"The Wire" on HBO

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.

good points

otm

I remember hearing Simon feeling regretful of the all-male writers rooms of the wire after the much more diverse room they assembled for the deuce.

hardly a unique failing of course

For sure.

is he still making a Spanish Civil War show? that seems destined to make everyone mad

Reg E Cathey was such a delight every time he was on the screen.

Yes he was.

And though Clarke Peters was near-perfect as Lester, I still would've liked to have seen what Cathey could have done there.

Season 5 is both better than I remember (the serial killer plot isn't that bad when it's not focusing on McNulty acting out his relapse, City Hall stuff all good) and much much worse (every scene set at the Baltimore Sun).

the smug Simon stand-in at the Sun doing his "at the Baltimore Sun, God still resides in the details" after correcting a poor word choice - fuck u fuck u fuck u

awww Clark Johnson, who would later go on to trade off w/Tim Van Patten at directing very special episodes of prestige tV

He's not bad (as an actor, the role is bad), I didn't see him as a Simon stand-in. This one was an old white-haired white guy. The real Simon stand-in probably is the 50-year old crime reporter who gets bought out and then immediately reveals his photographic memory of everyone who works for the police department.

I love Clark Johnson, he was so, so good as Lewis on Homicide. His performance in the episode "Crosetti" is prob my favorite TV performance of all time.

xp - oh yeah that guy.

wgae council member david simon says he decided not to step down specifically to tell digital media workers—which he admits make up almost 1/2 of membership—they're not welcome at wgae and please go somewhere else for solidarity and contract protections https://t.co/TF2mv1ATE8 pic.twitter.com/yURvgVPsx7

— sara david (@SaraQDavid) August 4, 2021

this makes my head hurt

Just really dumb reasoning. The great majority of unions organize workers in different trades.

also why would you want to lose due-paying members?

idk there are definitely dynamics where there are smaller unions that get absorbed (not the best word choice, sorry) by larger ones, and the needs of their members and/or locals aren't prioritized by the larger org (e.g. the teamsters)

I can see the rationale for Simon's argument. I just don't know enough about the different agendas/issues about the different types of workers to be able to determine whether he is otm, because he could very well be not otm

xp. yes but that's particularly because the teamsters is a bad, undemocratic union

JFC: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/michael-k-williams-the-wire-star-dead-at-54-1235009002/

worst news

photograph taken at his home in brooklyn, august 2021.

by jesse dittmar. pic.twitter.com/xVLILGDfVA

— #freekeithdavisjr (@liberianjue_) September 6, 2021