"The Wire" on HBO

oh, then it's uncanny

ugh i am so jealous my friend was like 'i started new internship and the first thing they did was put me in a cab to go have chris bauer sign a contract and i was like 'omg i am face to face with frank sobotka'' and now i hate her and i hate my job even more :(

did I mention I am a regular at the same bar as odell watkins

still trying to figure out how to hang with bunk tho

bring him one bathrobe???

and a cigar

well see it's more about finding which area bars they hang out at first
bathrobes and cigars I have plenty of

you pimp

i just finally watched the 4th episode and it was a lot better than the 3rd. the two obvious weak spots this season are the serial-killer thing (which i initially defended on one of these threads because i didn't fully appreciate the stupidity of it) and the fabricating reporter. but the rest of it's good. most of the newspaper stuff is right on -- like the federal courts guy saying "do you want one reporter covering two court systems?", i worked at a paper that did exactly that. (same paper made me cover an entire 50,000-student public school system AND a state university, because they'd cut the university reporter position.) but my favorite bits in the episode were small character moments: herc and carver talking in the parking lot; the grin daniels allows himself at rawls' desk; kima with elijah; michael with his mom. i think those are the payoffs you can get in a 5th season when you've put so much time into back stories and characters.

also r.i.p. prop joe. one of my faves. sold out by method man.

i don't know why i keep scanning this thread and risking/seeing major character death spoilers when i haven't even finished s4 yet.

just assume that everybody gets killed. that way you'll be surprised by the ones who don't.

tipsy otm, I love the little moments in these episodes like Herc and Carver, etc.

the Wire auction I went to last week was a little disappointing, the stuff being auctioned wasn't as cool as what they had at the one my dad went to on one of the show's actual sets circa season 4, but some of that stuff is now part of an eBay auction too: http://stores.ebay.com/hbothewireauction
so you could possibly get a DVD set signed by the cast for as little as a hundred bucks

looooool okay mcnulty in the newspaper office pretty much justifies the whole serial killer storyline.

RONG

Has Bunk had any dialogue that didn't involve berating McNulty for being a fuck up?

o yeah, in the bar about white chicks in Aruba

When Homicide got the OT approval for a second detective, why was Greggs brought on instead of Freamon? Is it because Command didn't know Freamon was helping out McNutty?

ep6 was definitely the first time The Wire has mentioned O'Malley as a past mayor (I guess as a gesture of finally saying "Carcetti is not Wire-world O'Malley, dammit!"), but was that the first time the show's mentioned Schmoke?

although acknowledging O'Malley's existence in the show's universe really kind of screws with all the season 3/4 talk about how Carcetti couldn't get elected because he's the "wrong color" when apparently all that time he could've cited O'M as a recent white mayor.

wasn't Freamon supposed to be working the case against Davis?

"Nevermind" MUST be the absolute coldest thing to say to someone before shooting him in the skull, right?

Could somebody please tell me (without spoilers) if this season has gotten better since the end of ep 2? Thx.

mike dxn i think that's from after s05 right? so stfu on this thread.

31g -- yes it does, but it's still the weakest series so far :(

disagree

it's smaller in scope but what do you expect with only 10 episodes

that's only two fewer than series 2. if anything it's larger in scope, though! so it needs more space than it has to do what it needs to. hamsterdam was a big stretch, plasubility-wise, but they sold it well. although the consequences of what mcnulty's doing are convincing, and i respect it more than i did initially, i still find it really hard to get behing the fake serial killer story. i guess it's david simon's take on iraq, more than any previous series. (+ omar as osama bin laden anyone?)

stupid serial killer shenanigans get stupider

+ omar as osama bin laden anyone?

i would love to see a diagram of the inside of your mind sometime

the series is pretty clearly an extended skit on the WoT; i don't think he's doing a direct one-for-one thing, it's not an allegory, but the extent to which marlo will fuck up his business to settle scores with omar... i think a case could be made. otoh the imaginary serial killer is osama too.

this ep was better, lol at munch cameo, powerhouse clay davis shit, but seriously this serial killer thing was a terrible idea.

this episode was great EXCEPT for the increasing absurdity of the serial killer plot. Handing out hours and help to everyone in homicide? This isn't going to be noticed? A serial killer abducts a victim, phones it in to the paper - and no one meets with the paper except for one homicide detective? A serial killer in Baltimore, images of the newest victim splashed all over the paper (and national news) - and no one working in the DC shelter is going to notice a striking resemblance to their newly arrived charge?

