"The Wire" on HBO

Yeah you would assume this show would be held to a higher standard than most but guess not

/I can't even remember who santangelo is
/

"You some kind of Democrat or what?"

nothing tbh

Is he the overtime guy? Who jumps down the stairs?

he says that to mcnulty after mcnulty lets omar borrow a cell phone to call butchie and arrange for some backup in prison

haha nah overtime go is named Mahone

*guy

police union working hand in glove w/ right wing media to justify a beating or shooting death that sent their city into a fury

this common aspect of american policing is not the kind of story shown in the wire.

I feel like police brutality has become a bigger issue and attracted more public attention and fury in the past decade than in the previous two.

i was about to say the same thing, except for rodney king

eh when prez pistolwhips that kid the coverup process, the way they stuff him in a back drawer more or less, is pretty well detailed. it depicts how bureaucracies protect idiots in power (in ANY power) pretty astutely

xp - for example, if the Oakland Riders scandal broke now, it would get really explosive, whereas at the time, there was a lot less visible public anger

*facepalm* yeah, Rodney King

wait the Wire ran from 2002-2008 right?

Rampart LAPD scandal springs to mind as being in the news during that time, I'm sure there were others. Rodney King is kinda like ground zero/the initial big case for this kind of stuff tho obviously

outside of the final season about the newspapers/homeless, it was written 10+ years ago

Sonja Sohn explicitly discusses the experience of playing the role of an abusive cop in situ
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/opinion/sunday/baltimore-taught-me-about-hope.html
kima is still awesome

nice piece, she seems like a good person.

the entire point of this show is that otherwise good people can do bad things, due to system they're a part of. cops don't question the beatings because in order to advance your career you have to fall in line. those who do find fault with the system and challenge it find that they're poweless against it and fail. does the show humanize cops, even ones who do horrible things? even try to make us like them? yes, and that's the point. anyone who thinks that's "pro-cop" doesn't get it

otm

Yeah some of these criticisms feel like a reach to me. I think Simon's own arguments are much more vulnerable to critique, outside of the show: again the drug war was not the crux of the prison industrial complex as much as it was the means to an end

Imo

And like, Simon not being adequately alarmed by police abuse but still portraying it doesn't feel like a failure--it feels like an honest reflection of the dominant paradigm of the time! Social media and protests recently have shifted that perspective so where a lot of people (including the all of ilx who praised the wire unreservedly before) suddenly think, wait, this is a warped perception of reality

That's not a defense of the show, it's a flaw for sure, but a flaw that reflects the period in which it was made pretty truthfully

Santangelo - short, grey hair. He's originally a homicide cop sent by Rawls to keep tabs on McNulty during the first season's case. Later, he refuses to rat on him and then gets demoted to being a district cop. He may be best known for telling a confused junkie in Hamsterdam, "I hear WMD is the bomb!"

― Mistah FAAB (sarahell), Monday, May 4, 2015 2:09 PM (6 hours ago)

i saw this guy irl at whole foods on saturday lol

!!!

i mentioned this in the ongoing police brutality thread, but the actor who plays slim charles, anwan glover, spoke at the rally in front of city hall on Saturday.

he's short. also saw him at jfx farmers market about 4 years ago.

santangelo, not slim charles

Slim Charles is a member of Backyard Band and a radio personality on one of the D.C. stations, in a weird way he's kinda become more of a 'local Wire celebrity in residence' than any of the show's actors from Baltimore.

nice

the wire is fine tv but it was always hella shallow in terms of portraying anything "deep" about why the situation was fucked, and people who thought that they understood "society's ills" better in any more fundamental fashion because they saw it were always corny. what made it a great show was that it had great characters.

oh it was about more than characters, and it was i think about 'the situation', v much so—portraying individuals struggling to work within bureaucracies & power structures, and it felt truthful in those portrayals! imo.

the wire is fine tv but it was always hella shallow in terms of portraying anything "deep" about why the situation was fucked, and people who thought that they understood "society's ills" better in any more fundamental fashion because they saw it were always corny. what made it a great show was that it had great characters.

― entry-level umami (mild bleu cheese vibes) (s.clover), Monday, May 4, 2015 10:37 PM (Yesterday)

rme, yes who were these lames watching the wire when _____ was on TV showing us what life was really like

Cutty kind of gets slept on in conversations about the show.

*farts*

Cutty kind of gets slept on in conversations about the show.

From who, everybody's mom?

I'm glad we've all come back around to the inauthenticity of The Wire.

ok i just saw an episode of this finally and maybe it grows on you but i was pretty taken aback by the sort of dippy romanticism it seemed to be dripping with -- way more than most network cop dramas even. hbo shows in generally tend to be sappy and just oozing from the pores with signifiers of "meaning."

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Tuesday, October 3, 2006 12:03 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh i mean there were definitely some embarrassing on the nose/writerly moments. obvious example is the chess scene in s1. that doesn't really relate to what we've discussed itt recently though

Chess scene was pretty dead-on: Some people know things and have a view of the larger perspective - it doesn't help them in any way.

Regarding it being 'just a cop show' - I don't watch a lot of cop shows, but the impression I got was that being interested in the criminals as well was distinctive if not unique.

idg how anyone can avoid the fact that this show never strays too far from the "cops must catch bad guys" template of all cop shows - compromised and morally ambiguous as (some of) the cops may be, their goals are p much always the ones the audience is intended to sympathize with: stopping murderous crack dealers.

Starting to wonder if you saw some bootleg which only includes the cop-protagonist scenes.

there are p clear moral lines drawn - none of the cops are sociopathic murderers akin to Marlo or Avon

no but plenty of them are blatant careerists, especially the ranking officers

xpost - The evil on the cop "side" is more of the faceless/corrupt bureaucrat variety.

^^

that's what people are saying is the problem no?

cops at the top and dealers at the top are both shown to be blatant careerists, but the latter are the ones shown murdering people to get what they want. which side do you think is being portrayed in the more sympathetic light there.

the dealers exist in a universe where murder or violence of one's professional rivals is an active and constant currency, like that's simply a fact of organized crime. the cops...do not, but they often do things that, considering the universe they operate in, are figuratively as ruthless if not literally

Non-figurative murder and violence is a fact of cop life in a way that seems in retrospect to have been played down in this show, was the original criticism

so now we're inching towards the implication that cops don't murder criminal suspects eh

xxp

because they operate in a universe where that just doesn't happen?