The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

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

Elba

not super familiar w google trends but i think maybe you are comparing the term 'sopranos' to the term 'wire'? bc when i use the thing that sets it to 'TV Series The Sopranos' vs 'TV Series The Wire' it's sopranos by a mile, US + worldwide.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0kfv9,%2Fm%2F03d16q3

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=sopranos,wire

but i dunno, the actor who played groundbreaking character 'wallace' was also in a comic book superhero movie so i stand corrected

Sopranos fandom waayyy more prevalent than Wire fandom, at least in my world.

The actors from the Wire are obviously more popular... NOW.... but between the two shows, more people I know recognize Paulie Walnuts more than they do Snoop or Chris or fuck, even Bodie.

Not saying it's right, but it is what it is.

all due respect xp

better to compare side projects by supporting cast members, maybe book sales of Steve Schirripa's books A Goomba's Guide to Life, The Goomba's Book of Love, and The Goomba Diet: Large and Loving It, vs Snoop's memoir.

Weird, I did search for "the x" TV show or thereabouts but I see different results now. Oh well. Google trends proves Sopranos is better luck thread

xp pplains - was he the guy with the bouffy hair or the goofy face/annoying voice?

Yeah, that guy!

the one from the car commercial or the other one?

or was it insurance? i don't remember

anyway, a lot of the Sopranos characters/actors were distinctive looking, whereas most of the Wire characters/actors weren't

^^ in terms of casting intent -- like if The Wire producers were to have given such distinctive hair styles and outfits to the characters, they would be more "identifiable" by the average viewer of the show years later

I mean, popularity ≠ quality. You know this.

I could make an argument for which show is better depending upon which way the wind was blowing that day. But The Sopranos are more ingrained into The Fabric of American Popular Culture than The Wire.

You may want it to be one way, but it's the other way.

more people I know recognize Paulie Walnuts more than they do Snoop or Chris or fuck, even Bodie.

BNBG?

i only saw one episode of sopranos and had no interest in ever seeing it again

― ketchup dood (harbl), Saturday, November 15, 2008 9:19 AM (ten years ago)

lol @ me ELEVEN years ago. must have been 5 years later i watched all of sopranos and loved it and now in the middle of a very slow re-watch on amazon prime. sopranos is better than the wire.

No surprise that the Sopranos is more popular in general - it's an easier sell, a family drama take on the mobster tradition.
The Wire is in the cop tradition but the cops aren't heroes, the not-cops are mostly a new cast every season and largely a group not particularly understood by or sympathetic to the average American.

Of my friends that don't like The Wire, their dislike is generally for one of two reasons:

1. too much focus on and sympathy for cops -- which I won't argue
2. not enough character development or focus on characters as people with agency; characters serve the plot -- which I respect, but consider a matter of personal taste preference, and is more about "why you watch tv/movies" and "what do you look for in a show" etc.

my 73 year old parents started watching it at one point because they had heard good things about it and they worked in Baltimore for a year in the 60s, but they gave up because there were too many characters, plus it was too violent and way too much swearing