's theoretical murders: lester emerges wearily from a sewer manhole as the sun goes down to find bunk in the street with suit and cigar, dancing w painstaking grace to the o'jays on the car radio. he just shines, which is why he's the only one who ever gets to convincingly tell off everybody's favorite predatory motherfucker. (this show has great, great fat guys in general actually: bunk, prop joe, landsman.)

always impressed by the way my feelings towards landsman change without his having a "redemption arc" or even a particularly important speech. the closest is his "but carry the water i will" speech to kima, while scarfing chicken doohickeys, but by this time you already understand where he's coming from, the evolutionary imperative that has created his ironic-but-total selfishness, in a way you didn't in s1, just by dint of knowing more about his job. he doesn't change but you do a little.

Trying to remember what Prez looks like and all I can think of is Doogie Howser

otm

he looks like the bellhop in hudsucker proxy

Or the random thug in Crime Story.

the amazon prime hookup is out now!

so the spring HBO binge is ON

he is the bellhop in hudsucker proxy!

holy shit.

never realized how crucial to moving the story Herc was until my most recent rewatching. the things he sets in motion without even having a clue what he's really doing. and in the end he winds up doing better than all his old colleagues (but not exactly intentionally)!

I just started a rewatch and one thin that strikes me is how tightly written the departmental politics are - the whole chain of events that sets the case in motion. I think I just kind of glossed over that in the past. It feels so real and at the same time has a perfect tragic inevitability to it.

beautifully backwards too - mcnulty acts out, he tells landsman he doesn't want to go on the boat, he is detailed to the unit, …, lester speaks up, mcnulty takes him out for a drink to the story of how he was put on the shelf, THEN he gives him the advice, 'when they ask you where you wanna go, keep your mouth shut'

1 yr later, mcnulty on boat

Well yeah there's that but tbh that's kind of a big punchline that I caught the first time through. I'm thinking of more banal stuff, e.g. when they're asked to write reports on Barksdale and the fact that Homicide's is long (thanks mainly to McNulty) while Narcotics' report is short puts extra pressure on Daniels and Narcotics, who has suction with who, etc. Also I felt more sympathetic to the department's desire to keep the witness killing under raps, being genuinely concerned about their ability to get future witnesses to testify and not having the money to protect them.

Lots of little details, e.g. the legal exhaustion issue wrt cloning a pager. It just feels like Simon and co knew the workings of a police dept so well and had the guts to actually put a lot of that stuff in there that would get left out of most cop shows for dramatic purposes.

burns certainly did

Well yeah there's that but tbh that's kind of a big punchline that I caught the first time through

well aren't you just the tits, tell me more about details that were the basis for entire episodes that your keen eye discerned by careful wireology

yeah I guess that came off douchey. Anyway just saying the attention to detail is amazing.

tbf i'm pretty dim (had to watch some parts on subtitles, not even b/c of the baltimore slang - i'm talking the police procedural stuff) and the mcnulty on the boat thing was apparent to me the first time around, too

god damn don't yall motherfuckers never just appreciate

yes he ends up on the boat after explaining in an earlier episode that he didn't want to end up on the boat it's not an easter egg

lol otm