The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

well, not really. but they humanize the "murdering, scumbag" etc dealers fairly well to the point where you find yourself empathising with them to a certain extent. and alot of the cops come off a total creeps. cheating, stealing and beating on people!

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I have never, not once, watched a scene/shot in the Wire and thought "huh, that was a really creative way to use the combo of camerawork and editing to accentuate/emphasize/add to what was going on in the scene/episode"

I guess I can kind of see where you are coming from with this and it certainly isn't the show's forte. But then again I think the 'theatrical' approach suits the material well; flashy camera work would have detracted from the tone.

disagree with shakey on 'manichean' but it does get a lot more manichean in 4 and 5. marlo vs anyone is pretty manichean.

if you're only on the 2nd season, D'Angelo would be a good example.

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maybe more happens in subsequent seasons to change that, but in the first two seasons you don't see McNulty, Bunk, Greggs, etc. do anything "bad" (apart from minor bullshit like "gets too drunk"/"cheats on his wife" - which doesn't really compare with, "murders nephews/ex-girlfriends/random people in prison")

Again without spoilerizing a LOT happens between the point you are at now and the end of the series.

The end of the sow I mean.

*show

I spent quite a lot of time watching The Wire thinking how beautifully shot it was. Not least season 2 with those vast dockside edifices and long bleak perspectives.

by way of comparison, yesterday afternoon A&E was re-running "The Legend of Tennessee Moltesante" episode of the Sopranos and I caught the scene where Chrissie picks up Tony (after fucking up something or other, I forget which) and Tony lays into him for being such a screw-up. When Chrissie tells Tony he "can't take it" cuz he can't handle the psychological fallout of being a murderer, there is this fantastically subtle, layered exchange - Tony tries a little psychoanalysis on him, but is defensive cuz he doesn't want to incriminate himself, but also genuinely curious at finding out if Chrissie is depressed like him, covering it up with bravado and manipulation... this scene is like 2 minutes long, but there is SO MUCH going on in it. Just the way the conversation morphs from Tony telling Chrissie to shut up while he lambasts him into this weird "let's talk about our feelings" thing... AND it foreshadows stuff that comes up in the last episodes of the series re: Melfi and sociopaths treating psychonanalysis as "just another racket" to be learned and used to suit their own ends.

I don't see anything approaching this depth in the Wire.

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it's not 'badly shot' or anything, but it lacks the drive of 'the shield' and the 'moments' of 'the sopranos' and the special effects work of 'battlestar galactica'.

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if you're only on the 2nd season, D'Angelo would be a good example.

this isn't all that nuanced a development, he becomes "good" (ie, sympathetic to the audience) when he forsakes his family to try and "get out the game" (and at the same time he's an "honorable" criminal by doing his time rather than snitching)

See the thing is I am literally the complete opposite to you, Shakey. Most of the stuff you said about the Wire, I think about the Sopranos. So I dunno really...

To be fair, Shakey, Season 2 competes with Season 5 as the show's weakest, and although I liked the first season, I didn't understand the acclaim until Season 3, after which you realize that, like a good novelist, the producers and writers have laid material that only resonates later.

I'd persevere until the end of Season 4 at least, which I think most people agree is the classic season.

the wire would be much improved by the presence of 70s cylons

shakey i dont see what the difference is between tony & someone like stringer or avon in terms of the balance between sympathy & disgust that the audience feels!

well, one is pointedly cinematic, and one is pointedly not. what's the point of acting as if one wins and one loses because of that?

because one is using all the tools at its disposal, and the other isn't? I have never, not once, watched a scene/shot in the Wire and thought "huh, that was a really creative way to use the combo of camerawork and editing to accentuate/emphasize/add to what was going on in the scene/episode"

― Kitchen Paper Towel (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, June 8, 2009 11:34 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

doesn't this assume that a) both shows have the same budget and that b) The Wire not looking particularly filmic or stylized is a symptom of laziness or inexperience or lack of vision more than a deliberate aesthetic choice?

D'Angelo is a rather straight forward example of this - but you're only in the second season - and you're comparing it to the Sopranos using examples all the way to the last episode. i don't want to give anything away (with the wire) but you're trying to draw conclusions based on having seen less than half the series in one case - and the entire thing in the other.

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i dunno max, i never really felt much sympathy for stringer. avon becomes a more interesting character in later seasons (despite being in it less)

I wouldn't say I felt sympathy for Stringer, but respect--absolutely.

(i have not seen a single episode of the sopranos.)

u guys are making me feel totally heartless here

shakey i dont see what the difference is between tony & someone like stringer or avon in terms of the balance between sympathy & disgust that the audience feels!

