"The Wire" on HBO

so you're going to be that kind of troll

That's Bird in the interrogation room midway through S1

This came up on David Simon's Twitter the other day. I don't know how to embed a Twitter thread, but here's the exchange:

Simon: Even among the hardest street police I knew, the ones who tell you privately that if you fight a cop, or run from a cop or cuss a cop, they’ll get licks in — it’s over when a man is in handcuffs. The cops who killed George Floyd are cowards.

A commenter asks: In the S1 scene where Kima, Landsman, and Daniels work over Bird in the interrogation room, the last shot we see of Bird he’s cuffed to the table. Did they uncuff him? Because it wasn’t explicitly shown. Not trying to play ‘Gotcha’, just genuinely curious.

Simon: My assumption was that his "finally" polite request that they at least uncuff him before they whip his ass was honored. I think Kima would do that.

This strikes me as some serious J.K. Rowling shit. At that point in the show you don't know that much about Kima or any of the cops except McNulty, but I thought part of the show's point was that it doesn't matter who the cops are as individuals bc they act as a gang. Why is he trying to walk that back, now of all times?

the wire is sophisticated copaganda, it was literally co written by a cop. its creator sat at his computer and scolded black people for not protesting police murder with enough civility for his liking. his show is a masterpiece of 00s centre leftism. that's an insult and a compliment. it's a good show compromised by a horrible worldview. he is insufferable as a human being

so you're going to be that kind of troll

the kind of troll who thinks we shouldn't take advice from men who assault women? sure

sounds like you've got everything sorted!!!! congrats

so now this is a bad show?

afraid so, pack it in, lads

I wish someone would tell D Simon to pack it in years ago, notwithstanding how overrated this septic pile of garbage is!

"masterpiece of 00s centre leftism" otm

I actually quite like the wire lol

I just find all tv writing with the *touch* of Simon absolutely unpalatable, and I had burgeoning hatred of The Wire at the the time and had my brother constantly proselytising it to me and that absolute king of wankers Brooker doing it in the Graun every week. Couldn't force myself to watch it these days.

The Wire is over, everyone should jump on the Treme bandwagon

well if you do like torturing yourself go ahead!

the John Goldman character in Treme is like some kind of apotheosis of Simonism

what non-Simon shows do you think have that touch?

the Steve Zahn character in Treme is the American Colin Hunt, but played deadly seriously.

Treme is the least-cool show ever. The Goodman character, Steve Earle, Steve Zahn, occasional nods to hip things a dad hears about from their kids like Goatwhore.

I respect it.

goodman ffs autocorrect

No show has been more ‘Steve’ - would you be surprised to find out Goodman’s character name is Steve?

I just find all tv writing with the *touch* of Simon absolutely unpalatable, and I had burgeoning hatred of The Wire at the the time and had my brother constantly proselytising it to me and that absolute king of wankers Brooker doing it in the Graun every week. Couldn't force myself to watch it these days.

How do you feel about Homicide, Life on the Street? I loved it but thought it went downhill when Simon started actually writing for it in Season 5.

lol come on that isn't why Homicide starts to suck

Maude: “It’s really smart. It’s about New Orleans and jazz and Hurricane Katrina and drugs and John Goodman.” Todd: “Sounds exciting.” Maude: “It’s not!”

Homicide was supposedly radical or whatever for the time but it just seems like a cop show to me

It started to suck for other reasons too, but Simon trying to fit the first season of the Wire into Homicide's format and making the whole season about Lewis and Kellerman and Luther Mahoney really didn't help.

I always get Homicide mixed up with Hill Street Blues for some reason.

God only knows what this is supposed to mean. You quoted my reference to Bubbles... who no one else has referenced.

You said that Bubbles had been beaten up for no reason after Kima was shot - the reason is right there in the sentence, he implicated himself and one of the policemen, on edge after Kima was shot, laid into him. I'm not saying it's a good reason, but it's not for no reason.

But given your desire to insert yourself: "the beatdown given to Kima's shooter (Wee-Bey) is presented as outside of the ordinary run of things" is 100% incorrect.

Fair point - it was Bird, earlier in the season, I must have conflated it with Bubbles.

Bubbles didn't implicate himself - he called his friend Kima and got beaten for being black in Baltimore.

wait I thought he just got robbed for his t-shirt money. it's been a minute

you are getting seasons 1 and 4 confused

a lot of the police brutality is at least shown negatively - the stuff that bugged me was when Herc and Carver would beat on Bodie and it would be portrayed as comedy

like this scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs-gO1ssqzE

simple human reaction? if you're trying to extract information it's probably best to get real, take the cuffs off, get close, but don't hit or harm

Prez partially blinds a child. Later he shoots a fellow cop quite possibly because he's black.

