"The Wire" on HBO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97PxJ-_6JwM

if you think the dropoff from S4 to S5 was bad in The Wire, i pre-emptively lol at taking on The Sopranos which was wildly inconsistent from episode to episode

i agree that BB was more enjoyable than The Wire too. don't see the great chasm of quality difference between the two, tbh, BB was just as masterful at what it was doing

Sopranos has the virtue of having great characters/character acting and zero police procedural crap

xxpost

well, sure, S5 of The Wire is at least watchable as compared to the long stretches in The Sopranos later seasons that were utter crap

arrest shakey

You be bad cop, I'll be good cop.

it's dark out there on that backlot. western district boys mistook him for a pinata.

we don't have PC, plant something

Don't bother, just write up a warrant for Shakey bin Laden.

in every cop show ever

count how many of those the Wire does

Season 5 spent the first few episodes showing stagnation, building up to McNulty and the reporter's breaches, but it really drags us deliberately through some tedium to get there.

xp prob around 40-50 out of the 180 or so, one could easily do the same with italian-american life and/or mobster cliches in the sopranos

and i grew up in northern jersey, a fair amount are accurate but some are absurdly "come onnnnn" just the same way the wire has a few.

the worst wire episodes are still better than most of seasons 4 and 6 of the sopranos (5 is pretty solid throughout)

I will grant that 4 is the low point of the Sopranos but 6 is incredible

the first serialized TV drama to actually have a definitive, iconic, well-thought out ending

BB is the only other one that even comes close so far

tbf when i say 6 i mean "the first 12 or 13 episodes," i have no prob with the finale and the few hours leading up to it

even 4 has eps like "whitecaps" and "whoever did this"...it also has literally every other episode that season

Also has the show's best episode, "The Weight"...

Uhm, how about The Shield for iconic ending?

The ending to Sopranos is crap. Well thought out two minutes, grasped onto an anti-climactic story, the combination of which makes no sense either way you interpret it. And Breaking Bad was the best final season ever for 3/4 of the way.

Also, season four was my second favorite season of Sopranos after five. Though I can't remember why. Whitecaps, though.

i thought breaking bad was pretty consistent throughout the entirety of the show, never felt like they fell off at any point. i did feel some small sense of burnout at s5a but it was brief, s5b was magnificent i thought

sopranos > wire >>> breaking bad

The ending to Sopranos is crap.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, February 24, 2015 2:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ban

the shield is a great show in a v different mode than the wire. Hard to rank them comparatively, though my earnest self prefers the wire.

I could only get through a season and a half of Breaking Bad but I mean what is that show even about? My earnest self can't watch that shit.

it's about a chemistry teacher who has cancer and is broke and too proud and cooks meth and gets obsessed with the power he thinks he has, get with it dude not too complicated

horseshoe are you me because that's the exact same response I had to BB.

BB bad is not "about" anything in the way that the Wire and the Sopranos and a handful of other shows that have central, overriding themes. It's more or less just about what it means to be addicted to dangerous behavior; it's an extended character study.

it's about a chemistry teacher who has cancer and is broke and too proud and cooks meth and gets obsessed with the power he thinks he has, get with it dude not too complicated

I'm no fun. It's the same reason I don't like mad men.

I also have zero desire to rewatch BB as its central virtue is the plot's tension and forward momentum, "cliffhangers" etc. once you know where everything is going and how it all ends and fits together I can't see it being very rewarding. A good show though.

xp

Honestly I stopped watching breaking bad because it started to seem like an experiment in out-suspending itself for...some purpose I couldn't determine. Also too hard to watch Walter white slowly destroy a kid he used to teach I can't even take it.

out-suspensing itself, I meant. Like blowing ever more impressive shit up as a formal exercise basically.

For the first few seasons BB was about a control freak fighting against chaos, and it was pretty great. Then it became a moralistic fight between good and evil, and that was pretty shallow, though often exciting.

haha what?!? there is no "good" in Breaking Bad - except for the entirely passive/inactive children (Jr. and the baby)

zero police procedural crap

Breaking Bad was good but I thought it was mostly interesting because of the plotting (the show's writers and Walter's) but the most (almost wrote 'only') fascinating characters were Mike and Gus and it didn't really reach beyond that plotting.
Mad Men is super boring tbh, even more boring than Downton Abbey which at least has the excuse of being British and twee.
Watching The Sopranos post-Wire/Deadwood/BB/etc. it didn't seem that remarkable. I don't think it effectively got inside Tony's head as a character study (or there was just nothing there but greed) and it had the single worst character of any of these shows in AJ.

Mad Men is so great fuck all y'all

AJ is essentially a tragic figure, his entire existence was an exercise in humiliation. Sopranos and Mad Men have/had better female characters than every show mentioned on this thread so far, which counts for a lot in my book

you are the one who caused all of this by not sufficiently loving the wire, the holy grail of tv

milo otm

horseshoe otm as in all matters peripherally related to the wire; what i saw of bb was strict contraption

i like mad men tho, which is totally About stuff, sometimes no doubt to its detriment

mise-en-scène

AJ was basically the Ziggy of the Sopranos -- served a similar function, basically what Shakey said. I liked the Sopranos quite a bit, esp. Carmela, but it definitely hit as many mob family stereotypes as The Wire did cop show ones.

And Mad Men is the most boring show I have watched every episode of -- I mean, people can complain about Season 2 of Walking Dead on the farm being boring, but Mad Men takes boredom to an entirely new level of tedium

Why do you watch it?

MADMEN LONG WATCH 2 (started by sarahell on board I Love AMC on 07-Jan-2014)

Catching up with Parks and Rec and laughed at this tidbit from the William Henry Harrison museum's "if he had worn a coat" alternate history exhibit.

http://assets.adamriff.com/images/the_wire-emmys.jpg

xxxp speaking of which, is it worth jumping straight to S3 of Walking Dead?

i don't think it'll be as bad watching it in a straight shot. it's that first half of the season while the show crawwwwwwls along week to week that was killing all of us