Tony being the main character he gets a lot more screentime than either of those guys, for one thing - and you see all the stuff that made him the way he is (his mother, his dad, the whole mythos of the Italian-American crime family) and you see him doing a lot of things that viewers are clearly meant to identify with as "normal" (driving his family around, singing along to classic rock radio, compulsively overeating, etc.) But Tony is also pure evil, and the whole thrust of the Sopranos kinda centers around this combination of evil and magnetism, that allows him to draw everyone and everything he comes into contact with (lone, notable exception is Melfi) into his amorality.

I mean, Tony is just a different kind of character, a more central one. Bell is pretty much your straight up Machiavellian villain guy. Barksdale too to a lesser extent (cuz he does seem to have some genuine sympathy for certain people, like D'Angelo)

http://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:xZ5F6Auee9DxKM:http://i.pbase.com/o4/14/684914/1/63850662.k8HwxXL0.zzz.gif

doesn't this assume that a) both shows have the same budget and that b) The Wire not looking particularly filmic or stylized is a symptom of laziness or inexperience or lack of vision more than a deliberate aesthetic choice?

of course its a deliberate aesthetic choice. Not a particularly good one though.

ya i guess i see where yr comin from shakey--but again im not sure why we cant say that stringer or avon have that same combination of 'evil and magnetism,' just accomplished in a v difft way.

i posted up above about how simon is very adamant that the wire is a greek tragedy & despite the kind of quibbles one has with that kind of sweeping statement i think its pretty helpful at getting at why comparing the sopranos & the wire is kind of dumm (fwiw i think the shield, or what ive seen of it, is a much better comparison w/ the sopranos)--simon & chase & the show itself are imo way less interested in the kind of psychological/existential questions that the sopranos is obsessed w/.

i tried to watch the first season of the shield once, and had to stop after two or three episodes--really not a good show imho.

the show itself are imo way less interested in the kind of psychological/existential questions that the sopranos is obsessed w/.

yea this is the nub of it. the wire doesn't exclude family shit but it's a different emphasis.

i was more immediately impressed by the wire but the sopranos is the one that's stayed in my bones over the years.

i say this in every thread but 1) the shield is the nuts 2) it hell of improved from season 3

I mean, if Shakey wants to understand the kind of family dynamic that leads to these cold-hearted gangstas, then he will be happy to watch the Naymond/Weebay/Momz situation in season four, if he gets that far.

i guess one way of putting it is that the sopranos (like shakespeare) is fascinated by individuals & individual choices while the wire (sorta like greek tragedy) is fascinated with institutions & fatalism & fate

i feel like sopranos is kind of like a greek tragedy too, almost more than the wire... everyone is a victim of their own inescapable character

um, detectives good, drug lords bad (to state the most obvious example?)

This is weird to me -- I feel like I've talked to very few people who even have good/bad responses to Wire characters, and most people I know found (e.g.) Stringer Bell more compelling to watch and more "likable" as a person occupying the screen than McNulty. (Personally I think McNulty is exactly as abrasive to the viewer as he is to his police superiors.) Maybe I'm weird, but on an individual level I think I spent the first season far more invested in the fates of lower-level drug dealers (D'Angelo and ... was it Wesley?) than in any of the individual police apart from maybe Kima. I'm assuming you mean this on an individual level because if you mean this in terms of classes it's just the opposite -- our view of the police department in this thing is actually heavily weighted toward laziness, incompetence, apathy, etc., just not so much on the part of the main police we follow.

or lolz individuals good, institutions bad!

I don't know how to address this without spoiler examples, but I don't really see the separability, because I don't feel like the show really claims that many of these individuals would be good if they weren't shaped by institutional demands, or that the two things aren't partly shaping one another -- mostly if I imagine these characters removed from their institutions, I imagine them exerting the exact same personalities and flaws onto whatever other institutions they might be a part of. (I.e., I feel like Burrell as a school superintendent or politician would still be Burrell, you know?)

Anyway, I would recommend pushing through at least the middle of season 3, which is maybe when the show really becomes what it ultimately is and people maybe most remember about it -- if you're not getting enough out of it at that point, you could probably beg off or re-prioritize without missing anything too major about how the show functions, I think.

