"The Wire" on HBO

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

i was gonna say it's the thing he says to tank about taking minutes on the meeting (bc he's been reading robert's rules of order) but that's in the s3 premiere, which predates the co-op's existence

ha! jinx xp

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

Maybe not, but in the first season, a) Bunk says that to McNulty, b) Rawls says it to him, c) I think Pearlman says it to him, and d) he clearly believes that himself. I suppose I've overstated it--half the story is the other side, and McNulty's nothing to them--but it is a theme that's verbalized by a few different characters.

wait it is the first co-op episode (s3 e5). shit. also shamrock is the one reading robert's rules not tank

it's been a while since i've watched

ep 1 always felt to me like we were picking the story up in the middle of proceedings (cold open always helps with that). I mean yeah, McNulty shit stirring is the starting point of everything but the McNulty = fuck spiel always felt like direct allusions to stuff that happened before we met the characters and not a thematic statement.

wire is plenty funny. prop joe-pat riley is in season 1 isn't it? and prop joe telling omar where avon is to be found "he's not having the best of days is he?"

i probably said this somewhere upthread a few years back, but what I took from that "theme" is that it was a critique of the crusading cop as "great white hope" -- in that McNulty is the sole cop character who fits the profile of the hero cop from most television shows prior to The Wire -- and he is damaged goods, an asshole, and can't really save the day.

However, Season 1 does have the most stereotypical characterizations of the cop characters. It does "get better" in later seasons.

all of mcnulty's characteristics "fit" in the usual M.O. of a central character from a cable TV show, but his womanizing and carousing and self-destructiveness are not really seen as part of a larger spiritual quest, which is what happens with a lot of these others shows.

p much every word out of prop joe's mouth is gold eg his phone call 'voices'

also shamrock is the one reading robert's rules not tank

iirc stringer has imposed robert's on them; what shamrock or whoever it is has done is get too enthusiastic about it and not think about which elements will be actually useful to a cabal of drug dealers and which won't

funny moment cuz the apparatus of new day (and the uneasy west/east peace it represents) is so much the product of string's yearning for legitimacy and order, and usually he gets pushback on this from avon and others who think it's deluded, but in this case his pragmatism makes him the one in the room who has to remind his newly roberts-enthused lieutenant that they are still drug dealers -- the line builds stringer's character as Smart while also quietly undercutting his vision for the future

this is dr. sidney handjerker trying to reach thomas hauk xp

lol i totally forgot about those, prop joe is the best.

on the dvds the actor robert chew did commentary for one season 4 episode along with the kids who play dukie/namond/mike/randy and does impersonations of half the cast, it's hysterical. (also totally forgot he died & that just bummed me the fuck out)

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

OMG thank u.

man i didn't know robert chew died, a little devastated to hear that

yeah, 2013. heart attack at 52.

all of mcnulty's characteristics "fit" in the usual M.O. of a central character from a cable TV show, but his womanizing and carousing and self-destructiveness are not really seen as part of a larger spiritual quest

i think his shacking up with beadie is the clincher for this - there's no big drama around it, he's basically just like huh whaddaya know domestic happiness iirc - but it also gets undercut/confused by the final season bullshit, without which his domestication would have put the idea of questing to rest. not that the final season bullshit seriously gestures in that direction, it just makes it less coherent that he's NOT a spiritual-questing detective/person.