The Shield does do a good job communicating what ulysses said on another thread: the police are indistinguishable from a gang. But it's also sensationalist trash (not nec a criticism)

I've never rewatched it, but iirc the cops in Treme are depicted far more negatively

― dip to dup (rob), Saturday, June 13, 2020 2:16 PM bookmarkflaglink

why does a show have to make some kind of an over the top depiction of characters as "evil"? are we doing taht thing where we conflate depiction with endorsement again?

besides, there's no sane person who would read this show as an endorsement of the cops. often the police are seen intentionally neglecting to take action that would better their communities, and few of them are governed by any altruism, usually just advance their own careers. the suits up top are routinely seen gaming the crime statistics and sending people out on the street to arrest people for low-level offenses to make it appear they are actually doing something.

the show makes being a cop look like the worst bureaucracy on the planet, just another political organization that doesn't actually do the thing it's intended to do, suits mostly interested in getting re-elected and rewarding loyalists. they sabotage each other's investigations by sending dead weight from their teams to special projects. Freeman falsifies evidence to get Marlo's warrant, they commit fraud to get a wiretap, everybody covers for each other so people like Presbo don't get terminated or see a cell.

if the message is "better things aren't possible", it's because Baltimore police is a cesspool of corruption

At the end of the day the show just likes its cops and their work too much, despite the valid points it scores in other respects

don't agree w/ that at all.

but, I mean, the show is literally about policing in Baltimore, so...it has to be focused on their work. but it shows that their work doesn't bring about any real improvement. they arrest Avon and get the "king" collar, but leave the criminal infrastructure largely undamaged, so that creates a power vacuum that allows Marlo Stanfield to take over, resulting in much more bloodshed, including that of civilians who merely piss Marlo off. they achieve nothing!

The show drips with personal affection for most of the cops. It is amused by them and frequently admires them as people. If you can't detect well :shrug:

yeah i think it's easy for cop show snobs to think they're seeing through something when they identify the cops and their work as the focus or the unduly privileged element. one of the grand yet unexplored themes of most american ('this america, man') tv drama of the few decades preceding the wire was work, and by following a long case built by daniels' squad the wire is only anatomizing long-familiar themes, slowing them down more than would be usual on an episodic, arcless network drama. but all kinds of pre-prestige dramas do turn essentially on work in some way—it's one of the ongoing elements of their narratives that doesn't even have to be written into very discernible dramatic arcs, because it's experienced by the characters and understood by the viewers via the one-week-after-another structure. medical dramas, law dramas, same deal generally. you could say that the show likes its drug dealers and their work too much, but i think it makes more sense to see the depiction of drug dealing as work as something that does everything to reframe the cop-work elements.

The show drips with personal affection for most of the cops. It is amused by them and frequently admires them as people. If you can't detect well :shrug:

Apparently you can't tell that it treats the criminal characters - Avon, Stringer, Omar, the gang on the couch, the human traffickers in season 2, etc, etc - with just as much affection and admiration as the police.

I feel like the show pretty specifically plays favorites / has more affection for some of those forms of work vs others

yeah unfortunately/fortunately, the 'did he have hands? did he have a face?' guy is funny

also "the show has sympathy for cops AND criminals equally!" is....sorta the problem lol

xxxxpost so now you're conflating the concept of "good characters" with "good people". even sons of bitches can be entertaining, either in real life, or the small or big screen. you can find something or someone fascinating without lionizing them. so, naw...I reject your thesis.

is this another one of those 21st century woke things where any character that is not portrayed as a mustache-twirling baddie is immediately seen as "liked" by its writers?

whoa whoa simon walk that back, you can't harp on its treatment of cops and then bat away the fact that everything you were complaining about applies to the criminals too. what's 'the problem' supposed to be then? not dour and documentarian enough?

xp yes neanderthal i think that is a big part of it, the zeitgeist viewer frame of mind is only capable of praising unjustly suffering characters with a good conscience, any other character ends up being at fault for having misled naive audiences into having wrong attitudes or for not having done more to change their attitudes

there are more ppl than cops and criminals in the show. it may TRY to view cops, criminals, teachers, politicians and the press with a similarly detached / humanistic / journalistic POV but it fails at it. and it's a dumb goal anyway!

it is a v good entertainment but for me its social content only works at the macro level in showing cascading system failure

i think its rich to characterize this show as dripping with personal affection for most of the cops. i think the show maybe likes bunny colvin and lester freamon a lot, daniels and kima too. everyone else is at least kind of a piece of shit (plus there's that already-remarked-upon-itt instance of kima participating in police brutality)

i mean i also get it, the show foregrounds them and has a deep respect for detective work in the way it unfolds... but idk even this gets complicated and undone by the later seasons. it's not "better things aren't possible," it's "all these systems that govern our lives are broken." it doesn't offer a solution bc it's documenting something, which imo is still a valuable thing for art to do

all that echoing "real PO-lice work" dialogue in the first season can i guess seem pretty pro-cop

I dunno I think it works splendidly as an entertainment but fails quite badly as a "document"

Treme kinda reversed this balance for me, varied wildly as an entertainment but was compelling throughout as a text about a time and place