"The Wire" on HBO

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.

I've read many good posts on this thread today with which I disagree. While I can't summon the show as readily from memory as I could've a decade ago, my sense was of a Baltimore eaten alive by the pathology of a system that kept cops employed, sadistic, obsessed with Kafka-esque stats, and whose personal relationships, whether McNulty and his kids or Daniels and Pearlman got sullied by even glancing contacts with a system that also encouraged conflicts of interest.

Treme in retrospect made me better understand the weaknesses of The Wire, but I ended up liking it as much

I mean, Th Wire showed the futility of meticulous police work -- it doesn't matter in the end because as the cops get promoted or retire the so-called criminals blithely keep up with the revolving door; if it's not Stringer Bell, it's Marlo. Shit, we even see Stringer and Marlo attempting to learn capitalist self-empowerment twaddle that implicitly acknowledges no difference between the street and the art of the deal.

I think I agree w/ that sentiment Dan

have watched a half dozen episodes of The Deuce, it seems as difficult to get into as The Wire or Treme, but also less like standard David Simon. I forgot that he also wrote Show Me A Hero

I'm sure The Deuce is worthy and goes places, but the episodes I watched felt like work.

also my desire to watch was def impacted by his Twitter/blog voice, fairly or not

I will admit it is probably also coloring my memories of The Wire

I tried watching The Deuce but the combination of James Franco and actually knowing something about the world they were attempting to depict made it impossible.

I can see that

James Franco is a good actor I don't care to watch act in things at this juncture

am comforted for some reason by its depiction of NY in the 70s

I think about how far gone we are now and I long for the innocence and griminess of that era

so I guess nostalgia

It was a fairly radical move to place the drug dealers on the same footing as cops - equal agency, equally charming or equally awful depending on the character, etc. - but that’s also the weakness of the show in retrospect because it doesn’t mirror actual reality. Cops have more agency in life than a kid raised on a drug corner.

i think that's part of the virtue of the three zones of characters i mentioned before—more, once you bring in politicians and teachers and the like.

they don't have the same agency and part of the problem is that some of the people with more do less with theirs, or are negligent or intentionally harmful.

the drug dealers are using their agency, in certain ways for much more than people ordinarily do (cf. gant the murdered witness being a 'citizen', a working man etc), but like the addicts and the cops they act under what they feel is a constraint on what they must do and can do. the real sources and natures of these constraints vary, and they have a lot to do with how we evaluate the characters' actions. the whole stoic-nihilist soldier mentality of the drug dealers that gets its extreme expression in avon and (not quite the same) omar and stringer permits them to play out a little heroic-tragic storyline within the larger one, but it wouldn't be able to if their characters weren't depicted as genuinely acting in the face of necessities imposed by the situation and the world.

yeah, like Bodie is a character who would probably do great as a cop - hard-working, attentive, pretty good with people, morally malleable enough to not make himself a nuisance the way McNulty does - but he’s so limited by his environment that it inevitably closes in around him.

I forgot that he also wrote Show Me A Hero

oh geez, that show made me cry.

that’s also the weakness of the show in retrospect because it doesn’t mirror actual reality. Cops have more agency in life than a kid raised on a drug corner.

one of the key points of the show is this exact thing.

But going back to the article posted upthread about women -- it does a bit of gender essentialism which I found a bit off-putting. Like, it complains about a dearth of female characters, and how we barely see women involved (esp. from the drug dealer angle), and I agree there. It would be good to see more of that. Who are the "little old ladies" these dudes put their fancy cars in the names of. What are their stories? What about the girls at the parties, Bodie's grandma, etc.? I was sympathetic there.

But then it does the thing where it is dismissive of some of the actual woman characters as not "female enough" (e.g. Snoop). The "men with tits" bit. ... It evades the issue that the world depicted in the show, esp. regarding the drug trade is a masculine one. So, to function in that world as a woman (e.g. Snoop, Kima, Kimmy, Rhonda) you kinda have be a "man with tits" -- and even the actual cis-men in the show have to demonstrate a certain form of masculinity. This is something that the characters even talk about.