"The Wire" on HBO

Thing with Prez is that he's in the worst possible profession for him. Here's this technology- and puzzle-loving dweeb who finds himself with a gun and these jockish type A bullies, and to fit in, he puts on this gross projection of what he thinks a tough cop is supposed to be like. So you get him blinding a kid when he's out with Herc and Carver, and arguably why he shoots the UC cop. But put him in a different environment, one where he's not in the street, away from performances of masculinity, and he flourishes.

there are no "good guys" and "bad guys".

Marlo's nuanced eh

is there really a meaningful distinction between actually murdering suspects, which isn't exactly commonplace ftr, and the sort of violence the cops routinely got away with?

this is such a weird question

let's ask some dead people

s there really a meaningful distinction between actually murdering suspects, which isn't exactly commonplace ftr, and the sort of violence the cops routinely got away with?

this is such a weird question

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 5, 2015 2:22 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

let's ask some dead people

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 5, 2015 2:22 PM (29 seconds ago)

i mean from a narrative standpoint. does the show lose anything by showing cops "merely" beating people half to death and getting away with it rather than actually killing people and getting away with it? is the message different?

it doesn't cripple the show's claims to realism or anything but I think it's an error of omission, yeah, and one that serves the show's (or rather the genre's) tendency to err on the side of depicting cops in a more sympathetic light

i think it's a lot easier to say that in the context of the highly publicized police killings of the past 12 months or so. making that argument when the show was running would have been a lot more difficult

Marlo's nuanced eh

simon routinely acknowledged that he made marlo a straight up psychopath on purpose, but it'd be a stretch to say anything like that about any other dealer the show portrayed

trying to remember Avon's good qualities. or Bird's. etc.

Apart from Prez, are there any other cases where the cops even fire their weapons? Even for totally legit reasons?

trying to remember Avon's good qualities. or Bird's. etc.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 5, 2015 2:35 PM (1 minute ago)

herc's? rawls? burrell?

don't get me wrong there is a lot of grey area in the Wire and this is by design and it's really obvious. at the same time I don't think it's any stretch to say that the dealers on the whole come off worse than the cops, and a lot of the reason for this is because of the former's propensity for violence, which is constantly on display.

their goals are p much always the ones the audience is intended to sympathize with: stopping murderous crack dealers.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 5, 2015 9:38 AM (1 hour ago)

they're mostly heroin dealers tbh

sorry

Avon has real affection for D! And I think that first episode where we see him throwing a neighborhood BBQ also suggests that role that kingpins play in inner cities.

trying to remember Avon's good qualities. or Bird's. etc.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 5, 2015 11:35 AM (2 minutes ago)

Bird and Marlo were the two out-and-out sociopaths. Avon was kind and generous to his family and friends and visited his terminally ill uncle in the nursing home.

xp yea avon also gave cutty like 15 grand to fix up the gym

goals are p much always the ones the audience is intended to sympathize with

and it subverts that by openly depicting that more often than not, the drive to catch dealers is not bc they believe in justice, it's usually to stoke their own egos! and when mcnulty finally does have a person he actually wants to stop bc he feels like he has to (marlo), he goes to corrupt lengths to do so w/an elaborate ruse and an illegal wiretap

also I would hope that it goes without saying that the last 12-months' publicity frenzy over killer cops has more to do with social media and surveillance footage everywhere than it does with an actual increase in the rate of police killing minority suspects, which has been going on forever. It's not like that stuff just all of a sudden started happening a year ago: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/23/baltimore-has-a-history-of-accidentally-killing-its-perps.html

xp

Avon was kind and generous to his family and friends

doesn't Avon murder some family members? D'Angelo was his nephew iirc?

