"The Wire" on HBO

If you don't think the waits version is the best, you are crazy and don't even like to fart

Anyway I liked the conceit of changing the song each season, went well with the structure of the show.

watching thru this again w/ a friend who's never seen it. we're in s2 and it's kind of a slog; none of the people she's interested in are given enough focus and she doesn't really like the sobotkas & greeks or the dead women plotline. we just got thru the ep where d'angelo gets killed in prison. the next day she texted me saying "I'm still so sad about D'angelo!" and she was already bummed about Wallace in s1. i tried to hint vaguely that there's more coming but it's not a death-y show like Sopranos was. her response: "If Stringer dies I'm out!"

it took a little while for s2 to grow on me, i wasn't happy about shifting focus from s1 either

ime by the time stringer dies you're too far in to be out

Yeah, I think you can get away with lying to her.

I was too far in to be out when Frank gets whacked. I love S02.

s2 is the best imo

my parents just finished watching the wire after me badgering them for years to give it a try. season two was a real sticking point for them too and it reminded me just how bold s2 is - sidelining characters the audience had only just gotten to know, introducing a whole new supporting cast, shifting the entire focus of the show, even changing the title music. it's almost like a challenge to the audience to stick with it.

actually, there aren't really supporting characters in this show, are there? i haven't watched the show since s5 finished airing, and i've only watched it through once, and i was amazed when talking to my parents about it that i could remember basically every character's name, motivations, and interactions with others in detail. there are very few other shows where that's the case.

The Wire is really fucking boring.

only seen s1 though.

http://img.pandawhale.com/post-30325-clay-Davis-cigar-gif-The-Wire-3Eja.gif

I think season 2 might be the most important, in a way. It's through the patient groundwork done in that season, that the rest of the show can be as ambitious as it can. Season 1 breaks down all it builds up, with the Major Crimes unit shut down, and all the people involved scattered to the wind. Some sort of contrivance would be needed to get everyone back into the story again, and season 2 does that masterfully in the end, but it takes a hell of a lot of time. Then season 3 and 4 can hit the ground running, allowing for subplots like Carcetti, Cutty, Colvin and Tilghman Middle School, to be introduced without people thinking of how it impacts the main story. Which they often don't really do.

The Wire is really fucking boring.

― this is just a saginaw (dog latin), Tuesday, 13 January 2015 10:38 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Someone's getting a bit too carried away with this 'freedom of speech' lark

good reaction gif deploy

fwiw I feel like I'm the only wire fan who didn't much like frank sobotka as a character. Something a little too tropey working class hero about him. But w/e, it wasn't a huge complaint. 2 isn't my favorite season but 5 is the only one I really found disappointing.

yea i wasn't hugely pulled to sobotka either

season 2 is the one everybody suffers through. always surprised to find people on the internet who actually didn't hate it

ziggy is the most annoying character on the show no contest

ziggy is sad

i love season 2 v much

it's why we get up in the morning

Season 2 doesn't have the elegant sweep of 3 and 4, which are masterpieces of multi-strand storytelling. 2 is more a new story, which can't quite leave the old Barksdale-people behind. That said, it's obviously a very very good season, better than almost everything done on tv ever. I haven't rewatched 5 ever, but I think I'll continue once I'm done with 4. Will start episode 10 right now.

It was definitely crucial to David Simon's sort of "theory of everything" of Baltimore/post-industrial urban america. It wouldn't be the series it is without Season 2.

season 2 is great. i feel like the greek's pal vondas keeps drinking increasingly tiny cups of espresso throughout the season.

I think my main issue with this show - for all of the things it admirably attempts - is that I never felt any real emotional investment in any of the characters. There are SO MANY, and the vast majority of them are not allowed enough time or opportunities to provide a lot of depth or shade or contradiction; vast swathes of the cast are one-dimensional. This is exacerbated by the way the stories are framed, this really tightly laid out, mechanistic method of storytelling - everybody is a piece on a board, a cog in a vast machine that must move from point A to point B for the narrative to maintain momentum. I am always highly conscious of how methodical everything is, the way the show is straining to get all its puzzle pieces aligned just so so that the viewer properly understands the scope of the inescapable trap, the overwhelming scale and force of the institutions that all the characters are enmeshed in. There are ridiculous caricatures - Ziggy, Omar, Marlo, McNulty, Brother Mouzon, that weaselly guy that runs for mayor - that I can't take seriously for a second, surrounded by all of these other essentially tragic figures who you just know are going to get fucked no matter what they do or how righteous their motivations are. Unlike the Sopranos or Mad Men, most of these characters don't show much more depth than the chess pieces they're treated as - they simply aren't on-screen enough, or given the opportunity to display a wider range of who they are. Overall it leaves me cold. I don't find any of the characters as fascinating as Tony or Janice or Peggy or Pete etc.