... Stringer Bell more compelling to watch and more "likable" as a person occupying the screen than McNulty. (Personally I think McNulty is exactly as abrasive to the viewer as he is to his police superiors.) Maybe I'm weird, but on an individual level I think I spent the first season far more invested in the fates of lower-level drug dealers (D'Angelo and ... was it Wesley?) than in any of the individual police apart from maybe Kima. I'm assuming you mean this on an individual level because if you mean this in terms of classes it's just the opposite -- our view of the police department in this thing is actually heavily weighted toward laziness, incompetence, apathy, etc., just not so much on the part of the main police we follow.

but characters being interesting or compelling is independent of their moral position within the show (I mean duh villains are often more fun to watch than boring old heroes) - what I was getting at is that the two opposing sub-groups in the first two seasons (the drug dealing crew vs. the detective crew) by and large the individual detectives are hard-working, morally driven, good humored guys. The individual drug lords - Stringer, Avon, D's mom (basically anyone that isn't D'Angelo) - are shown to be ruthless, greedy, and violent. The moral line is pretty clear. I totally take everyone's word for it that this line gets blurred down the road, but the murder of D in Season 2 just points up how essentially WRONG the drug-dealing institution is (whereas with the cops the institution's fucked-upness stems from the higher-ups being uniformly lazy, opportunistic, amoral power-hounds - and actually I find the caricaturish nature of those characters like Burrell and Valchek really irritating and one-note).

i really don't think the detectives are morally driven.

like, the ostensible PURPOSE of the institution of drug-dealing is never portrayed as being positive. By contrast, while the explicit purpose of a police department to provide a valid social function is routinely shown to be undermined by the bureaucracy, politics etc. of the higher-ups, the moral underpinning of the institution - that cops should catch the bad guys - is well-represented by those lovable, hard-working, hard-drinking detectives. This is still a pretty standard good guys vs. bad guys set-up, albeit with some grey area shading thrown in around the edges for good measure.

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i really don't think the detectives are morally driven.

cue scenes of cops agonizing over victims of any given crime in the show...

i mean, not solely morally driven.

i just mean, the detectives are pretty morally complex.

as someone who really wants to like the good guys, i was continually having to realign my assumptions about who the virtuous detectives were until there were no uncomplicatedly virtuous detectives.

also if you're talking about jimmy mcnulty, give me a fucking break.

that herc is a model citizen.

shakey i sort of wonder if your own proclivity--based on some things youve said on this thread--would be to naturally "side" with the drug dealers in some way, and that youre just sort of assuming that the detectives are thought of as loveable working class stiffs (instead of arrogant power-tripping drunks) because youve never been in a position to like the police in a given show?

does that make sense as a question? i just mean its like--i like cop shows, and i dont usually have a problem rooting for the cops, but the cops in the wire are among the least sympathetic on television, more or less across the board. i wonder if the assumption youre making about the shows sympathies has more to do w/ yr own blind spots than the mechanics of the show and its audience

i mean clearly you dont think of them as cute and fun, and i dont know that anyone on this thread has ever claimed to think of them that way--so why assume that the show does?

yeah I guess we just view this differently (and maybe my perception is altered by later seasons), cuz this --

by and large the individual detectives are hard-working, morally driven, good humored guys

-- only seems true if "by and large" means ... Kima, Daniels, Bunk, and Freamon? Maybe McNulty? And then leaves out higher-level alcoholics, dudes coasting toward retirement, dudes pulling injury scams, idiotic forays into public housing and kid-face-smashing, evidence theft, general covering up for one another's criminal wrongdoing, etc. ... also, apart from some things you haven't gotten to yet, there's never much sense that any of them are acting largely on behalf of any public good; aren't there some explicit conversations about how their main drive is just to win, to be smarter than the criminals, to not have their power be skirted or undermined?

Whereas the drug dealers are also hard-working and good-humored and driven by ... not a code you'd call "moral," but kind of moral system nonetheless. I guess what I mean is that it always seemed to me that part of the point of this show was to portray both sides of this from similar perspectives, and to show how an individual in a gang navigates the gang's institutional concerns on the same plane that a policeman navigates his department's concerns -- and one result (for me, anyway, and most people I talk to) is that while you start the 1st season with the expectation that the police will "win," you gradually come to a point of just watching the workings and politics of both sides, rooting for whoever/whatever you like in either system to come out ahead, in the knowledge that neither one is just going to "win" anyway.

NB this is part of why there's a benefit to hanging on until the next couple seasons, because there comes a point where both worlds have changed entirely and you're looking at, e.g., low-level drug dealers from the beginning kind of growing and moving through their system, and it becomes ... different and interesting. The response is definitely not that they're just bad.

kima, daniels, lester and bunk, i guess, but they're no saints. mcnulty's moral impulses are so entangled with his asshole-ness i just don't think they should count.

daniels is crooked, kimas a cheater, bunk is fat

bunk's a cheater, too; i feel like they basically all are.

kima's also a lesbian! Immoral City!

daniels is too in shape