I mean that's kind of a marker of stone-cold evil, the murder of a family member

avon is unaware of d's murder until stringer, who arranged it, tells him so.

xp - duuuuuuude you have forgotten major plot points! Stringer has D'Angelo killed, and that is part of why Avon lets Omar and Brother kill him.

ah right

I watched this show once 10 years ago, forgive me

my takeaway so far is that Shakey seems to have watched as much of The Wire as I have, ie none of it

tbf a number of people in this thread are making arguments about the show that seem to be based less on the show than what the show's creators, critics, and various other people have written or said about the show.

tbf a number of people in this thread will brook no criticism of THE GREATEST SHOW OF ALL TIME

oh I include people arguing both sides in that number

tbf a number of people in this thread will brook no criticism of THE GREATEST SHOW OF ALL TIME

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 5, 2015 2:50 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so, like you re: the sopranos...

this could go on forever in all directions argh

there's some dumb stuff in the Sopranos

there I said it

(fwiw my go-to "greatest show of all-time" answer is usually the Twilight Zone)

Were those aliens really cannibals? I mean, the screen goes to black before you see them eat anyone.

cannibalism is not addressed in "To Serve Man"

The fact that the cops don't shoot any suspects is normally one of the things people like about the show, it's not as if murdering suspected criminals normally turn the audience against the cops. Look at Justified.

Justified is more like a western than a cop show

cannibalism is not addressed in "To Serve Man"

Ah, so you did just blindly take it on face value that those were really aliens.

i suppose the reason why this retconned discussion is frustrating imo is not that criticizing the wire is an unforgivable act (it ain't perfect at all! no show is!), but that trying to paint a show that took major capitalist and political city institutions to task in brutal fashion as Not Quite Critically Liberal Enough is a sure sign we are thoroughly entrenched in the thinkpieceification-of-everything era and we're never ever getting out :/

there's no getting out
sopranos.gif

lol

Ah, so you did just blindly take it on face value that those were really aliens.

well the tv said it was true so

there are plenty of legit criticisms of the wire and shakey mo has not articulated any of them

legit criticism - "you want it to be one way but it's the other way" isn't half as good a line as fans seem to think it is

in retrospect I'm disappointed that Steve Earle didn't play the same character in Treme as The Wire - and any future Simon projects.

there's a huge difference between holding the wire up to some weird imagined ideal standard of a "truthful show" -- of course it can't be truthful, it's a show -- and seeing it for what it is. the weird defensiveness over it isn't like over the quality of entertainment it produced, but over acknowledging that the "message" (and it did have one, or a few) wasn't necessarily as earth-shaking as ppl like to pretend.

altho i will grant that in that time, a major "important" thing coming out directly for legalization felt like a sort of big deal, and probably did end up having some minor knock-on consequences in terms of what's happened since.

acknowledging that the "message" (and it did have one, or a few) wasn't necessarily as earth-shaking as ppl like to pretend

― entry-level umami (mild bleu cheese vibes) (s.clover), Tuesday, May 5, 2015 6:34 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it shook my earth fwiw

a list of my complaints about this show as articulated to-date in this thread (a primer):

1) The way the show handled female characters. The women on this show are relegated to supporting roles and in almost every case are under- and/or just badly written.
2) totally pointless and gratuitous sex scenes
3) the "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown" nihilism re: institutions
4) the constant didactic hammering home of point 3 (w/copious montages in case viewers were having trouble drawing connections on their own)
5) jarring juxtaposition of an essentially fantastic character (Omar) in an otherwise relentlessly "realistic" show
6) cops are generally portrayed in a more favorable light than I find credible

anyway, off to watch last week's episode of Mad Men (which is way better than the Wire nyah nyah)

xp

the message in and of itself was not necessarily earth shaking but using that format as a delivery system was certainly a landmark. no other tv show aside from OZ (and in a less substantive way the shield) covered this ground in any way - homicide couldn't quite get there bc it was on a network although it was pretty great. obviously OZ did it in a different specific venue but covering similar themes of institutional and bureaucratic failure. can we learn about these sociopolitical issues in other more traditional mediums like print? of course, but it's great that mediums like fictionalized TV started to address them, and the wire (and the corner) are both huge parts of that.

xp I mean the only author that portrays cops in a way that seems like it would make sense to you given what you've said would be james ellroy where they are almost exclusively complete monsters, and hey, I like james ellroy so that's aight

I like some Ellroy. in general yeah I don't like cop shows.