"The Wire" on HBO

One can never underestimate the human importance of the aesthetic contributions to television narrative that HBO continues to make. One easily recognizes the impetus for the late-night trash that it presents as a neon sop of barely soft-core pornography for the masses, but that would not explain all of the other things that this adventurous station offers. In aesthetic terms, I think this is especially true of The Wire, a dramatic series with much wider scope than The Sopranos, an unprecedented classic.

The human importance of The Wire is that it avoids the caricatures that we are too often given of black people in rap's pervasive minstrelsy and the other fast-food ethnic images of mass media. The Wire is the best crime show since Hill Street Blues, Law & Order, and NYPD Blue. Like its predecessors, the show has a breadth of human vision that moves us far beyond the stereotype and does the best that it can with the mysteries of human personality.

The Wire is set in Baltimore and does not back away from the monstrous elements of the black drug trade in American cities, but it also gives great variety to the criminal characters, from extremely stupid to extremely clever. Even more impressive than that already impressive achievement is the range of black people in law enforcement and the complex rendering of urban politics as played out along racial, sexual, and class lines. For one long stretch its focus was white ethnic crime on the Baltimore docks, and the series was as successful in creating complex scenarios, providing the viewer with maddening, flawed, corrupt, heroic, and tragic characters. Within the limits of its form (which seem to be no more than the width of the screen, since cable television is not, for good and for bad, held in check by censorship), The Wire is a masterpiece and will continue to be as long as it can maintain the depth of the standards it has set for itself.

yes. yes i do know. even though I missed most of this last season :[[[[ After not catching a bunch of eps in a row I basically gave up and decided to wait for the reruns, but the beginning of the third run wasn't quite as arresting as what came before, one had the sense that the show had found a groove and was settling into it (i think by tackling so many Big Ideas™ in the second season they ended up neutering themselves in terms of how far they could expand the scope of the story) (not necessarily a bad thing) but there was still quite a bit of interesting stuff going on. and I had no idea that Stringer bell was one of those rappin' limeys!! They should get Dizzee on there.

Here's my review of Season One in City Pages:

THE WIRE: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
HBO Home Video

Only some of The Wire's greatness can be measured by how thoroughly it demolishes the "realism" of other TV public dick shows and gangsta soaps. Every trick of television verisimilitude has a freshness date, and makes way for a new set of clichés (think of the shaky camerawork in the now rote Law & Order franchise). Even FX's The Shield, once the cutting edge of morally ambiguous cop heroes, demonstrates the diminishing returns of constantly defying viewer expectations. In the end, its extremism is about nothing but other cop shows.

HBO's The Wire, however, is about work. And the genre it subverts isn't just the crime one, but the nameless category of TV and film that might be labeled "people who are great at their jobs and work like maniacs." Most characters in this emergent genre of the overworked '90s and '00s are judged by how well they serve their institutions. Yet in The Wire, it's the institutions that are the problem--including the illegal ones. Running a housing project in West Baltimore like a death squad might run a food court, local gang members adhere to a demeaning organizational hierarchy. There's no Bonnie and Clyde fantasy of freedom to this murderous pecking order, which exists only to perpetuate itself. (In one poetic touch, the kingpin's right-hand man takes macroeconomics at the community college. At the core, he's a company man.)

The narcotics detectives have their own parts to play, and it doesn't seem remotely heroic when they buck authority. McNulty, the romantic lead among cops (he carries a liquor bottle and spits when he talks), admits at one point that he's pursuing the gang as an ego trip. If characters find dignity anywhere in the Sisyphean drug war, it's in their duties to each other, and in their craft.

Created by a former Baltimore Sun reporter (David Simon, who also gave us Homicide: Life on the Streets) and a former Baltimore Police detective (Ed Burns), The Wire is clearly a work of journalism. But it never pretends that the truth can set you free. --Peter S. Scholtes

http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1253/article12754.asp

Amateurist, The Wire is the most naturalistic show I've ever seen on television. Yeah, some shaky camera etc but only when it suits the scene. It's not very stylized, most of the technical filmmaking stuff is pretty subtle.

It allows itself occasional flashy touches (like Bunk and McNulty's great "Fuck" scene, where the dialogue consists entirely of "Fuck" said with a dozen or more different inflections), but those come as sort of welcome bonuses -- easter eggs for dedicated viewers or something.

