The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

Even with the third season mess, I'd put Deadwood up with anything.

Breaking Bad was so plot-driven, I don't think it has as much to care about once you've seen it and know how everything will go.

Of the Simon series I've watched, I'd probably rather go back to Treme than The Wire, in retrospect it's kind of amazing how little drama there is to it, there are no evil characters. Even the Texas Republican carpetbagger who comes in to profit off Katrina is redeemed to some extent.

the first drama to fully integrate "a beloved character could die/get killed p much anytime"

yes, definitely, but surely this is inherent in the kind of story they were telling

Breaking Bad was so plot-driven, I don't think it has as much to care about once you've seen it and know how everything will go.

i'd agree with that -- def feel like the sopranos would most reward rewatching

xp oh no doubt, but it definitely wasn't the first crime show, yknow? "sudden, capricious death as verisimilitude" undercut more well-established dramatic practices/expectations; the criminal life just made it easy to implement

The middle stretch of Treme is amazing.

sopranos has entire seasons of fat, and brilliantly-performed fat still loses u srs marks in my book.

bb is not far off dan brown ito ridiculous cliffhangers and preposterous escapes every other hour

cant see the criticisms of narrative arc for the wire set against these two, regardless of the other charms of each

best narrative arc of em all might be jimmy in boardwalk empire tbh

don't take this personally but... you have bad opinions

i only take stuff personally after considering the source tbh

🤗

there are no seasons of Sopranos that are entirely "fat", that's just ridiculous. 1 is a little slow to get up to speed but that's about as far as I'll ago. the rest is gold.

how long did

sorry spoilers

tony spend in a fridge salesman dream again

one episode, and he's a precision optics salesman

how long did fabio spend mooning around mrs s

gonna say we got three episodes minimum of optical schlub tony tbh

might poll a suite of worst sopranos bulkup plots and note for how many episodes we suffered each actually thatd convince ye right

nb its still the second best show obv

I've never been interested enough in the Wire to start watching it, and I stopped watching Breaking Bad somewhere in the second season because it stopped being a black comedy, but the Sopranos doesn't need 6 good seasons to be forever Good to me; I can just rewatch "Pine Barrens" every year or two forever.

xp. furio and carmela is a good plot ffs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d79w1M-nhLA

id see that statement and raise it thus:

fabio and carmela is a bad plot

there you all go calling things "good" and "bad" again

tho I realize I did it too

this is a good discussion abt good shows tho

carmela's character is one of the most compelling in the show, and her relationship with tony is central to the show's arc in general. season 4 is the nadir of their relationship and edie falco's portrayal of the sad, impossible love between her and the passionate, attentive furio that develops during this time is a memorable arc on the show and is very well acted by falco

Sopranos is the best show I have strangely little interest in revisiting (have, for example, seen Wire and BB probably like 2.5 times each and would happily watch again someday).

there's a lot of things that I could say right now that I am not gonna say

Sopranos had higher peaks and lower valleys. I don't know which of these shows is better but The Sopranos best twenty or thirty scenes are better than anything single scene in the Wire

any single

The Sopranos like Mad Men has an amazing core group of brilliantly casted actors and sometimes the going gets a bit muddy when it strays too far from them, but what quality they are! The Wire on the other hand contains many gratuitous scenes of posh but dim useless twat Dominic West allegedly acting, and he is arguably one of the main players of the core group that makes that most of that series :(

yeah dominic west v jimmy gandolfini as series leads (yes i know mcnulty is hardly in a whole season), i know who I'm picking

as well claim anthony jr as a series lead ffs

oh yeah, lol! Like as if Dominic West isn't in a lot of The Wire. just this minor background character, gtfo!

as if anthony jr isnt in a lot of the sopranos!

which one of these useless cunts is quadruply bad: posh as fuck, overexposed, overrated and adult aged at the time and still stealing a living though?

both of them apparently!

Dominic West is def a worse actor than any of the Sopranos leads (quantify that however you like - Tony, Carmela, Chrissie, Livia, Paulie, Melfi, Junior, Janice, Silvio, Meadow, and yes even AJ), how is this a question

but then the Wire is not really interested in actors or even characters - it's about the overarching design, the SYSTEM man

I have already made these arguments on this thread but... y'kow

it was also not interested in doing anything remotely engaging formally, from a stylistic or technical point of view. I can't think of a single shot that made me sit up and take notice of the technical audacity on display the way the Sopranos did, repeatedly, where I'd just think "jesus christ that was an ingeniously composed and shot scene"

I mean, the camera panning up and from Silvio stalking Adriana and into the trees, all after the initial "fantasy escape" sequence alone

panning up and away

but then the Wire is not really interested in actors or even characters - it's about the overarching design, the SYSTEM man

I have already made these arguments on this thread but... y'kow

"The Wire is not interested in characters" is completely OFFtm!!

pfft so many of the lead roles are thinly drawn caricatures. Macnulty is such a dumb cop show stereotype, for ex. Slimy mayor is slimy. Monstrous amoral superpredator crack dealer etc

no Sopranos actor/character is as bad as fucking Ziggy who is nigh unwatchable

If I had to single out one reason why I'd pick The Sopranos, it would be the quality of the writing. The characters in The Wire tended to speak according to type--cop-speak, dealer-speak, etc. You could argue that this added realism, and you could also argue that with everyone in The Sopranos it was wiseguy patter. Myself, I found the dialogue more mannered on The Wire (for the most part--again, I liked the show a lot, and sometimes the writing was great), more surprising on The Sopranos.

the kids in season 4 are probably the best set of characters/actors in the Wire

don't get me started on how lame a character Omar is - a super-powered gay black "noble criminal" gimme a fuckin break, he never comes close to feeling like a real person

bad takes coming hard and fast damn

I can't think of a single shot that made me sit up and take notice of the technical audacity on display

danielsandpearlmansoftcorehumpfest.gif

The Sopranos meandered somewhat, but it always felt really powerful and frightening, there was inevitably something shocking and unexpected around the corner. I had such a hard time with that Adriana scene that I had to stop watching if for a while

my hottest take re: the Sopranos is that it got better in just about every sense as it went along. The first two seasons have some creaky moments and dodgy aesthetic choices (like the disastrous mashup soundtrack cue in the s2 premiere)

Zombie Nancy Marchand was the most cringe-inducingly inept moment in any of these shows. I mean, I get it, desperate times, but still. There had to have been a more elegant way to deal with her death.