The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

the wire's first season is imo really good but the next 3 are epic and actually vv unusual (the season with the kids has elements of a horror film, maybe since it's sort of from their perspective, and is maybe the best single season of any tv show i've ever seen)

yeah i always end up telling people "season 4 is the best but you can't start there, sorry"

No love for the Bunk?

I was actually gonna say... I just finished the episode where Bunk picks up a barfly and burns all his clothes in her bathtub/gets totally wasted/sleeps in McNulty's kid's crib. There was some nice nuanced characterization stuff he had goin on there, he seems the most like a "real" person to me.

Xpost Shakey and Edward III - heavyhandedness of the Wire is making me wonder if I'll keep watching, though I probably will.

also enjoyed Ashy Larry's cameo from same ep

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"heavyhandedness of the Wire"

the wire is pretty non-judgmental, maybe even frustratingly so. Not like relentless karmic retribution in Sopranos.

? People get away with shit all the time in the Sopranos.

I think there is some serious sociological analysis/heavyhandedness in the Wire and that's what's being referred to (see my above comment re: crack deals teaching kids math; or Ashy Larry being a bagman for a Senator; or the many many many instances of the cops being hamstrung by regulations/politics)

I mean I thought Ashy Larry's appearance was fun, but as soon as he showed up at that party talking about crack I knew IMMEDIATELY that he was going to show up again as a high-placed guy doing dirty shit, placed in the story as emblematic of just how far corruption/the drug trade reaches blah blah blah

xp Edward: Yes, the Wire is a lot more sociological than personal character studies. A lot of its appeal is showing how institutions function and are fucked up and the effects they have on communities. A lot of the best character development and acting comes later: Carver, Stringer, Omar, Prop Joe get more play later on, besides Season 4 with the kids and Namond's mom.

re: the McNulty thing - to me he characterizes a critique of the cop show genre - in your standard cop show he would be the hero - but in The Wire "he's basically a combination of alcoholic douchebag, morally righteous cop, and sad bastard who's incapable of doing anything else in his life worth a shit so he plunges everything into solving cases." He's your standard workaholic dude that's made his job his life, and had he not been divorced, he could end up like the guy in 6 Feet Under who goes on and on about the trivia of his job and how he showed them at the breakfast table before his wife hits him over the head with a frying pan and ends his sad existence. In a later season, it's revealed that he dropped out of college and became a cop because he needed a decent paying job, presumably with benefits, after his girlfriend got pregnant, and his options were limited.

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Edward: You're absolutely right that The Wire is mostly interested in the "work" people do, but don't be fooled into thinking it's just functional or procedural, like a cop show. You've probably heard/read this before, but ... the scope just keeps opening up, the interrelationships between different characters and institutions keep getting more complicated and compelling ... it really becomes something. The first season has a tight focus on one investigation, yeah, but that turns out to feel like it's almost just an introduction.

The second season is maybe medium-tight in terms of focus, and probably the one I'd say is closest to a more Sopranos-y style; it's the third season where the whole thing really starts spinning out amazingly. I think part of why the fourth one works so well is that by that point the show has brought in and is interconnecting events from so many different levels of the city -- streets, gangs, police department, courts, politics, schools, families -- mostly from the point of view of how they affect a specific group of children you wind up caring a lot about, so ... it reaches this ideal balance of being intricate/panoramic but also very tightly about the fates of specific, great characters.

"People get away with shit all the time in the Sopranos."
everyone gets whacked in this show!

"I think there is some serious sociological analysis/heavyhandedness in the Wire"
I'll agree that the writers and critics are aware and thinking at least peripherally in these terms, but what ends up on the screen is composed for dramatic entertainment, not pushing some sociological reportage agenda. If there were no institutional complications presented, there'd be no Game (no fun).

The Game is the Game, yo!

everyone gets whacked in this show!

Janice, Paulie, Junior, Tony (debatable), lots of people survive. and people are rarely killed because of the bad shit they've done, its usually something totally unrelated... I dunno, seems quite different from "karma" to me.

Nabisco otm. Its about roles rather than individuals, who are always disposable, which is why they have such a high turnover of characters&how they make the scope so large. The stuff I enjoyed most was when ppl are grappling w/their place amongst the big forces, when there's a gap between character and role, and that's where they mine most of the tragedy. Characters aren't judged on morals but their success depends on their ability to navigate the powers that be.

i don't think karma, as a concept, necessarily means you get it in the end via something directly related to past transgressions.

i really don't think david chase was trying to go for a karma thing in the sopranos.

Janice and Junior are dealt some dire karmic life cards.
Paulie's not dead?

They lead their lives and are generally punished for their lifestyle than any particular misdeed.
The rule is opposite for civilians on the show -- they make a stupid misstep and get pretty much immediate retribution, and we are meant to take delight in some of them,
like seeing Ben Kingsley cowed and frightened.

yeah I agree w/s1ocki - I think you're misreading/overgeneralizing

Its about roles rather than individuals, who are always disposable, which is why they have such a high turnover of characters&how they make the scope so large.

