"The Wire" on HBO

The Wire is over, everyone should jump on the Treme bandwagon

well if you do like torturing yourself go ahead!

the John Goldman character in Treme is like some kind of apotheosis of Simonism

what non-Simon shows do you think have that touch?

the Steve Zahn character in Treme is the American Colin Hunt, but played deadly seriously.

Treme is the least-cool show ever. The Goodman character, Steve Earle, Steve Zahn, occasional nods to hip things a dad hears about from their kids like Goatwhore.

I respect it.

goodman ffs autocorrect

No show has been more ‘Steve’ - would you be surprised to find out Goodman’s character name is Steve?

I just find all tv writing with the *touch* of Simon absolutely unpalatable, and I had burgeoning hatred of The Wire at the the time and had my brother constantly proselytising it to me and that absolute king of wankers Brooker doing it in the Graun every week. Couldn't force myself to watch it these days.

How do you feel about Homicide, Life on the Street? I loved it but thought it went downhill when Simon started actually writing for it in Season 5.

lol come on that isn't why Homicide starts to suck

Maude: “It’s really smart. It’s about New Orleans and jazz and Hurricane Katrina and drugs and John Goodman.” Todd: “Sounds exciting.” Maude: “It’s not!”

Homicide was supposedly radical or whatever for the time but it just seems like a cop show to me

It started to suck for other reasons too, but Simon trying to fit the first season of the Wire into Homicide's format and making the whole season about Lewis and Kellerman and Luther Mahoney really didn't help.

I always get Homicide mixed up with Hill Street Blues for some reason.

God only knows what this is supposed to mean. You quoted my reference to Bubbles... who no one else has referenced.

You said that Bubbles had been beaten up for no reason after Kima was shot - the reason is right there in the sentence, he implicated himself and one of the policemen, on edge after Kima was shot, laid into him. I'm not saying it's a good reason, but it's not for no reason.

But given your desire to insert yourself: "the beatdown given to Kima's shooter (Wee-Bey) is presented as outside of the ordinary run of things" is 100% incorrect.

Fair point - it was Bird, earlier in the season, I must have conflated it with Bubbles.

Bubbles didn't implicate himself - he called his friend Kima and got beaten for being black in Baltimore.

wait I thought he just got robbed for his t-shirt money. it's been a minute

you are getting seasons 1 and 4 confused

a lot of the police brutality is at least shown negatively - the stuff that bugged me was when Herc and Carver would beat on Bodie and it would be portrayed as comedy

like this scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs-gO1ssqzE

simple human reaction? if you're trying to extract information it's probably best to get real, take the cuffs off, get close, but don't hit or harm

Prez partially blinds a child. Later he shoots a fellow cop quite possibly because he's black.

The Shield does do a good job communicating what ulysses said on another thread: the police are indistinguishable from a gang. But it's also sensationalist trash (not nec a criticism)

I've never rewatched it, but iirc the cops in Treme are depicted far more negatively

― dip to dup (rob), Saturday, June 13, 2020 2:16 PM bookmarkflaglink

why does a show have to make some kind of an over the top depiction of characters as "evil"? are we doing taht thing where we conflate depiction with endorsement again?

besides, there's no sane person who would read this show as an endorsement of the cops. often the police are seen intentionally neglecting to take action that would better their communities, and few of them are governed by any altruism, usually just advance their own careers. the suits up top are routinely seen gaming the crime statistics and sending people out on the street to arrest people for low-level offenses to make it appear they are actually doing something.

the show makes being a cop look like the worst bureaucracy on the planet, just another political organization that doesn't actually do the thing it's intended to do, suits mostly interested in getting re-elected and rewarding loyalists. they sabotage each other's investigations by sending dead weight from their teams to special projects. Freeman falsifies evidence to get Marlo's warrant, they commit fraud to get a wiretap, everybody covers for each other so people like Presbo don't get terminated or see a cell.

if the message is "better things aren't possible", it's because Baltimore police is a cesspool of corruption

At the end of the day the show just likes its cops and their work too much, despite the valid points it scores in other respects

don't agree w/ that at all.

but, I mean, the show is literally about policing in Baltimore, so...it has to be focused on their work. but it shows that their work doesn't bring about any real improvement. they arrest Avon and get the "king" collar, but leave the criminal infrastructure largely undamaged, so that creates a power vacuum that allows Marlo Stanfield to take over, resulting in much more bloodshed, including that of civilians who merely piss Marlo off. they achieve nothing!

The show drips with personal affection for most of the cops. It is amused by them and frequently admires them as people. If you can't detect well :shrug:

yeah i think it's easy for cop show snobs to think they're seeing through something when they identify the cops and their work as the focus or the unduly privileged element. one of the grand yet unexplored themes of most american ('this america, man') tv drama of the few decades preceding the wire was work, and by following a long case built by daniels' squad the wire is only anatomizing long-familiar themes, slowing them down more than would be usual on an episodic, arcless network drama. but all kinds of pre-prestige dramas do turn essentially on work in some way—it's one of the ongoing elements of their narratives that doesn't even have to be written into very discernible dramatic arcs, because it's experienced by the characters and understood by the viewers via the one-week-after-another structure. medical dramas, law dramas, same deal generally. you could say that the show likes its drug dealers and their work too much, but i think it makes more sense to see the depiction of drug dealing as work as something that does everything to reframe the cop-work elements.

