"The Wire" on HBO

finished s. 4 last week...wow, i don't know even know what to say about it. last ep had me in tears for like a half hour, i can't even remember the last time i cried at tv/movie or whatever. the kids were incredible

also, season 5 isn't bad! am about halfway through. serial killer shit is definitely the worst part of it and not very well done imo, but everything else is really good. the city hall stuff in s. 5 is great and excellently transitioned from s. 4 - how it looks like it's gonna be a 'new day in baltimore' w/ carcetti coming in and all the bodies being found, then right away the budget crisis kills everything

(also how awesome was dukie, michael & bug ditching the corner to go to six flags???)

the show totally fucks with you too. u see avon & stringer do all kinds of fucked up shit the first 3 seasons but w/ marlo being the new king, you totally feel nostalgic for them, esp. hearing bodie talk about the good old days and how the game's all changed now. and i hated those 'greek bastards' in s. 2 but when vondas & sergei show up later and i'm all excited to see them. u can't imagine how i felt seeing avon show up in the prison when marlo thinks he's meeting sergei.

btw i'm really hoping for a good arc w/ marlo - so far he's just fucking cold. unflinching. for three seasons now. almost boring. the show for the most part has done a fairly good job wrt making the 'villians' a bit more rounded out, but marlo's just cold

"serial killer shit is definitely the worst part of it and not very well done imo"
how so? the bunk's escalating disapproval is pretty great! how else could it have been done?

Marlo is a lot like McNutty: he's a dude who really loves his job, and doing it his way!

Season 5 does have some of the best high points ever. the lows are pretty low, though.

Avon's reappearance is classic.

xxp maybe i shouldn't have spoken so soon, and yes bunk's scolding of mcnulty is pretty great. and i've got 6 episodes left in the season. but for one, for all the stupid shit mcnulty does, this still seems like a stretch. i also just can't see lester getting into it - dude likes fucking w/ the bosses and doesn't mind going against authority but up until now it was all for a purpose. following the money, the subpoenas, the wiretaps, all that was real police work for lester, and he didn't do crazy shit unless it facilitated real police work.

like what's the motive here? if they succeed in scaring city hall, city hall is gonna want the serial killer shit solved, not marlo stanfield's 22 bodies. the idea that it's somehow gonna help knock marlo down by bringing attention to some other serial killer seems like a huge stretch and not something that mcnulty & lester, who are pretty intelligent police, would actually think of doing

Marlo is a lot like McNutty: he's a dude who really loves his job, and doing it his way!

yea but u don't get anything from marlo the way u do from mcnulty. there's no sense of humor w/ marlo, no camraderie. like snoop is cold as hell but she's hilarious and engaging. chris shows some warmth to michael and you see a lot of layers to him. marlo's just a tight-ass. deadly as shit yea but a tight-ass. prop joe reached out to him nonstop but marlo's just cold as shit

and i don't even get the sense that marlo loves his job. he just wants to be the king to be the king, there's no joy there imo

There is a moment at the end of S5 that really explains my point, fwiw, but I don't want to spoil it for ya.

I really did think that S5 redeemed itself by the end of the season, even if I lost my faith in the middle.

dun worry, mark - you'll see lester's angle on it soon enough

like the one time i found marlo remotely engaging was when slim charles meets him up on the rooftop (in s. 4 i tihnk?), and marlo says, 'alright slim, have a seat. let's chop it up." i liked the way he said that, but that's about all the warmth u get from him.

(isn't to say that the character lacks any depth tho, or that he isn't a good character)

dun worry, mark - you'll see lester's angle on it soon enough

yea ur prob right, i just need to be patient

There is a moment at the end of S5 that really explains my point, fwiw, but I don't want to spoil it for ya.

thanks! i'll prob post again next week.

when i'm finished w/ s 5

you know, sometimes it's hard getting really specific and detailed about Suspension of Disbelief and what does or does not strain credulity, but in the end yeah, I agree (and think lots of others agree) that there's something about the fake serial killer that jars a bit, for that very reason -- as with anything else, it's less about realism and more about what tone and what limits we've come to expect from the show. people always respond to that complaint by saying that Hamsterdam is credulity-straining in real-world terms, but that's where the specifics and details come in; it'd be tough to explain why, but something about that just fit better and flew better within Wire-world than the serial killer seemed to.

of course, the last season's still compelling once you swallow that. and the one excuse I can make for it is this: the reason the fake serial killer jars, in Wire-world, seems to be that it's sensationalistic in a way the show normally skirts, and I suppose that's probably pretty purposeful and meaningful in a season that wants to explore the relationship with the press.

In lieu of a serial killer, what crazy shit should mcnulty have pulled? the best I can think of is maybe mcnulty finds out about carcetti's affair and blackmails him.

There's a really great and compelling re-imagined phantom menace thought up by john hodgman that you could really see working much better than lucas's version, but i haven't seen any wire fanfics that improve upon the serial killer storyline.

i always thought it was weird how many people accepted the hamsterdam plotline but not the fake-serial-killer one. maybe it's because the latter comes out of nowhere and you're eased into the former more gently. personally speaking tho - i never had a problem with either.

xpost - no - and i wouldn't change it. what's this about Hodgman tho?! i heart that man!

it would have helped if it could have made the serial killer story sensationalistic without having the actual behavior of McNulty (et al) or the tenor of the show start to feel sensationalistic. I don't know what details would have changed that, but something to draw more of a line between the story itself and more unexciting/unglamorous stuff put into sustaining it. (this was obviously attempted, but I don't think it came off.)

