"The Wire" on HBO

i was at a convenience store buying a water over the weekend and frank sobotka was in front of me. his jeans looked brand new.

Hadn't noticed that same actor thing with Subotka(?) but am noticing it a lot across other series I'm watching.
Just saw a guy from Longmire stop Tony Soprano for speeding for instance.

&more topically since its the same source material as The Wire, the actress playing Carmela Soprano played a sergeant in Homicide.

she also played a prison guard in Oz

falco was an officer's wife on homicide, not a cop herself

(the officer was the one who was blinded when shot, who crosetti listened to miles davis with)

Yeah sorry think I got the 2 confused and I haven't actually seen Homicide yet to any degree. Just got hold of the first series.
I was just looking through IMDB for other things cast members had been in yesterday and thought I'd seen her elsewhere. Had been thinking that the cast was probably studded with people I knew from other roles or at least had seen in bit parts.

I think a number of Wire people also turned up in Good Wife. Think at least KIma has been on there and think I saw a couple of others but that show seems to almost constantly have people well known from elsewhere cameoing.

there is a thread for Wire Actors in other things fyi

Off the top of my head, Good Wife cameos include Herc, Dee, Bodie, Chris P., Burrell, Kima, Carver.

there is a thread for Wire Actors in other things fyi

worth its own thread? Cast looks interesting at least

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj5Nt-HoBhw

from the director of "Crash"

maybe he'll be good now that he's not a Scientologist

I like Oscar Isaac but that preview is v White Man Crusades for the Rights of Black People(tm) and Crash was awful and just ... yeah I wouldn't get your hopes up

haggis is generally awful

Longer trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLFfSbQ87JQ

R.I.P. Melvin Williams

Not sure I'd stretch to 'peace' for one of the main figures in bringing heroin to Baltimore.

David Simon would.

I'm in the third season again, and I'm always impressed whenever the Deacon is onscreen -- very effortless charisma.

rip Melv

Chi-Raq has Snoop Pearson as well as Clay Davis saying sheeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiitttttt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZZivDg3cpY

Snoop was in Da Sweet Blood as well.

idk why but i am re-watching s1, it is really good and on par w/ the better seasons imo

also daniels is one of the best characters on this show

I've probably said this before but s1 is so much more enjoyable when you know who everyone is and what's going on.

yeah i'm rewatching with a housemate right now, and seeing the beginnings of arcs knowing how they'll twist and resolve is really pleasurable

I just now realized that Dukie's last job on The Wire was literally RIDING A HORSE.

http://i.imgur.com/qUx0sBA.jpg

GOOD GRIEF.

Rewatched S1 last week, all the years and weight put on it as the Great Russian Novel Series blah blah blah I'd forgotten so many great little moments that hooked me the first time - Lester flirting with Chardine, "Lester, are we still police?" "Technically, I suppose" etc.

kinda cool seeing all three Sbotkas in the Prius car chase superbowl commercial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EluvJby2baA

http://fortune.com/2016/03/21/snowden-simon-twitter/

Ive decided to give this another go. Somehow, I've managed to accumulate all five series on DVD, so I guess I ought to... Slogged through the first series a few years ago and found it rather slow, humourless and hard to follow. About 4 episodes into S2, watching with subtitles because literally I wouldn't be able to understand anything about it if they weren't there. Helps me keep track of the various characters too, because there are a lot of them and many of them get referred to in the third person.

Just finished Season 1--a friend got it for me last Christmas, but I was immersed in Mad Men at the time, then I got sidetracked with a few other series. As with many of these shows, I felt like it took them five or six episodes to settle in. "Slow, humourless" definitely--especially didn't like the flashy and often cryptic cop-speak. (I'm a middle-aged white guy, and I found I understood the drug-dealer jargon much better than whatever the hell the cops were talking about half the time.) Happily, they cut down on all that as the season went on. I think the best characters are Avon, Stringer, and D'Angelo. I waver a bit with McNulty, find Daniels pretty one-note. Will continue on.

Daniels' one note goes on FORever. Mcnulty is annoying.

have no idea how someone could call it humorless

OTM, the humor is very bleak sometimes, but it's there. "Slow" is apropos, though.

Daniels loosens up by season 3.

Watched season one and half season two so far after starting it last week. It's hilarious and perfect.

I'm not as a rule a fuiud type but I may try a fuiud on for size for this.

Daniels loosens up by season 3.

He sure kept those glutes tight, tho.

Yeah, this show always seemed to have a lot of humour from the very first scene about Snotboogie. "This America, man".

They have 'jokes' I guess, but I still feel like I have to watch it with a furrowed brow. So far, I've regarded the Wire like I would regard an epic novel with difficult language and long arcane passages which you can't really skip for fear of missing detail. Altogether, I know I'll get something out of it but the effort and concentration I have to put into it only underweighs what I get out of it. Even with subtitles on, I often find myself wondering who or what the hell the characters are talking about. It's a clever show, but I dunno, maybe I need things to be a little less gritty and realistic for me to really get into them.

I watch with subtitles too--I do that with most things because of my hearing, but it especially helps here.

As I say, I'm liking if fine. A couple of things that have bothered me though:

1) How oblivious Avon's low-rise dealers seem to be to the fact they're being watched. I don't mean the wire, but rather the physical presence of cops on surrounding rooftops. At some point, you'd think someone would look up (I kept waiting for a Rear Window-like moment where a drug dealer looked up and made eye contact through the binoculars). And if not the dealers themselves, then someone from the neighborhood.

2) The idea, verbalized three or four times (most pointedly by Bunk), that McNulty destroys everyone around him. That theme is absolutely central to Mad Men and Don Draper. I don't find it that convincing here.

D'Angelo makes me think of a young Frank Thomas (baseball) at times.

difficult language

?? what's difficult about the language?

Is it just the slang + accent unfamiliar to you? I occasionally have issues understanding cop shows set in Glasgow / Northern England for that reason.

i love daniels

xps

to be fair, Mad Men is more of a fantastical thing where admonitions like "you destroy everyone around you" can be taken literally, where McNulty really does fuck with a lot of lives in very indirect ways. he gets a lot of cop work done, but he's a millstone around the necks of so many people along the way.

mcnulty is easily one of my least favorite parts of this show and a big part of that is how shitty dominic west's baltimore accent is

He is a shit actor and his character is a combination of stale cliches, not a very good combination imo

2) The idea, verbalized three or four times (most pointedly by Bunk), that McNulty destroys everyone around him. That theme is absolutely central to Mad Men and Don Draper. I don't find it that convincing here.

i don't know, i think mh is otm here. The Wire is so much more of an ensemble show, and it doesn't necessarily need a protagonist who's an operatic vortex of destruction, complete with flashbacks to his overly complicated origin story.

Basically, McNulty has a self-destructive streak and make the lives of people around him harder in quotidian but tangible ways. That works a lot more for the wire. tbh i never thought "you destroy everything you touch!" was ever a central theme anyway.

that was also the theme of the sopranos, iirc, and i didn't see breaking bad but it looks p suspicious on this front. one of the cool things about the wire is that it's the premium cable show where that is not the theme.

also notable that don and tony are the majority recipients of their shows' focus, year in, year out; mcnulty is a secondary character. (even in s1 he's no more a protagonist than D is.)