"The Wire" on HBO

(i mean the agenda's always there, which is fine -- i am on board with the agenda -- but usually it's handled a little more subtly.)

that dramatization on a dramatic show just didn't fit, sure.

i am sorry for thinking some parts of the wire are handled better than others. overall i think it's the best show on tv and at least in contention for best show ever. does that make you happier?

relax. i just think people buy too much into the "it's gritty! it's realistic! it turns the cop procedural formula on its head!" conceit that david simon has rather successfully put out there. it's still a tv show, and despite it being better at depicting the "reality" of crime than most, it still has to have some dramatic elements to, y'know, actually be worth watching.

as much as i love the show, i think a lot of the response to it (on this thread, and elsewhere -- see also: nick fucking hornby) has been a little too trusting of the creator's public comments (as much as i like the dude, too). thankfully, the people involved in the show seem smart enough to have some fun with that -- without the people they sometimes mock on the show even seeming to get it (see also: the word "dickensian" showing up in season 5).

I don't watch previews of next week. I don't understand why anyone would, actually.

no previews with torrents

i only watch them so as not to sound like an idiot on message boreds with speculation over whether jimmy mcnulty's gonna get in trouble or not.

is more fun to speculate! and i don't think watching previews can save anyone from eventually sounding like an idiot on a message board... it happens to the best of us!

ps omar should be showing up soon.

xposts

no i like a lot of the dramatics. e.g. omar's whole character is not "realistic" (composite of real people, i know, but i guess one of them was a ninja), but who wants the wire without omar? the scenes where they do the parallels between the cops and teachers, or cops and reporters or whatever, is all very plotted, but pretty smart about it. and the dickensian thing was funny too. it's just usually it's done well enough that i don't really notice the gears and wheels behind it, so when they occasionally become too noisy it's a little distracting.

i like the show's tendency to have different characters say the same exact thing at a later date. mcnulty quoted bodie last night, yeah?

sheeeeeeeit

at least with hamsterdam there was a build up to it - you saw the reasoning and logistics behind it's implementation. the mcnutty thing just came out of left field!

xpost ha ha

it's not too left field, mcnutty's going straight and being happy was way more left field.

it was prefaced by that scene at the coroner's office, which felt like an obvious setup for something.

i kinda liked the scene, really, because at first it's like he really has just lost his shit. but then you see he has a PLAN.

lol at first i thought he was searching the corpse for booze ;_;

i dunno. the happy thing - you saw coming. he had talked about wanting to go back to just walking a beat and settling down a few times before. i don't think he ever leaned back in his chair/bar stool and reflected upon how much he really wanted to violate a corpse and taint a crime scene!

this episode was so meta: 1) lester at the start selling how big the case is to sydnor and how everyone is somehow implicated (think he oversold this) and 2) the editor talking about narrative form vs CJ on hos it isn't just the schools but but but...

of course what mcnulty did was stupid, but within the episode and series it was plausible.

i was disappointed by the feds -- fifth series in a row, i would guess, where they bail on grounds everyone does counter-terrorism now.

bailed on the grounds that Carcetti flipped the US Atty the bird, you mean

there was that too.

funny that bit about stats for the port. is that going anywhere?

mcnulty's thing, yeah it seems like a dont-give-a-fuck breaking point, but otoh selling a serial killer story to the media ("we have 23 bodies and they dropped the investigation!") is not really a bad idea.

yeah, but that's not the angle. mcnulty's plan won't link marlo's 21 bodies -- he's created a separate serial killer pattern, a guy who kills junkies by strangling them and then puts them in a stupid ass-upward position.

again - it's not a plan to attract attention to McNulty's personal hero vendetta (i.e. marlo), which would be at least SORTA in character. it's a shitty plan to create the scare of an unrelated serial killer, thus spotlighting the underfunded police force, which has never been mcnulty's cause celebre, let alone to the detriment of already-open cases!

maybe the problem is that for me his intentions were telegraphed from the second he knocked over the jug or whatever. i didn't have any expectations flipped, i was just instantly like: what the fuck, who wrote this the practice bullshit?

mcnulty quoted bodie last night, yeah?
i think so - "this game is rigged" right?

Avon is totally f***ing with Marlo. I'm sure Marlo gets that..

i didn't like the way bunk just kinda stood around and didn't stop mcnulty. i feel like he would have restrained the fuck out of jimmy mcnulty right there - this would mean a real fight of some kind in order for mcnulty to pull what he pulls though and i guess they didn't wanna go there??

elsewhere i like how the editor's relationship with cj mirrors the tension that i imagine exists between simon, the newspaper guy, and screenwriters who really know how to structure things and tell a story in pictures (and keep a season on track); the difference, as we're probably going to find out, is that one's a fictional tv show and the other's supposed to be the news

tracer otm, the second bit.

fave line so far: "*everything's* thin"

also it was a wicked awesome surprise to see clark johnson in it. pembleton should be the finale's deus ex machina.

Looking forward to seeing how they deal with McNulty pulling this at some other crime scenes.

it kind of requires that he gets called to a number of similarly dead dead guys! ie not gunshot/stab wounds etc.

or that he starts killing junkies

Ep 3 finally "available"!

i think we're doing this sunday by sunday y/n

I'm watching them as they become available.

Then go to the non-real time thread!