Agreed. After I devoured the season one DVD set I picked up a stack of Pelecanos novels and fell in love with his work pretty much immediately. A Firing Offense, his first one, is pretty stiff, but King Suckerman and The Sweet Forever are genius -- lots of great music references and layered characters and observations about race. His work on The Wire is starting to inform his writing pretty obviously; I just finished an advance of his next book, Drama City, and it has a very Wire-y structure. There's less music stuff, but it's still good stuff. (Comes out in March.)

but what makes the wire so great is that it never gauchely strikes out at the status quo (see: everything bad about michael moore); instead it accepts that it is reality and shows how people work within it: what they bend, what they break, how they cope, how they don't. and so all of the action that we are presented with are people bristling and bumping up against the limitations of life itself. that's where you get the hyper-realism. there are no master criminals or puppetmasters or cops. i mean, jimmy mcnulty is don quixote with a drinking problem and that's that. he's not special; he's smart and he's well trained.

and nick i'm with you that frank sobotka (he's currently on the espn poker show tilt) was a great character. i really can't think of a character that i didn't like. even prez gets his moments!

I don't know, regardless of the societal reasons that lead people to do awful things, I have a hard time forgiving extreme cruelty, violence, and murder. It's easier for me to feel bad for guys like D'Angelo Barksdale, but not so much for powerful puppet masters like Stringer and Avon.

and matthew i'm psyched to hear that! that's great.

if anyone's interested in a cheap copy of s2 ($60!), i may end up having two copies of it on dvd shortly. i bought it when it came out but i think i'm getting another copy from hbo cuz i reviewed it for blender. if it does arrive (i never count on these things) i'll post notice here.

I think one of the many things that's great about the series is that it shows rather than tells in making its case. We hear about dumb Pollocks, then notice some of them being smarter than the characters using that phrase. Stringer and his boys call Omar a cocksucker and a faggot, but we see him having more heart (in every sense) than any of them. In season two, one of the young dock workers talks about project niggers, but ends up doing essentially the same business as them, but with less smarts.

Now, you could make the argument that there is "honor" in Stringer's taking an Econ class and attempting to invest drug money in "legitimate" stocks and other businesses, schooling his employees in the realities of capitalism that have to be faced before a gun is drawn. You can definitely make the argument that he's a great character, and the show's writers love him.

But to me, he's the essence of a soulless rational maximizer. He takes what he can get. He kills characters I like, because they might hurt him down the road as informants. Once you extend the idea of "honor" to self-preservation at all costs, you have adopted Michael Corleone's morality, my friend.

Plus, he doesn't like go-go music!

Life itself? I think if you don't see a radical critique of the various systems on display in front of us, you're trying not to see it. Check out this interview with the show's creator:

http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=3336

there's a dedicated thread for these fascinating revelations :)

i am a fan of Bernthal, Thomas Jane and Walton Goggins ... my first Bernthal experience was as Shane in Walking Dead, kinda dirtbag, kinda hot tbh

could definitely see him hooking up with diner waitresses after getting drunk and crashing his car

I waited til I finished my full series The Wire rewatch until I watched this trailer!
Some real 'Ryan on Line of Duty' feels seeing Marlo there.

And Herc? Donut? Jay? Dukie?
Should be good.

should we start a new thread for the new show - it’s so good

Yeah, different thread makes to me.

Yeah, I think it's a good idea. Great first episode.

ok done & done

Lake Trout & ACAB: David Simon’s “We Own This City” on HBOMax

Rewatching first four seasons, up to 3 now. Still enjoying but man, that scene where they mistake Cheese killing his dog with killing his "dawg" is some lame sitcom shit compared to the rest of the ep

LESTER: We've been listening to him all night. Something about looking for a "free show."

BUNK: Fuuucck, ain't nothing free out there. We're getting set up!

Season 1 had plenty of lame sit-com shit, that scene where they’re trying to get that table through the doorway, the cop trying to figure out how to injure himself so he can get out of work, sub-Office Space level shenanigans.

god, Avon was so bad at running shit. not that Stringer didn't fuck up on his own, but talk about having literally all the wrong priorities.

does it make you feel better about your "stupid annoying co-workers" Neando?

yeah at least mine won't get me killed

GOD DAMMIT: https://variety.com/2023/film/obituaries-people-news/lance-reddick-dead-the-wire-john-wick-1235557886/

Fuck. Heartbroken.

😞

;_;

Good police

— Drew Lawrence (@by_drew) March 17, 2023

Love him in everything he's been in, RIP

Shirtless Daniels reveal is one of the most memorable moments from the HBO Golden Age.

Lance Reddick originally read for the part of Bubbles on the show, which I’m sure he would have nailed, no mean feat since he completely embodied the Lt. Daniels relationship role.

I think he would have been really mediocre to bad as a homeless drug addict character and the correct casting decision was made. It's fair to say he wasn't a rangy actor, but excelled in one particular type of role. Without any disrespect.

Didn't he pay a drug fiend on The Corner?

he did yeah, but I'll keep my bad opinions on David Simon off this thread cos I think everything he touches is unbearable garbage