The shelter was in Richmond VA, right? Still far-fetched.

I felt so bad for that hobo i wanted to puke.

munch!

Also, doesn't Baltimore have street/traffic cameras everywhere? Mightn't somebody go look up the footage of the missing guy's corner and see the abduction? I think earlier seasons mostly stood up better to this kind of nitpicking.

im sure mcnulty would consider camera angles

how are they planning to bring the case in? won't they have to explain an illegal wiretap, etc?

naw they wait for marlo to be in the room w/lol hueg greek drug shipment then say they got a tip is all

Thank god for CIs.

disappointed that Bubs isn't getting more time

drugs on the table.

i want them to pull it off tbh.

but i guess it's a race for the prize w. omar.

Also, doesn't Baltimore have street/traffic cameras everywhere? Mightn't somebody go look up the footage of the missing guy's corner and see the abduction? I think earlier seasons mostly stood up better to this kind of nitpicking.

no they're not everywhere, they're very deliberately placed in mostly poor, non-white areas

that was the first time omar broke Bunk's 'no more killing' pledge, t/f?

Griggs putting together IKEA furniture is the closest they've gotten to anything resembling reality this season.

That said, I'm still kind of enjoying this.

Omar killed one guy in the stash house, I think

I forgot you won't be reading the non-realtime thread, NRQ, but I was calling you out over there - seems no-one else subscribes to your angling that the serial killer plot is Simon's skewiff take on the war on Iraq. Care to expand…?

srsly? well i think it is partly because of evidence that DS likes rubbish analogies. on the commentary for s03e01, at the start, when the towers are getting blown up, he says, "this show is about the collapse of the american empire... and it begins with towers getting blown up... that's all i'm going to say." i am paraphrasing, but, seriously, not very much.

sooooo when this series started with an overstated version of a scene in 'homicide' in which a guy is made to think a photocopier is a lie detector, and bunk says "the bigger the lie, the more people believe..." -- if DS reckons this show is about the collapse of the american empire, what possible subtext could be read into that scene, put at the very start of the series?

so from that the baltimore sun story is not unlike the judith miller saga at the NYT, right? it serves her interests to get a big story, it serves washington's interest too, or, in this case the BPD. and then of course money has to be diverted from more important thinks to fund the investigation/war.

i'm not saying this is a one-to-one mapping exercise, but i do think that's how DS thinks, and though obviously for dipshit english lit grads what DS thinks "doesn't matter", well, you know, maybe it kind of guides certain aspects of the show.

i don't think it's a skewiff take on the war, exactly, just sort of inappropriate and jarring. well, maybe i do: personally i don't think anyone in power really believed iraq posed a threat in 2002, whereas people believe in the serial killer.

wtf does "skewiff" mean?

I dunno about 9/11, but I read the Barksdale-Marlo transition as Simon's commentary about contemporary American capitalism, with Marlo as the faceless, inhuman multinational that's destroying the community (which, yeah, Barksdale's drugs destroyed the community, but Marlo takes it to another level with his treatment of other dealers, etc.).

yeah this is true. but i think a lot of crime stories -- 'the godfather', 'goodfellas', 'casino', 'the sopranos', to take minor examples lol -- have been based on that kind of transition. i hadn't thought of marlo in that way before -- i had him more like a mergers-and-acquisitions kind of guy who doesn't play by old school corporatist rules.

one of the kids in s04 tells wee-bey (it's his son right?) "yeah yeah" when he says says there used to be a code -- also bodie (or poot?) says basically the same thing to herc and carv one time, that people are always saying the next generation is meaner and more cut-throat.