SPOILERS: The Non-Realtime Wire Season 5 Thread

I'm in between the non-realtime and the real-time threads! Besides, non-realtime already is talking about ep 3, so announcing its availability is kind of redundant.

so s05ee03?

worst Wire episode ever? maybe. my friend neale talks about the shittines of "stromfronts" or something on season 2/3 (i forget), but i don't remember what happens in that one. anyway, this blew. the performances were fine but my disappointment with the writers with this mcnulty/serial-killer plot remains unabated. and bringing Freeman on board? gah. this is the dude who wouldn't let operatives listen to the wiretap longer than the legally sanctioned limit, etc. such bullshit.

similarly: McNulty ignoring the article about Cedric/Burrell in the paper? wtf! or the total hackneyed/cardboard dumb-newspaper-owner and wise-newspaper-editor characters? and don't fucking get me started on the telegraphing/cliche of the Omar shit at the end. weeping as he hears the news. this show used to SURPRISE and OUTSMART me. there was almost nothing on screen tonight that made it any superior to the shield or whatever the fuck else.

McNulty hitting on Alma was aight.

lolz mcnulty the rake up to his old ways lolz

McNulty ignoring the article about Cedric/Burrell in the paper? wtf!

he didn't ignore it, he gave a kind of jaded shake of his head at it -- the top brass, musical chairs, who knows the politics of it? who cares? he had a more pressing issue that morning.

or the total hackneyed/cardboard dumb-newspaper-owner and wise-newspaper-editor characters

you mean mr. red suspenders, "my friend, who's the dean of the journalism school" dude? he's not the owner, he's the editor-in-chief. the owner is the tribune company in chicago; they're calling the shots.

<i>McNulty ignoring the article about Cedric/Burrell in the paper? wtf!

he didn't ignore it, he gave a kind of jaded shake of his head at it -- the top brass, musical chairs, who knows the politics of it? who cares? he had a more pressing issue that morning.</i>

Yeah, see I'd get this if it were a bullshit police show with a hackneyed, character-flaws-writ-overlarge lead, but this is an intelligent guy who sees in the paper that HIS FORMER BOSS, WHO MADE THE MARLO INVESTIGATION HAPPEN, remember MARLO, THE REASON HE'S DOING THIS SERIAL KILLER BS IN THE FIRST PLACE.... is going to become uh COMMISSIONER OF THE POLICE and he doesn't even fucking read the thing!? total plot contrivance bs.

<I>you mean mr. red suspenders, "my friend, who's the dean of the journalism school" dude? he's not the owner, he's the editor-in-chief. the owner is the tribune company in chicago; they're calling the shots.</i>

ah, thanks. i got the chicago thing, but didn't catch the editor's job title - assumed he was an MBA lackey for the brass.

ok, that's a good point about daniels

that said, mcnutty is completely off the rails and frankly his serial killer connivance seems less of a well-honed strategy and more of a giant game which has become its own justification

i feel you that people aren't behaving very rationally, but as i said on the other thread, this season is shaping up to be the elmore leonard season - everyone doing very dumb shit to try and break out of whatever situation they feel trapped by, and working through the consequences of it

this guy? - http://www.hbo.com/thewire/img/castcrew/character_season05/landing/jameswhiting_90.jpg

and lester freeman?

what I wanna know is what bar McNulty goes to that it's that easy to get laid

sean what about lester? you mean why is he down with mcnutty's plan? i dunno, maybe if you'd spent a decade and a half stuck behind a desk for doing the right thing only to finally get a shot at cracking a big case and then see it all go up in smoke just a week or two away from being able to close the whole thing -- maybe you'd resport to some crazy shit too

resport

oooor, in real life - maybe not!

again, Lester was so devoted to the rule of law that he wouldn't let people listen in on the wiretap after the federally mandated 45 seconds or whatever, even in the heat of the case. And besides, he seemed pretty fucking psyched about taking down Clay Davis. And even if Freeman would be tempted/amused by what McNulty's doing (if memory serves he's called McN a self-serving asshole before), Bunk was there in the room as a disapproving influence, and it's BS to think that Freeman would just automatically be sympathetic to McNulty's side.

The detention-room "gotcha!" of Freeman agreeing with McNulty was maybe fakest and most hyuk-teevee! moment of the whole episode (nay, the series?).

Lester was so devoted to the rule of law that he wouldn't let people listen in on the wiretap after the federally mandated 45 seconds or whatever, even in the heat of the case.

it's been awhile, but i don't remember lester insisting on this because of some abstract devotion to the rule of law -- it was practical: they simply couldn't use the evidence if it was beyond the 45 seconds, and if they started getting into changing the logs every time there was something interesting in order to make it seem like it was under the 45 seconds then the whole thing would be a compromised mess

i agree it was set up clumsily -- i feel like bunk has gotten a lot of disappointingly obvious/ham-handed lines so far this season. then again i've always felt the police end of things has always been the least "real" part of the show

i've always felt the police end of things has always been the least "real" part of the show

A friend of mine who worked as an attorney with the Baltimore Police Department (not a DA or States - sort of like a legal advisor, I'd say) has told me, on numerous occasions, that this show absolutely, 100% gets the Baltimore Police Department square between the eyes.

Yeah if anything I think, given the time Burns spent on the BPD and Simon spent covering it upclose, that they depict the police work is more accurate than probably anything else (drug trade, city hall, the docks, etc.) in the show, where I tend to feel a little more suspension of disbelief.

I mean, it definitely shows more sitting at a desk, or sweating about overtime or who picks up the next call, real garden variety shit that takes up 90% of any job, than any other show about police.