The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

Like Omar is no less realistic, believable, or convincing than 99% of Sopranos characters tbh ... and I don't dislike the Sopranos, and I don't hate Pulp Fiction or everything Tarantino -- maybe your point is that in the context of the Wire, a character like Omar doesn't fit?

Gandolfini was what maybe 36 when the show started?

These boomers aged like (fill in the blank).

Season 1 Don Draper being 33-34 is another one in that realm.

Yeah I just finished the first season of MM on my first rewatch since it aired. He looked age appropriate.

He seemed mid-40s to me but that might be the suits and adultery.

These boomers aged like (fill in the blank).

― Yerac, Friday, October 11, 2019 7:47 PM (eight minutes ago)

idk, I watch Riverdale, and it's like ...Luke Perry, Molly Ringwald, Skeet Ulrich ... oh damn, yeah ... my generation is aging, I'm aging.

Jon Hamm is actually 48 now ... and a Pisces ... (sigh, so dreamy)

Jon Hamm and Christina Hendricks are tall glasses of whole milk in the first season of MM.

they are both very attractive people -- then and now

I am a little surprised that anyone on ILX in 2019 is wondering what edge the show about middle-class middle-age white dudes who shoot people might have in the popular imagination.

There were a few years where The Wire - and Breaking Bad - were definitely the two shows I saw most chatter about. People discovering The Wire and being blown away, other people not 'getting it' and feeling ashamed that they were too simple to enjoy this big complex work of art. But it's changed back again. Don't know why. I might guess that with the glut of new shows, nobody is having time rediscovering old work.

There's a police violence story in season five which plays a lot different now. A white cop straight up assaulting a black bystander. And it's played as a dillema what is supposed to happen to him, with Carver in the end doing the right thing.

I think if it were made even a few years later it would have dealt with police brutality very differently/at all, as opposed to the few very casual instances of “good” cops beating the shit out of unarmed suspects and the prez thing which is more about his angst & redemption

Sarahell is otm that it’s fundamentally pro-cop, or at least: most of us I think would agree that the main problem with the police is not political systems rendering them ineffectual

Man, I'd forgotten Carver's first impulse is to cover the story up. It's only because Colicchio refuses to play along that he writes him up.

tbf tho carv is pretty explicitly presented as a bad cop right? It’s been so long since I watched any of it but I seem to recall he says as much himself

No, Carv ends up as the good guy, definitely. In season five, he is the one person who reforms.

Oh wait I was thinking of the other dumbass in the double act

Herc? Yeah, he is the bad one :)

A Baltimore PD where no white racist cops shoot/kill any black people, truly it is a mystery

Well any innocent black people, i guess i should say

the David Simon vision of social decay is so full of shit - it's no wonder the show get's presidential endorsements.

sorry, probs getting a bit carried away after a few beers - and The Sopranos is dodgy as fuck with politics tbf

Sopranos doesn't wear its bad politics on its sleeve though.

The David Simon vision of social decay is explicitly anti-capitalist and based on decades of journalistic work...

Trying to frame Sopranos as more politically progressive than The Wire is seriously a massive challop

I'm not doing that you tin-eared fucking jerkoff!

Calz explicitly didnt do that

Lol xps

and I think Shakey makes a good point about its cop show bullshit portrayal of cops who aren't regular perpetrators of deadly force against law abiding black people as well as crims.

when i watch the wire i do not feel any particular sympathy or empathy toward the cops or think they are good people regardless of the show's pro-cop (i guess) framing and i think the show still works. mcnulty is a self-serving narcissist which is the very thing that causes him to give a shit, it's a compelling, frustrating character who i'm also glad is absent for entire seasons because he also has the tendency to be as irritating to watch as his colleagues think he is (cf. season five)

i think the most flattering portrayal of a cop in the wire is bunny colvin? that guy does not feel like he exists in reality but i love him as a character. it's been about ten years since i watched season three though

imo its cop show bullshit portrayal of cops is also where the wire is rooted in genre and not journalism, and i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing

I was reacting to pplains, stop posting while drinking

stop posting

meant to put a wink to make it less aggressive sounding, soz!

How did I say The Sopranos was more politically progressive than The Wire?

Sopranos were populated by racist thugs who murdered innocent people. But when Prez shoots a black cop or when the other cops throw people into their paddywagon and hit a few extra bumps on the way back to the station, it's just boys will be boys.

what does "politically progressive" mean in fiction?

both shows are depicting things that happen in the world

That's not at all how the Prez situation is depicted

It is a good question what 'politically progressive' means in fiction, but The Wire focused on systemic analysis, it was explicitly anti-capitalist, constantly focused on the underclass of society, was very very clear about racism playing a massive role in what went on. I really don't get how you could at all try and formulate an idea of what a politically progressive tv show should be, without The Wire being a prime example. And while reality has shown that cops are much more horrible than they are on the show, The Wire is still on of the tv-shows ever that is most critical of the police force as an institution. Even on The Shield it's just a few bad apples, most of the other cops are good.

yeah but who cares

how do you feel abt Bad Lieutenant?

I find late period Herzog overrated in general

Abel Ferrara

without The Sopranos there would not have been Jersey Shore.

why are there 278 (279 i guess) new posts on this thread, aside from the possibility that we're all just old and living in the past

cos all the new longform drama US tv series produced since are bare pez!

And while reality has shown that cops are much more horrible than they are on the show, The Wire is still on of the tv-shows ever that is most critical of the police force as an institution. Even on The Shield it's just a few bad apples, most of the other cops are good.

fred otm-- there's a weird sense in which people asking the wire to be "more critical" of the police are actually just demanding it show us a few more bad apples-- the whole point of the wire's politics is precisely that it doesn't matter how good the apples are-- the problem is the barrel

at the same time i still think the wire as bloodless sociology thesis populated by clockwork social-category delegates is way overstated in both criticism and praise-- it is a show with characters who shape and are shaped by plot, pretty much how this stuff usually works, and it isn't even always materialist: mcnulty, stringer, d'angelo, daniels, many others act as much from character as they do from external pressure. and the two-way distortion action between character and environment-- the spooky way everyone is simultaneously a monad and a collection of vectors, which is prob the show's big theme-- is hardly a low-level subject for drama: it's attic.

brad's point about genre is good too since the premise of the show is the slow+deliberate contextualization of a kernel of genre cliche, making it signify in unrecognizable ways without changing its essence-- maybe kind of a mirror of the sopranos' premise of "what if american gangster media underwent psychoanalysis".

i watch the wire often (my own rips from the 4:3 dvds) but yeah i can't fucking believe i'm still posting about it, sigh

Good post thank you

lol

Wire-as-lecture neglects how frequently extremely funny and horrifying and tense and dramatic the show is, and it ways that flow naturally from character and situation. The genre of the show, the fiction of it, also necessitates larger than life characters, of which there are many beyond uh omar little.

omar really is an outlier but of course he is: he is the character who is unbeholden. in lieu of apparent allegiance to any of the show's lineup of corrupt institutions we're at first we're meant to believe in his Code, the god it was necessary for him to create-- this is the outside-the-law-and-honest version of the character people seem to remember whether they're calling him awesome or ridiculous-- but by the time bunk dresses him down it's pretty clear he is as much a cog in the larger system (the game) as the cops or soldiers are in its constituent subsystems. when we understand this, the cartoonishness of his mythic-ronin vibe pays off in irony.

He attempts to mythologize himself and create some kind of persona that creates fear and in the end participating in the game has the same result for him as it did for others no matter how he played it.