S5 tips into black farce with the killer plot, which personally I quite liked. I always thought the 'realism' aspect of the Wire was too talked up anyway. It occupies a very well-conceived and convincing world which perseptively comments on our own, but it's always had its cartoonish aspects (Omar, The Greek and Brother Mouzone for example).

S5 tips into black farce with the killer plot, which personally I quite liked. I always thought the 'realism' aspect of the Wire was too talked up anyway. It occupies a very well-conceived and convincing world which perseptively comments on our own, but it's always had its cartoonish aspects (Omar, The Greek and Brother Mouzone for example).

i agree w/ a lot of that. but i think that nabisco's right when he says that it's less about realism and more about what we've come to expect from the world that the show has created, like how likely something is to happen in 'wire-world'

hodgman's reimagined phantom menace (look for act 3):
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=232

hodgman should totally write wire fanfic.

like so far my problems w/ the serial killer plot aren't that 'it would never happen IRL' but that it just seems like a stretch for what the two normally intelligent characters are pushing it for xp

I keep starting to write and stopping, but will just say it even if I can't make total sense of it. For me, beyond just suspending my disbelief in regards to the two reaches, Hamsterdam and the Serial Killer, I see them as plot devices that allow the writers to explore real issues, and thus I can be ok with it.

yea but u don't get anything from marlo the way u do from mcnulty. there's no sense of humor w/ marlo, no camraderie. like snoop is cold as hell but she's hilarious and engaging. chris shows some warmth to michael and you see a lot of layers to him. marlo's just a tight-ass. deadly as shit yea but a tight-ass. prop joe reached out to him nonstop but marlo's just cold as shit

b-but he clearly loves his pigeons?

without spoiling it, season 5 really hinges on Kima and Ikea, and that will seem like an even bigger stretch if you read it that way (but it works out so perfectly!)

chap - i always felt Brother Mouzone was the most hard-to-believe thing to turn up on the wire.

I don't know that anyone's not-okay with them -- I just think some plot devices go down more smoothly than others!

^^^

& w/ hamsterdam, they stared developing that in the last episodes of s. 2. they prob took a full 5-6 episodes before it really was a full on drug market. it just seemed a lot smoother.

w/ serial killer plot, it's like 1. mcnulty happy as western district patrol cop. 2. goes back to MCU b/c shit seems good for once. 3. shit's not good anymore so BAM mcnulty invents serial killer plot to get attention to the REAL criminal. it just wasn't done as smooth imo.

i should prob repeat that i have 6 eps left in s5 so it i could be pretty wrong about it once i've seen it all

I just think some plot devices go down more smoothly than others!

I'm down with this - it's just a matter of personal opinion which ones they happen to be (duh).

I felt the killer thing worked alright because the first few episodes set McNulty up to be in an unhinged and desperate state of mind. If anything was unconvincing it's the intimacy with which his character defects seemed to be tied to his professional position - never did quite buy the S4 'I'm a beat cop now so everything's A-OK!'

another thing about the hamsterdamn and fake-killer plotlines that was always in the back of my mind - and this may sound really clichéd - but truth can be stranger than fiction. neither story is unbelievable when one compares it to say the news story a few years ago of the astronaut driving across the country with a gun and adult diaper to get some guy she was all psycho about!

for some reason that story made slightly more sense to me when I learned that astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry

Just bought the box set; will finish breaking bad and homicide and am starting this shit again.

i know. but it only makes it *slightly* less bat-shit crazy. there's no pit-stops on your way into high-orbit. the highway, a different story.

xpost

brother mouzone sucked, really stupid character.

he was based on me :(

the only time I felt any sort of warmth for Marlo was when he went over to the condo after Omar fell off the balcony and disappeared. Marlo did this classic double take and said something along the lines of "That's some spiderman shit right there."

IRL lols xp

anyways i just watched what had to be the worst episode thus far in the whole show

(s5 ep6)

will post a little more tomorrow but i'll just say that with the serial killer bs the writers seem to have thrown out the window all kinds of shit that they led you to believe in earlier seasons about mcnulty & lester (tho especially lester). ep 6 was just sloppy as hell.

i'm pissed! more than a little bitter about this tbh, it's like, what happened? tbh tho i should probably just shut up and finish the series

season five is meta. The whole "what kind of bullshit story do we have to come up with to make people CARE" thing that happens in the police department is an allegory for David Simon's own attitude about his show's relationship to the institutional/social problems it describes. So it's flimsy-on-purpose in a way that is, I think, supposed to be farfetched and slightly irritating.

in the end it pays off with a couple of excellent comedy scenes imo

in season 5 the first few episodes are ok but a little cartoonish, the middle episodes are the worst shit the show ever did, and the last three episodes are fantastic and heartbreaking. so stick with it mark!

Even the bad episodes in the middle have some great lines and scenes mixed in.

Hamsterdam works in a number of ways - the long setup/introduction, yeah, but experiments with decriminalization are hardly novel in western countries, presumably it will happen somewhere along the line in the US. And most of all because it fits into the arc of the series - solid policy on a human level getting fucked up by the political system.

The serial killer plotline was just unbelievable too me - it relied entirely too much on believing that beat cops who were involved wouldn't say anything, no one would trace any of the events/calls/etc. back to McNulty, etc..

agreeing on all the above here; the payoff is worth getting jerked around over.