The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

boy SOA really did have some of the worst characters in the "golden age" of "prestige" TV, in terms of conception and execution

iirc sarahell and i were comparing BOSCH and the wire awhile back, there's a lot of crossover with actors and a bit with the politics/system stuff. but it's pulpier and not as funny. Good cast tho, solid entertainment.

almost stopped watching the wire at the beginning of season 2.

― Seany's too Dyche to mention (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, October 8, 2019 3:03 PM (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's such a great fuck you move: "Stay tuned for the action packed Season 2 of Cops vs Drug Dealers: White People Unloading Stuff From Container Ships"

Tbf they deployed boobs to keep the audience engaged

also, realizing that the actor who played the Irish priest in SOA frequently was cast as a crime boss in British tv.

― sarahell, Tuesday, October 8, 2019 3:09 PM (forty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that's jeor mormont from GOT

I've probably mentioned it before, but when Homeland destroyed Carries career at the end of season 1, they contrived a reason to have her back on mission in episode 1 of season 2. In The Wire McNulty isn't back with the detail until episode 8. It's that patience, and the willingness to get rid of characters when their stories ended, that meant it stayed so great for four seasons, and had a pretty good season after that.

for me Dominic West is such an awful actor I think The Wire would have been much better without him tbh

he is kind of bad and yet iconic to that show somehow

MVP* of Sopranos: Ulver poster in Meadow’s bedroom

Also Nicky Sobatka in The Wire: a Guided by Voices and Disturbed fan, apparently!

*Most Valuable Poster

I liked when McNulty went to visit his kids and you could tell they were growing up because they were listening to Dead Meadow now.

meadow's bedroom poster collection is very eclectic.

i seem to remember her having girls against boys and lisa loeb also.

aj wears marilyn manson, coal chamber and pantera t-shirts iirc

west is a great mcnulty he doesn't need to be any better than that

Best McNulty moment IMO is when the FBI is “profiling” McNulty’s fake serial killer and he’s just describing McNulty.

west is a great mcnulty he doesn't need to be any better than that

yes

I've probably mentioned it before, but when Homeland destroyed Carries career at the end of season 1, they contrived a reason to have her back on mission in episode 1 of season 2. In The Wire McNulty isn't back with the detail until episode 8. It's that patience, and the willingness to get rid of characters when their stories ended, that meant it stayed so great for four seasons, and had a pretty good season after that.

west is a great mcnulty he doesn't need to be any better than that

― too many cuckth thpoil the broth (darraghmac), Tuesday, October 8, 2019 11:28 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hear, hear. I've always found the criticism of West as McNulty ill-informed at best. West is a very limited actor, which is totally what the role of McNulty asks. West is always ok-ish, hardly ever great. He's lost a lot of the time. Which is the whole damn point.

another thing about the wire

four and half seasons of cop drama

cops in actual physical danger- like, twice?

if I hadn't watched every season of The Wire then my feeling that West is a hack actor and the McNulty character is an uninteresting composite of cop cliches might be a bad opinion but certainly not ill-informed.

He essentially plays a lost, easy to corrupt, snowy white cop in a world of crime he cannae hack. Let alone his personal life, which is a mess. It takes a mediocre actor like West to portray this character truthfully.

he plays a midlevel charisma hot jock who is also good at his job who is also interestingly willing to totally fuck things up for his peers and superiors

its not cliche imo

there's cliche aspects to the mcnulty character.

detective who is great at police work but terrible at the office politics, drinks too much, and with a personal life in disarray. it's been done a bunch.

the facet i like, which i feel we don't often see in tv/movies is the fact that he broadly doesn't give a shit about the crimes, and is concerned primarily with solving cases to gratify his ego.

It’s kinda both I think, the writers being crime fiction & cop show lifers seem to have some affection for him & indulge themselves with the whole charming antihero thing, but they also obv enjoy tearing it down & showing him (through the eyes of every single character he interacts with) as contemptible

another thing about the wire

four and half seasons of cop drama

cops in actual physical danger- like, twice?

― too many cuckth thpoil the broth (darraghmac), 8. oktober 2019 23:37 (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

A cop is killed in season 3, but it's by another cop. In general, the cops are untouchable, and when a suspect hits one of them in season 1, everybody beats him up, even the most sympathetic of them.

