"The Wire" on HBO

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.)

the real destroyer anyway is herc, in ways that are worse than anything mcnulty does.

definitely

the expression on herc's face when levy rebukes him for not buying his ex-colleagues enough drinks

I'm laughing at the idea that Don Draper is a more realistic and credible character than McNulty.

apart from in sex scenes ...

"Can I get some scrapple with that?"
"You can get anything you want."

the moment i saw this thread in sna i scrolled up wondering where shakes would show up grumbling about something and i was not disappointed

It's not necessarily that I find Don Draper more realistic--Mad Men's definitely the more highly stylized show--it's that I find the idea of him destroying the people around him a more credible organizing principle (or whatever) than with McNulty. Both shows make that idea explicit; I just think it works better in Mad Men.

I like the show! I think some of you are maybe discussing things that happen beyond season 1--I haven't started season 2 yet.

there's humor everyfuckingwhere in this show, it's just not along the lines of roger sterling quips and oyster puke (which are quite fun in their own way)

fat face rick's adminonition of stringer bell for being, ah, /hard to find/ in s3 ep. 10 is burned into my brain forever and that's one of the more obscure lines

if these shows were "realistic" they would be really boring

sloth otm the wire is hilarious there are so many great moments & lines

I was thinking there are variations on that with a lot of shows--Ned in Six Feet Under, Larry Sanders, and while I haven't yet started on The Sopranos, I assumed that would be true of Tony Soprano too.

perhaps the humour doesn't come across in subtitled form

I find the idea of him destroying the people around him a more credible organizing principle (or whatever) than with McNulty

but the thing is, as people have pointed out upthread, it really isn't the organizing principle of the show.

if these shows were "realistic" they would be really boring

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, April 13, 2016 11:11 AM (14 minutes ago)

I shudder to think at how even more boring Mad Men would be if it were realistic!

McNulty's "I know I can deal with this situation" nature is pretty well spelled out when he keeps drunkenly driving his car around the corner to hit the bridge

McNulty isn't that central

The protestations of his being an asshole so far aren't much more than half hearted work bitchings

If you speak English and watch this with subtitles then you prob are going to not enjoy it anyway

no idea what that's supposed to mean. i'm sure the show is still perfectly good with subtitles.

Bunk's reaction when he gets a copy of the Greek guy's texts - one of the biggest laughs I had watching the series.

can't begin to calculate the mileage i've got out of Stringer's big zing from the first meeting of the New Day Co-Op

can u remind me or link to vid roger

I speak English, put the English subtitles on, watch and listen, all at the same time. Sometimes, just for an extra challenge, I wave my right hand in the air.

I thought McNulty's best dramatic scene in the first season was visiting Kima in the hospital.

"is you taking notes on a criminal fuckin conspiracy?" is probably too specific to be what roger's been getting mileage out of (tho i don't know his life) but i wanted to post it anyway