"The Wire" on HBO

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWY79JCfhjw

but why

got to. this america, man

next stop: HarmonTown

Hey O, given your personal experiences and opinions, maybe nationally decriminalize weed rather than just sitting around talking about the fictional ramifications?

wrong thread forks?

eh, appropriate everywhere sadly

Simon looks like Herc and McCain's lovechild there.

earned my The Wire wings last night. Season five is fine but the face:punchability factor is much higher than the other seasons.

Otm.

so true

This show's sense of humor doesn't get acknowledged enough

cuzza fuckin idiots is why

i was just recalling ol gus triandos to someone the other day

herc as kingpin's dad on daredevil was inspired casting

An understated ensemble that puts the 'b' in "subtle."

Started watching this again for the first time in years last night. Weird piece of set design in episode 1 in the scene where they first call in Rhonda Pearlman. Whoever's desk that McNulty's sitting at has a "Thundercats Live!" patch thumbtacked to the cubicle wall. I had one of those patches back in 1999 or 2000. I think I got it from a UMBC student who just had a stack of them they were passing around. I'm pretty sure there was no Thundercats Live production at the time.

there's a shot of d someplace in season one where he's in front of a refrigerator and prominently placed on top of the refrigerator is a box of lil debbie's oatmeal creme pies and it always makes me want one (dozen).

lol this show's highly prominent embrace of utz chips completely inspired my love of them particularly the elusive (in MA) crab chip

http://www.thenation.com/blog/206121/game-done-changed-reconsidering-wire-amidst-baltimore-uprising

Now, I cannot help but recall all my favorite Wire moments through a lens that has me wondering if the show was both too soft on the police and incredibly dismissive of people’s ability to organize for real change. In the season that took place in the public schools, where were the student organizers, the urban debaters, and teacher activists I’ve met this past month? In the season about unions, where were the black trade unionists like the UNITE/HERE marchers who were—in utterly unpublicized fashion—at the heart of last Saturday’s march? In the season about the drug war and “Hamsterdam,” where were the people actually fighting for legalization? In the stories about the police, where were the people who died at their hands? It all reveals the audacity—and frankly the luxury—of David Simon’s pessimism. Perhaps this pessimism, alongside the adrenalizing violence, created, as Jamilah Lemieux put it in Ebony, a show steeped in the voyeurism of “Black pain and death” for a liberal white audience that “cried for Stringer Bell and a burned out CVS, but not Freddie Gray.”

I am not saying that art should conform to a utopian political vision of struggle like some dreck from the Stalinist culture mills. But I am asking a question that I wasn’t before: Why were those fighting for a better Baltimore invisible to David Simon? I don’t mean those fighting on behalf of Baltimore—the (often white) teachers, the social workers, and the good-natured cops who are at the heart of The Wire—but those fighting for their own liberation? Why was The Wire big on failed saviors and short on those trying to save themselves? And if these forces were invisible to David Simon, shouldn’t we dial down the praise of the show as this “Great American Novel of television” (Variety!) and instead see it for what it is: just a cop show? There’s no shame in that. I’ll even call it the greatest cop show ever, a cop show with insanely brilliant dialogue, indelible performances, and more three-dimensional roles for black actors than 99 percent of what comes out of Hollywood. But all the same—still just a cop show.

the inevitable retconning thinkpiece!

In the season about the drug war and “Hamsterdam,” where were the people actually fighting for legalization?

there were several scenes with them iirc

a liberal white audience that “cried for Stringer Bell

who cried for Stringer Bell? Wallace, yes. D'angelo, yes. Dookie and Bubbles, sure.

Why was The Wire big on failed saviors and short on those trying to save themselves?

There were quite a few characters trying to save themselves, and most of them failed at it.

Though I do agree that The Wire is pretty much a cop show.

There were also several scenes of police brutality carried out by the "good" cops

In the stories about the police, where were the people who died at their hands?

if this didn't bother you about the Wire... man, I dunno...

there was a scene with iirc keema & a bunch of other cops kicking the shit out of a guy lying on the ground, tbh I felt quite comfortable hating all these ppl

Prez killed another cop by mistake

Also blinded a kid and got away with it!

only half-blinded, c'mon!