"The Wire" on HBO

it's not like he's Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

do the shakey leg

guys, the thing is: it's the other way

He is so superhuman that he is SPOILER murdered by a small child in a convenience store.

I agree w/ shakey

uh oh i'm having a fantasy (about a black, gay, robin hood-type near-superhuman stickup man)

I said near-superhuman. His ability to routinely surprise/get the drop on people without getting shot is pretty miraculous

i believe the following people have existed in the criminal drug trade: dudes who are "prison" gay on the outside, dudes whose place in the drug ecosystem is to live via stickup and robbing "weak" corners, dudes who try to keep the violence internal to the trade, dudes who are charming and funny, dudes who have survived longer than usual.

whether these have all been the same person, well, who knows.

he spends a lot of time surveying, researching his targets - it isn't like he has this consistent stream of "lucky encounters"

global warming's effects on the delicate drug ecosystem has definitely reduced the number of people with all of those characteristics

omar is based on al shipley fyi

max, al shipley isnt gay!!

imagine a polar bear, swimming towards an ice floe, that will remain out of reach, forever

uh oh i'm hearing a zing

I don't think it had anything to do with believability, but I did share Shakey's irritation with Omar's gaiety at first - just cause it seemed a bit showy and almost pandering to a certain segment of the audience, like "you're gonna love this guy! he's like robin hood and - get this - he's GAY!".

But that faded pretty quickly for me. Maybe I bought into exactly what I criticized, but I thought it was a really smart and daring move for The Wire to create a thug character that macho dudes would kinda idolize, but make him gay. Way smarter than what the The Sopranos did with their gay gangster.

Plus, you can't deny he was a super fun character - lots of great action, one-liners, comic relief and, as noted, awesome superhero skills.

I forget what show it was, but the main character started putting an ikea bed together and it cut to the character passed out drunk.

i believe the following people have existed in the criminal drug trade: dudes who are "prison" gay on the outside, dudes whose place in the drug ecosystem is to live via stickup and robbing "weak" corners, dudes who try to keep the violence internal to the trade, dudes who are charming and funny, dudes who have survived longer than usual.

whether these have all been the same person, well, who knows.

^^^all true. I don't think he's a bad character per se - he's always entertaining to watch. But it seems clear to me that his role within the show was to allow some wish-fulfillment for the audience. You know, here's a character who will provide the audience with some sense that justice is still possible, that there are good people within this hellish environment that can still come out on top, etc. His appeal is fairly obvious when you look at it this way. Omar is, in many ways, a break from the spirit-numbing nihilism that pervades most of the other character arcs - he's smarter than most everyone else, he's funny, and he's a badass. Qualities every viewer expects in a protagonist in a cop show. The thing is, given the bleakness of the rest of the show, the contrast Omar provides makes his character stick out - he seems, more than many of the other characters, particularly contrived. That's all I'm sayin

x-posts

he was gay for the purposes of the show because it showed (even moreso than his rip and run actions) that he was utterly fearless

goole is basically otm, but it doesn't change the fact that you all have intractable desires for the situation to be just as you'd hoped. it's just...it's not. it is the opposite.

lollllll I just realized it was don draper putting his kid's playhouse together. Also realized that nothing in my previous statement actually happens, don just gets drunk and randomly drives around or something.

mcnutly does what you've describe iirc

lol mc-nut-ly

yeah mcnutty definitely does pass out drunk after a failed attempt at ikea kids beds. he also randomly drives around drunk a lot.

sry I was being really unclear, I was trying to figure out what show ripped the wire off

shakey is the best thing that ever happened to the wire

when this thread gets to 5,000 posts shakey come up from the basement

*shakey can

Still lolling in my head at the series bible with its 'Stringy Bell'

dont get what gbx is saying itt

shakey is saying that omar is kinda this unrealistic, "ideal" character and you do not want it to be that way. you want it to be the other way.

pretty easy to get imo

it's not like he's routinely performing superhuman acts - his supposedly superhuman feats consist solely of jumping off that balcony.

superhumanly breaking one leg and fucking up the other ankle

imo the way omar died was a statement on his seemingly superhuman status

I agree,

And apparently that Jump off the balcony was based off true events, I think it was even higher in real life, actually.

Omar is a trap! He's inextricably part of the drug dealing institution, killing young black men, which, Lester reminds us, nobody cares about, so audiences become complicit in the things the show is critiquing.

Not reading this... but ... Omar the best character on TV ever

That point about Omar prepetuating the cycle is made super-explicit, right? The kid who kills him is one of the little kids who is imitating him in the street in an earlier season - so yeah the audience who cheers him on becomes complicit in Omar's own death.

which all loops back into him being a symbolic figure - and remember how he's really into greek mythology?

xp - i don't know that that kid was one of the ones imitating him in Season 3. I think that kid was being shown to be the next Marlo - emotionless and cruel (see the attempted cat torture scene) - and presumably the fact that he killed Omar would be a notch on his belt, give him cred for his eventual ascencion to the throne.

pretty sure it was kenard that was dressed up like omar.

one of the primary motifs of the wire is that things are falling apart on every level: in politics, in schools, on the corner, in the precinct. All culture is slowly spiraling into darker, less humanistic values and the wire's writers lay the blame predominantly with the country's draconian drug laws.

^ basically Kenard will become the new Marlo, but will be even worse - Marlo's one redeeming quality is his fondness for his pigeons, and Kenard tortures animals.

Presumably d'shaun, following Kenard, will be the antichrist

http://blog.nj.com/alltv/2008/03/the_wire_david_simon_q_a.html
So when you introduced Kenard in season three when they're playing outside the stash house shoot-out, even back then you were planning, "Okay, this little kid is going to kill Omar a few seasons from now"?

With one caveat. We did introduce him, and I had it in my mind that I wanted a moment like "The Shootist" or the buried moment in the gunfight at the end of "Wild Bunch." The character that was most in the Western archetype -- and George had a lot of fun with this -- was Omar. The inner city is now the Wild West, the new frontier in terms of American storytelling, it has been for several decades now. We played a lot of our Western film themes and archetypes through Omar's story. I always had that in my mind. There were arguments to be had in the writers room -- there were guys who didn't want to kill Omar, there were some guys who did, some guys who didn't but came around. Everyone gets a say when you argue it down on the merits. I definitely wanted to plant the beginnings of that story if we wanted to go that way.

thanks, i didn't know/notice that.

i didn't catch it until someone pointed out either! it's a cool little detail

why you guys don't believe in the redemptive power of foot locker?

well, sure, I don't think there's a totalizing belief that no one ever gets out, but I think their point/the show's point, is that it's quite rare that someone does - like Poot and Namond - they're exceptions.

Isn't Poot a reference to the 'rational actor' argument from the venkatesh/freakonomics stuff? he makes more $ slinging sneakers than drugs -- basically everyone who sucks at it gets out. (e.g. cutty, namond)

Wallace got out, he's on Friday Lights now