"The Wire" on HBO

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.

S5’s biggest problem is starting production thinking they were only going to have EIGHT episodes – they totally rush the McNulty recidivism/serial killer nonsense in a way that Hamsterdam had the luxury of not doing – it’s halfway through the series before you know what’s going on in S3 but S5 just kind of throws all the toys on the table and starts bashing them against each other

(second most especially: that the connection between the paper/slimy reporter/McNulty & Lester antics is up and running almost immediately, instead of playing out their own strands and then gracefully, glancingly interconnecting, the way other seasons’ plotlines do. [ie McNutty never even sets eyes on any of the dockworkers in S2 IIRC, Major Crimes barely even become aware of Hamsterdam as a unit in S3 – Herc & Carver do, but they’re working the Western] {etc etc} <brackets are fun>)

This is also why the end of S5 works so much better than the rest of it – they managed to get those two extra hours before they get that far in, so everything has a chance to breathe better. Though I could have taken a good 40mins of Norman laughing at the serial killer reveleation tbh.

Season 5 definitely felt rushed compared the others ... the newspaper people seemed flatter as characters and were probably the least interesting of the non-cop cultures explored in the show.

i like some of the newsroom people. gus is great, & alma is just...yea she's pretty cute huh? alma's great. i liked the police reporter guy (twigg) who got the boot. scott sucks tho. am totally hoping this guy falls hard. the newspaper boss sucks too.

but that's part of the sloppiness of S5 again - u have a character like scott templeton or the baltimore sun boss who isn't really likable, interesting, or intriguing at all. all 4 seasons took pains to round out the characters, even the characters u tend to dislike or that impede the main protaganists' shit. burrell is total jerkoff but it's really fun to watch him play politics all the time, rawls is just a spectacular asshole, herc is hilarious & shows all kinds of camraderie w/ carver, etc. sucks that season 5 wasn't able to do that w/ templeton, et al.

am disappointed at alma's showing in the WIRE BABEZ POLL btw

sorry to belabor the point everybody, but.... the stupidity of whole serial killer plot strikes me as something HERC would do. make up some bullshit story, run an illegal wiretap, & say the information came from a CI? like that is some fuzzy dunlop-type shit.

lester tho? this is the dude who chewed out mcnutty for trying to work stringer when they was supposed to work kintel williamson, same dude who gave all kinds of speeches about how "the only way we make this case is with a voice on the phone" & how necessary it was for the case to work within the confines of surveillance regulations, etc. like if herc was running this whole plot it might be more believable, but instead it runs counter to all kinds of shit u were supposed to believe about freamon & mcnutty

people are fluid though - these characters are not a fixed set of characteristics - to my mind that's part of the point, that a fucked up system will drive people to go counter to principle

I'll grant you making herc the total focus for season 5 would be amazing balls move, but freamon and mcnulty were on this trajectory from season 1. also, bunk's reaction when he pulls freamon to steer mcnulty right is priceless. i think where the wire may have failed is not making you cynical enough to believe it might work as well as it did, or that a culture of sloppiness in the dept. would help make this happen.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/used-subtitles-to-watch-the-wire-the-writer-says-thats-just-criminal-1773087.html

just been lolling at the translation section in this silly fluff piece about middle-class daily mail writers who don't understand this new jive talk

Baltimore talk Lost in translation:

*The hopper from Balmer carrying a burner

A child drug dealer from Baltimore is carrying a disposable mobile telephone used by drug dealers to stop the police monitoring their conversations.

*Crew up with corner boys for a re-up

An instruction to form a team of young men who can sell drugs on a street corner when a re-up, or a re-stock package from drugs wholesalers, arrives.

*The G pack

A wholesaler's package of 100 vials of cocaine

*He's a Yo

Police term for a corner boy.

*The civilian's carrying weight

An ordinary person who is neither a drug dealer nor an addict who has been served a custodial sentence.

*The Game

Life of a drug dealer in which the dealer accepts a distinct set of ethics in which even apparently minor transgressions may be punishable by death.

*There's been a humble

An arrest or search of a corner boy on flimsy or no evidence, intended merely to humiliate.

*Stash house

A heavily guarded property in which drugs are stored and cut.

*Those Red tops/blue tops/yellow tops are worth a lot of cheese

The colour-coded vials of cocaine (use to identify quality) are worth a lot of money.

*He's not a fiend, he's slinging

He's not a drug addict, he's selling drugs.

*Walk-around money

Petty cash used by corrupt politicians for the purposes of persuasion on election day.

though the article itself doesnt explain how people like india knight *understand* whats being said merely by seeing it written down

also how do subtitles get written? are they taken directly from a script? do they take into improvisation - what if they can't understand something spoken that isn't in a script?

so I understood most of those, I'm so accomplished

tbh i've used subtitles while watching a few episodes but mostly for the technical language the cops use -- all those acronyms, legal terms, all the steps needed to authorizing wiretaps, etc.

you can pick up most of the street language in the first episode imo.

and gahhh those translations are terrible