In that sense I think the didacticism of the show undermines its effectiveness as drama

idk i felt like every season putting another antagonist in front of tony and making him too dumb to figure out how to deal with it felt more programmatic than the procedural nature of the wire

I agree that it's not the most character-driven show, but there were still characters I thought showed a lot of emotional depth, e.g. D'Angelo Barksdale. I don't see it as a flaw of the show, just a different kind of show.

There are ridiculous caricatures - Ziggy, Omar, Marlo, McNulty, Brother Mouzon, that weaselly guy that runs for mayor

His name is McNutty.

One thing I did find weird about the Wire was the sex scenes -- pretty much every one of them is cold, sudden, and aggressive in about the same way, except I vaguely remember a really bad late-nite-movie style scene maybe with daniels and rhonda?

the sex scenes in the wire are almost uniformly terrible w/ the exception of a few that are played for black comedy (such as mcnulty showing his badge to the cops who watch him plowing a woman he picks up at the bar and their subsequent departure from the scene). mostly bc they're just awkwardly filmed. but, hardly enough of a prob to detract from its superlative qualities in other areas.

xp yeah that scene's at the end of season 3, its pretty unintentionally hilarious

yeah it's a minor thing except that it just seemed like there was an overall lack of a sense of any good male-female intimate relationships overhanging the whole show, like maybe a little bit of a bitterness about women and/or marriage/dating that pervades it. McNulty's divorce and bitchy ex, Daniels' divorce, the strongest female characters being "more like men," etc. I wouldn't go so far as to say misogyny, but probably bitterness.

sex scenes in the Wire were all gratuitous nonsense, serving no purpose to the narrative. which was totally not the case with the Sopranos (sorry to keep bringing it up but those poll results make me so mad)

as to the character thing...idk. for every somewhat caricatured or one-dimensional character (ziggy, the newspaper bosses, arguably marlo) you have prez, or the kids in seasons 4-5, or how grounded michael k. williams makes omar through his acting despite the deliberately outsized nature of the character, or daniels, or carver, or bunny colvin, the aforementioned d'angelo, bodie, etc. etc.

also if you really wanted to you could make "one dimensional" arguments about multiple sopranos and mad men characters.

there is def an undertone of misogyny through the Wire imo, the female characters are all either underwritten or downright horrible

xp

mcnulty's ending on the show is happier than i remembered, like off the force and off the drink and back home with amy ryan. seems like a pretty good way to end up.

you could make "one dimensional" arguments about multiple sopranos and mad men characters.

you could, but there are *fewer* of them, as opposed to like 3 dozen in the Wire

you can say that abt virtually any cable show, even the sopranos quite frankly. i wouldn't say it about either show. though i think the best of the major cable shows w/r/t female character is definitely mad men.

misogyny, that is.

mcnulty's problems are based on david simon's marriage self-destruction (pre laura lippman), so there's def bitterness there. but i think about marriage/romance on a whole rather than women. and the way the beadie/mcnulty relationship works out in the end (or daniels/pearlman) seems to indicate the possibility that individual people can figure their shit out even if the overarching things they're part of are kinda fucked, like everything else in the show.

xxp mad men def has the shows it's so frequently associated with lapped in terms of great women.

i just rewatched season 4 and the first few episodes of season 5, and unpopular opinion alert: season 5 is, newspaper editor caricatures aside, really fuckin good.

Season 2 is great because so much huge stuff is set in motion (and ultimately hindered) by Maj. Valchek's personal feud with Frank Sobotka. Feels like real life, sadly.

If you think of it as five "acts" it kind of makes sense for the second act to not be the most exciting of them, yet have lots of necessary setup in it.

you could make "one dimensional" arguments about multiple sopranos and mad men characters.

you could, but there are *fewer* of them, as opposed to like 3 dozen in the Wire

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, January 13, 2015 10:33 AM (7 minutes ago)

This is ridiculous. So many 1d characters in sopranos and mad men!

i just rewatched season 4 and the first few episodes of season 5, and unpopular opinion alert: season 5 is, newspaper editor caricatures aside, really fuckin good.

i remember watching the first few episodes of season 5 and thinking "this is good! why all the hate?" but by season's end it just gets really bad. the serial killer plot and the absolutely dead character of templeton were just awful

also i think i mentioned it somewhere else itt but one of the reasons s2 bothers me is the corny "russian gangster" aspect of the greek and his organization -- even though they aren't russian it just has that totally cliched vibe of unlikeable eastern european criminals as antagonists