The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

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.

(or maybe worse-- omar's part is in the mechanism of a still larger system, the action of which is to pull "the game" as a whole ever deeper into atomized all-against-all predatory transactionalism-- cf "now all we got is bodies") xp yeah

(what's good about obama calling him his favorite character is he's the one who seems at first to transcend categories)

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

Bunny, plus Bunk and Lester (though he has that Season 5 problem), and the show in it's "the game keeps itself going and produces the next generation of players" -- shows Kima and Carver as that next gen of "good police"

you gon help, huh? you gonna look out for me? you gonna look out for me, sergeant carver? you mean it? you gonna look out for me? you promise? you got my back, huh?

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

yeah I would hope so! ... As it was, I didn't see The Wire until it had ended, so I think I watched Season 3 (where Prez shoots the black undercover) only a few months before the Oscar Grant shooting. ...

I don’t even remember that, I was thinking of a different prez thing (beating someone so badly that they go blind in one eye) - pls nobody tell me that was another character, I am rapidly losing my wire rememberer cred!

If a post-BLM wire was made in 2002, it would be the show about police brutality and there would be thinkpieces about how ahead of its time it was, imagining what it might've done if it got a second season to finish its first season.

Haha please imagine that I knew enough HTML that it was strike-through rather than italics.

xxp - same character

Sure but if we accept the premise that they would have focused more on police violence if it had been made after blm came to prominence then the fact that it almost wholly sidesteps the issue - which did exist in 2002 - is at least worth noting given that this is sold as an all-encompassing critique of the war on drugs. I’m not saying this makes it a bad show, it’s a great show, but it is worth noting

xp phew

It is a commentary on police brutality? Even the good cops actively participate (Kima in the raid in S1) or cover it up (Daniels w/ Prez) closing ranks in the thin blue line.

Yeah idk I just remember those instances feeling quite glib. But this is the thing I get cross about when others do it (depiction without overt criticism = endorsement) so I should stfu

I wonder how the choice to have the extremely violent cop in season 4 be black would play today. But I think an essential part of the story is that the political structure in Baltimore is black, so the story of what the police does is fundamentally different than in Chicago or Ferguson, for instance. The constant racism in The Wire mostly takes the form of neglect. Bunk and Lester points out it would never be accepted to have about 300 murders a year if the victims were white, for instance

the scene with Lester and Caroline discussing Prez's shooting and whether it was racially motivated was interesting -- it was a very brief one, but it was definitely an attempt at examining the conflict between being a cop and being black.

I wonder how the choice to have the extremely violent cop in season 4 be black would play today.

I think about that character a bit, actually, Officer Walker -- it's interesting in the context of one of the critiques of urban policing of communities of color in the US (and the racism and brutality) which is that the majority of cops are white and live in the suburbs. They don't live in or socialize in the cities they patrol. In Walker, we see someone who is "of the community" -- aside from being black, he's a regular at a nearby club, for example. ... He is also lazy and corrupt.

This is kinda brought up elsewhere in the show, where Colvin talks about being a beat cop, and actually walking the beat, getting to know the neigbhorhood and making relationships with actual people (part of this is when he's roasting Carver for being totally useless in his job)... also in Season 4, you see McNulty doing just that.

And there are regular scenes with McNulty getting food at the same places where the drug crews eat (which is what leads to his getting Bodie to become an informant) ... counter this to the funny scene at the multiplex, where Bodie and Poot and dates run into Herc, Carver, and Dozerman with dates, and the line, "Y'all go to the movies, too?"

In Walker, we see someone who is "of the community" -- aside from being black, he's a regular at a nearby club, for example. ... This is kinda brought up elsewhere in the show, where Colvin talks about being a beat cop, and actually walking the beat, getting to know the neigbhorhood and making relationships with actual people (part of this is when he's roasting Carver for being totally useless in his job)... also in Season 4, you see McNulty doing just that.

otm that these are linked, i said on one of the other wire threads that this character

troubles the s3 ideal (the final shot of mcnulty) of the compassionate plugged-in beat cop: evil is not always ignorant or confused or detached; sometimes being aware of and close to people's pain means exploiting it better

Bunk and Lester points out it would never be accepted to have about 300 murders a year if the victims were white, for instance

right and again: in s5 mcnulty renders these murders briefly unacceptable by recontextualizing them, turning their stories into accessories to the fictional pulp story of a white guy who is literally him

evil is not always ignorant or confused or detached; sometimes being aware of and close to people's pain means exploiting it better

I think it is less about evil, and more about the structural power of police. Like, upthread someone commented about what would The Wire look like if it was less pro-cop or more politically progressive, and I think it would focus more on the inherent power and violence of policing, and being a cop. (Also there would be fewer scenes from the cop POV ...) ... Like, Walker uses that power and violence to enrich himself personally (and to be a bully). Prez uses it badly twice, the second time when he kills the black officer. We kinda see him recognize that aspect of being a police, and how it is inherent in the job, and decide he is not comfortable having those things. ... Also in season 3, during McNulty's affair with the political consultant lady, we get the sense that being a cop was the "best" job McNulty could get based on his class position, education, etc. -- he wanted a job where he could be clever and "make a difference" (related to the "power" aspect but not sure whether it's the same thing?) and being a cop in Baltimore was the best he could do, not that he was attracted to the structural violence and repressive aspect of policing.

we get the sense that being a cop was the "best" job McNulty could get based on his class position, education

relationship of the cops (and dealers!) to the politicians is well-portrayed in a bunch of scenes/arcs of various lengths+tones-- comic-pathetic in this mcnulty affair; ironic in daniels' being mistaken by clay davis' bag man for just another employee of his wife/her class; tragic stringer's entire going-legit ambition-- where v "clever" characters have experiences of one kind or another suggesting they are instruments

and that's another aspect where race comes into it -- and I'm sure that the fact it was created by two white dudes writing about what they know plays into this -- we don't get a scene with Lester chilling with his gf, and her asking him, "So, Lester, how does a super smart, capable man like yourself end up being a cop?" ... more than McNulty, Lester's intelligence and skills could easily qualify him for another line of work, but this doesn't come up, whereas with McNulty, it comes up regularly.

he wanted a job where he could be clever

one imagines the disruptive making-a-difference antics of a theoretical bourgeois consultant version of mcnulty would be as mere a mask as ever for what we know to be his True Motives-- which yeah are fanciful and unrepresentative true motives to imagine as a cop's big moral failing.

I mean, in another life, Lester could have made bank as an appraiser -- with his fondness and diligence for research, attention to the financial details and paper trail, and his interest in dollhouse miniatures -- dude could have been an expert on like Antiques Roadshow or finding art stolen by Nazis etc