McNulty is sort of like a Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon character if that character were just the delusional self-fantasy of a cop with a more mundane existence.

Griggs nearly died in a shooting in season 1, but whatever. The show’s portrayal of police as primarily bureaucratic creatures and not as action heroes was an interesting choice, and one that illustrates the very different game that cops like McNulty and street guys like Bodie are playing.

griggs shooting is the noted exception

But I couldn't deal with all the sad sack men bitching all the time. It's not my genre.

This for me with the Sopranos. I just wanted those dudes to shut the fuck up, never made it past one season.

universal remote... put it down on docking station

West would be dece in any adaptation of the work of those novelists who wrote for The Wire. That's kind of his niche, his range. I like him as McNulty, don't need to see him stretching much beyond that.

Re: The Sopranos, it was great for what it was, but I'm pulling into the homestretch on The Rockford Files and take a guess which Chase show I'm more eager to revisit.

This discussion made me begin a rewatch of season five, and while it's good, I think the remaster really hurt the cinema verité aesthetic of the show. It was never as pronounced as in Homicide, The Shield or OZ, but it really had a lo-fi visual look, and now it's too glossy.

lol it's why i went out of my way to get the old dvd box

I have that too :) but couldn't find it. Also, some of the discs are worn from over-use. I think it's on HBO GO in un-remastered form as well, though? I was just curious trying to see the new version.

This discussion, and re-reading a bit of the articles written about The Wire back when it finished, makes me really nostalgic for how good TV used to be. Everyone talking about 'the difficulty' of a new show, grappling with what these shows said about the world. Now everything is bingable, and it's all gone so soon. Every new player wanted that prestige six-season show that would drive the conversation and subscription for years, but now four years, and it's all based on a known property. Netflix were the last ones to premiere the old way, with Orange is the New Black and BoJack Horseman, and when that last one is gone, it's really the end of a twenty year era.

i don't follow

personally i binged the wire at the time - i didn't watch it as it was broadcast and bought the boxset shortly after it came out, and finished it in an inordinately short timespan (i think i was unemployed at the time)

Yeah, I sympathize with those who long for a less prescriptively binge-y era (it certainly undermines episode-by-episode discussion) but my tendency has been to mostly binge since the time when season sets on DVD became a thing.

I watched The Wire when it was airing so it was nice that all the actors were unknown to me at the time.

Mr Robot could benefit from being released all at once because letting too much time elapse between episodes is like, wtf is going on?

What I appreciate about The Wire is how it really is largely a show that bears no resemblance (for the most part) to the current era of streaming binge TV and its often perfunctory and predictable narrative beats. I think The Sopranos does hit those beats a lot more but at the same time it handles them really well and being a pioneer it can’t be accused of mere copycatting. And the template that many shows currently follow is more lockstep, driven less by character than Sopranos was. Both shows also exhibited a lot of patience and intelligence, there was never a rush to a finish and never any kind of sense they played into giving the audiences what they wanted.

History has proven me right on this.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, October 7, 2019 5:15 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

curious what spurred this on btw... imw sopranos still occupies a large space in the culture while the wire is mostly forgotten, but not sure what i would point to empirically to verify that aside from the one show being so vastly superior to the other

imw sopranos still occupies a large space in the culture while the wire is mostly forgotten

idk what your "w" is, but whatever it is, is the opposite of my experience.

well, yr w is yr w i guess, part of why i asked the q. but iMw, no one cares how the wire ended. the wire didn't create prestige tv. the wire didn't have tony soprano. all the ppl upthread who said the wire is like a book, otm.

in my wankfest

Xp - guy who played Wallace on the Wire went on to play Oscar Grant and Black Panther. Most people in my world find that more relevant than whether the show invented prestige tv

He didn't play Black Panther, although he was in the film. He's also Creed.

he's the bad guy (who was right) in black panther

google trends tells me that in the years since both the shows were finished the wire is searched for consistently more than the sopranos! marone!

Lol oops

Also in terms of cultural relevance, Idris Alba is probably ahead of “tony soprano” atm