The show drips with personal affection for most of the cops. It is amused by them and frequently admires them as people. If you can't detect well :shrug:

Apparently you can't tell that it treats the criminal characters - Avon, Stringer, Omar, the gang on the couch, the human traffickers in season 2, etc, etc - with just as much affection and admiration as the police.

I feel like the show pretty specifically plays favorites / has more affection for some of those forms of work vs others

yeah unfortunately/fortunately, the 'did he have hands? did he have a face?' guy is funny

also "the show has sympathy for cops AND criminals equally!" is....sorta the problem lol

xxxxpost so now you're conflating the concept of "good characters" with "good people". even sons of bitches can be entertaining, either in real life, or the small or big screen. you can find something or someone fascinating without lionizing them. so, naw...I reject your thesis.

is this another one of those 21st century woke things where any character that is not portrayed as a mustache-twirling baddie is immediately seen as "liked" by its writers?

whoa whoa simon walk that back, you can't harp on its treatment of cops and then bat away the fact that everything you were complaining about applies to the criminals too. what's 'the problem' supposed to be then? not dour and documentarian enough?

xp yes neanderthal i think that is a big part of it, the zeitgeist viewer frame of mind is only capable of praising unjustly suffering characters with a good conscience, any other character ends up being at fault for having misled naive audiences into having wrong attitudes or for not having done more to change their attitudes

there are more ppl than cops and criminals in the show. it may TRY to view cops, criminals, teachers, politicians and the press with a similarly detached / humanistic / journalistic POV but it fails at it. and it's a dumb goal anyway!

it is a v good entertainment but for me its social content only works at the macro level in showing cascading system failure

i think its rich to characterize this show as dripping with personal affection for most of the cops. i think the show maybe likes bunny colvin and lester freamon a lot, daniels and kima too. everyone else is at least kind of a piece of shit (plus there's that already-remarked-upon-itt instance of kima participating in police brutality)

i mean i also get it, the show foregrounds them and has a deep respect for detective work in the way it unfolds... but idk even this gets complicated and undone by the later seasons. it's not "better things aren't possible," it's "all these systems that govern our lives are broken." it doesn't offer a solution bc it's documenting something, which imo is still a valuable thing for art to do

all that echoing "real PO-lice work" dialogue in the first season can i guess seem pretty pro-cop

I dunno I think it works splendidly as an entertainment but fails quite badly as a "document"

Treme kinda reversed this balance for me, varied wildly as an entertainment but was compelling throughout as a text about a time and place

i kind of want to finally watch treme lol

I guess I've also always preferred my socially conscious entertainment to shun even the slightest appearance of documentary realism

brad watch Treme!!!!!

i don't think it's right to say it's (merely) documenting either, unless that's understood in a pretty thick way according to some public-minded aim of journalism (which as a fiction this is not, exactly), the community having its workings described to itself, etc.

the principles of selection have to mean a lot, since what stories each season ended up telling is pretty much down to the writers' decisions about what to purport to 'document'. and i gather that the audience responses that those stories solicit indicate something about the ways in which the writers understand themselves not just to be documenting.

Starts and ends kinda wonky, but the middle portion is, imo, as good as any section of The Wire xp

What does it mean that Bubbles and Dookie are basically the moral center of the show

j. u are of course right

i forget, who if any are the cops who die during the run? it seems significant that unlike the criminals and the drug addicts, they are relatively 'safe' throughout.

it seems like the cyclical/'reform' dimensions of the characters' stories over the course of the whole show point the way toward thinking about everyone in kind of a suspended life-to-death, aristotelian/aeschylean (?) 'count no man happy until he is dead' framework. people keep pointing out what a sorry excuse for a human being prez was earlier on, so that they can fault him or the writers for where he seems to end up as an (eventually) effective teacher, but then again he also haplessly gives dukie the money for his (first?) high, so its not like his no longer actively brutalizing citizens is the end of the road for him. (now he can do bad while thinking he's doing something almost-good for the suffering urban youth!) those kinds of reversals in light of consequences and the small, easily lost magnitude of moral progress are all over the place in the show (think of mcnulty with beadie), so that even a feel-good story like bubs' should leave viewers hesitant to feel that he's 'safe'. but the addict characters, like cutty after his release, offer an example of the reasons that we might not want to be too definitive about who is or is not, who has or has not, become 'good' by the last episode.

kind of want to finally watch treme lol

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson

You probably shouldn't.

if there's a documentarian aspect to the way it depicts / looks at / thinks about / asks us to think about the characters, i think it's not quite that (not as if it comes from a non-fictional camera's 'objectivity' or a director's point of view, effort to gather evidence, confront viewers' beliefs, etc.)—it's more that there's a kind of suspended, sociological immoralism in the way it judges characters, or rather withholds judgment. that could appear affectionate, not jumping right away to fault characters for what they (think they) have to do (to stay alive, to be or become happy or safe, to get right with someone or with themselves). but because of the proximity of addiction i would guess that the show is ambivalent about just how much to forbear that judgment when it's evidently going to come to grief for someone, if not the person being judged.

You probably shouldn't.

At least watch the Fats Domino appearance, sheesh.