^^ I don't agree with this at all, actually! I don't think the individuals in this are reducible to just their roles, or disposable in the least -- I think all the interesting things happening are about individuals, with all their individual habits and desires and whatnot, trying to accomplish stuff within the structures of whatever institutions they're involved with. Practically nobody in the whole series strikes me as just being someone who occupies their job or role; they all have individual agendas and individual ways they'd prefer to get things done (or not get things done), and most of the action is in watching those things butt up against the institution's goals, or other individuals' goals, or whatever.

(I honestly can't think of many characters in this who are just the way they are because that's their job -- in every case you know something about their personality and their goals that makes very clear why they occupy the role the way they do.)

I've said this on another thread but the overall pattern is not retribution (not necessarily anyway) but more one of corruption

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in every case you know something about their personality and their goals

like I said already, I have no clue about McNulty's personality and goals, beyond I R HARDASS COP

even his relationship w/his children and ex-wife is portrayed in those terms

he's a townie fuckup bro with a hair more smarts and observation skills than his peers and huge chip on his shoulder that sometimes serves as a motivation to work shit really hard

i mean yeah he's the easy-on-the-eyes white dude cop show guy. deadwood had a sheriff, too. it's still TV after all.

xp Shakey: SRY U LAK CLUE

haha well yes, I think that is part of his self-image! I mean, functionally speaking, his deal is to be the guy who wants to do "real police work" and pisses off or screws over everyone he encounters by refusing to acknowledge that it doesn't really work that way -- roll with it for a few seasons and this will get progressively more interesting and complicated, even during the seasons when he's not around much

put it this way: McNulty is basically a troll, and he trolls the police department

haha

i really began to love the mcnutty character (and all the cops, really) for embodying a conception of cop-life as a working-class intellectual curiosity, which, lo these many trillions of hours of cop show, hadn't been brought to life that way. they aren't geniuses or heroes or angels, they just Want To Know.

"i really don't think david chase was trying to go for a karma thing in the sopranos."

what's with the tony in therapy moaning "why is this bad stuff happening to me" then?

in the wire, the bad stuff is the game.
in the sopranos, there's some moral judgment component to the bad stuff.
if it's not karma, maybe it's catholic or something.

the point is tony is self-pitying and self-deluded, not that he's being punished.

i mean come on, this guy has it better than pretty much anyone else on the show, you don't see a little irony in him kvetching about that?

that is some serious point-missing - Tony is totally manipulative of Melfi in therapy

melfi's pretty all up with the righteous indignation -- supposed to represent viewer right? be all shocked at tony's bad behavior but complicit in it too?

haha tony is chase, manipulating us viewers.

^^^yeah that's one of the ways I see it

i always thought the show had a sorta catholic point to make w/r/t melfi: she's too locked into a secular/medical view of tony to realize that his problems are moral. it's not his screwy psychology that causes him to do bad things, it's his sins that make him miserable.

I don't agree with this at all, actually!

This obv not clear cos you really should! The plot, the energy of the show is at the social level, the characters exist independent from that, but they're there because of their roles&their staying power is dependent on them. The drama comes from characters differing abilities to work the gap between where they are and who they are, manipulating their circumstances w/various degrees of skill to further their goals or get along. Professional, social stuff, wins out over personal relationships a lot in the Wire, w/characters turning on each other when prudent, home life suffering&c, a lot of the extra-professional loyalty ends up tragic. Characters are very vulnerable when their role is at threat or they're not 100% in it. The characters who do well manage their own shit very cautiously re:outside forces or put it away completely, there's a lot put on codes of conduct, even by the most free&powerful characters like Omar&Marlo. I think individual fragility is one of the main themes.

by the end of the sopranos I'd say the message is: tony is evil and there's nothing you can do about it

thinking of the sopranos as a morality play where everybody gets their just desserts, that seems way off base to me

^^^yep. its Faust thing. and Tony is the devil.

its A Faust thing

melfi breaks the cardinal rule, you can't psychoanalyze a sociopath

what was great about the sopranos was how ruthless it was in exposing its characters delusions

it didn't always rub their noses in it, but it sure rubbed ours

is there a character in the sopranos who isn't wildly deluded about themselves and their life?

one legged Russian girl!

^^^seriously one of my all-time favorite characters

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OiP3Y2_p3k8/R8VoYc8JnnI/AAAAAAAAAZ8/Qw81OrcRmxA/s400/svetlana.jpg

haha you got me

and yes she is hall of fame fictional character

She and the duck from the wire should do spinoff series.

(the duck being the equivalent character from the wire)

but yeah I agree that Sopranos is basically one loooong parade of delusion, obfuscation, and lies - and half the fun in the series is picking up on what is REALLY going on underneath all that.

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