"The Wire" on HBO

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

The hopper from Balmer carrying a burner

when was this ever fucking said on the show

some of these don't even seem totally accurate, either. A humble is a charge, not a search ... isn't it?

We've just finished the final episode. I'm just here to mark its passing, now I can finally open these threads without fear of spoilers.

*pours Jamesons on dvd*

I'm stalled out mid-season 4. Dunno if I'll finish honestly

season 4 finished on bbc2 last night. it picks up in the second half.

there are a lot more deaths ...

NI it depends if the subtitles are meant for closed captions (in which case it includes notes about audio i.e. "singing in background" "cough" etc) or not - but in both cases paraphrases are common - sentences that barely make sense written down can sound fine while spoken, so the subtitler often needs to simplify

Deaths right up to the last episode! That's THE WIRE PROMISE tm!

Interesting thing I noticed about the show's editing -- seems that no two consecutive scenes ever feature the same characters. I'm sure that's not a device the show invented, but it was interesting to realize what an integral part of the show's rhythm that is.

yeah one thing i loved about the show was never being sure which storyline it would cut to next, yet w/ all the different story arcs it never seemed to lumber or get messy

shakey the last couple of eps of s4 are really, really great, you should def. stick w/ it

I have no idea how you can be in the middle of the series and not be compelled to finish it. It took all my willpower not to take some vacation days and just power through the show, I rationed it so I only watched a few episodes a day near the end, I could have easily watched the whole series in 5 days.

I watched all of season 4 in one 24 hour period.

Season 5 was getting on my nerves, put it down for a while.

Yeah, season 5 can do that. The post-condo shooting scene w/Marlo is classic.

I watched all of season 4 in one 24 hour period.
Ha, I did that with season 2 and i honestly only barely remember it.

yea i watched season 4 in like a couple days. if you've made it to season 4 and have found the show relatively enjoyable, i have no idea how you could get bored with it halfway through s4.

Season 5 was getting on my nerves, put it down for a while.

same thing happened to me. i took a week break, which is the longest length of time i've taken between episodes since beginning the whole show back in june (excluding a week i took for family vacation).

I dunno I just don't find this show all that addictive or engaging. its good and everything but I just don't feel... enveloped(?) by it. I've gone into why I think this is on the Sopranos vs. Wire thread but most everyone seems to think I'm crazy or something. Perhaps I lack the gene to properly appreciate this show, but I wouldn't even put this show on a list of my favorite shows ever or anything like that.