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Duncan

The Wire

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The Wire is an unstoppable monolith of brilliance. Everyone should watch the first season, seriously. This show is easily the best thing that has ever been on television.

I am also liking Studio 60 a whole lot though I am a big Aaron Sorkin fan. This is also something more people should be watching than they actually are. :fart:

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The Wire is an unstoppable monolith of brilliance. Everyone should watch the first season, seriously.

As soon as TV Torrents* stops bringing its lungs up with every request, I'll be able to sample its delights.

I swear, I'll :cens0r:ing explode if that bloody site's not in proper working order on the 6th! :bomb::pan::frusty:

"Deep breaths, Wres. Chill..."

* Reliable alternative(s) greatly appreciated.

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The Wire is not really on my radar. I might check it out.

Heh, The Wire is not really on anyone's radar unfortunately. :sad: Walter is probably right when he says it's the most important tv show ever.Very broadly, it's a literary novel about the drug war in Baltimore. I mean, that only scratches the surface.

There was a decent Slate article about this, although no one should actually read it beyond these two paragraphs, because it's largely about the fourth season.

The Wire, which has just begun its fourth season on HBO, is surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America. This claim isn't based on my having seen all the possible rivals for the title, but on the premise that no other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.

During its first year, it was possible to mistake The Wire for merely an unusually shrewd and vivid police drama. But the program has gotten richer and more ambitious with each season and now fits only into a category it defines by itself: the urban procedural. Its protagonist is the broken American city of Baltimore, depicted with obsessive verisimilitude and affectionate rage. Its fundamental concern is the isolation and degradation of the black underclass, a subject that has, with the exception of a blip after Hurricane Katrina, disappeared from the political radar screen. If the national conscience is ready for another sleepless night about the waste of lives in the ghetto, I expect that The Wire will be what keeps us awake.

It's good! It's good stuff!

edit: Oh and everyone should watch Studio 60 also!! Weirdly enough, that's the show in more danger of being cancelled. :tdown:

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Ah I see The Wire is an HBO show. I have had nothing but good experiences with HBO shows so I will check it out asap. (I recently bought the Curb Your Enthusiasm s1 DVD without knowing anything about it and didn't regret it one bit.)

That analysis of Sorkin's work is really spot-on by the way. It's very harsh, particularly on post-9/11 West Wing, but it's true. I'm always turned off by the melodramatic endencies of his shows and every episode being a sort of parable. But the reason I watch them is to see characters who love their jobs and Do Things That Matter. It makes for great escapism.

Secretly I want to be a showrunner who is called up before the weekend to take over a show because he's the only person who can and then walk into the studio and have a billion people circling around like busy bees waiting for your input and then you say something inspiring and yell "ALRIGHT LET'S DO IT PEOPLE" and then people cheer and oh man they deliver the best work possible while telling each other witty jokes and they are all awesome and aren't we a great team.

The people in Sorkin's shows seem to have the most stressful jobs in the universe though. It's justified in the case of the West Wing, but it kind of creates an odd microcosm for his other two shows. They're these fantasy workplaces that everyone would want to work at but would also hate eventually.

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Secretly I want to be a showrunner who is called up before the weekend to take over a show because he's the only person who can and then walk into the studio and have a billion people circling around like busy bees waiting for your input and then you say something inspiring and yell "ALRIGHT LET'S DO IT PEOPLE" and then people cheer and oh man they deliver the best work possible while telling each other witty jokes and they are all awesome and aren't we a great team.

lol :):D:amelie::knoweverything::earl:

brilliant. Now I feel like I can go outside and be the best damn barney I can be. Thanks.

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I just watched the first episode of The Wire. :tup: I'm really looking forward to watching more.

Has anyone watched Huff? I watched the first episode of it last week and quite enjoyed it. I love Oliver Platt. What other HBO shows are worth checking out? Is Rome any good?

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I bought the first two seasons of the wire and I can't wait to get the rest of the seasons on DVD as well. The best series ever in my opinion!

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I bought the first two seasons of the wire and I can't wait to get the rest of the seasons on DVD as well. The best series ever in my opinion!

It only gets better.

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The wire season 3 is on pre-order. I've already seen most of it thanks to me being a nasty pirate. I was halfway through season 4 when i in a stupid move accidently deleted all the wire episodes on my harddrive ;(

I just saw Little Miss Sunshine. Twice! (The second time with the audio commentary) Best movie of 2006 by far! Right next to Brick me thinks. This is such a great movie I can't believe I haven't seen it any sooner. Thanks for the tip guys! :)

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I finally got around to finishing the first season of The Wire. The middle dragged a bit for me, but the end was fantastic. I'm already halfway through the second season which is absolutely brilliant. I'm watching it at the same time a friend of mine and I are forcing ourselves to watch Firefly. It's like night and day going from brilliant writing and superb acting to cheesy writing and painfully aweful acting. I especially love Frank Sobotka's character. :tup:

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I too am blowing through The Wire. Started season 2 on Thursday and I'm... half way through now. Season 1 took me about a week -- and it only took that long because that whole pesky family Christmas thing got in the way.

Unfortunately, Season Three looks to be about $100. :fart:

:tup: :tup:

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Just finished watching the mini-series The Corner. Wow. Great stuff. Not as great, dramatically, as The Wire but that much more real.

It also made me appreciate the casting for The Wire that much more. A lot of the druggie/dealer characters here were recast, in The Wire, as cops. :tup:

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Oh man!

The last and final season of the wire is about to start. And HBO released a preview of the coming season. You can get it at the usual places. Oh and in case you want to buy the DVD's (Like me) you can pre-order season 4 now at play.com

I can't wait! :woohoo:

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I've been putting in some very, very late nights over the holiday, in order to get some more of season 1 of The Wire under my belt, and I must say I'm completely hooked at this point (up to and including episode 8).

The direction and the writing are masterful and I'm about to burst with the steadily building tension across all sides. The ebb and flow of the various narratives is great, with the small victories here and there perfectly relieving the more tense sections only to allow further build up in the story in general.

Hats off so far, really. Absolutely superb stuff -- and not once have those responsible deemed it necessary to talk down to their audience or hit me over the head with a jarring and cheap "story so far" recap. It's like every episode is a tidy, considered mini-novel. :clap:

Quite how they can keep this level of quality up for a further 3 seasons beggars belief, but I'm very hopeful.

-~-~-~-

On other televisual fronts, I'm literally about to watch the very first episode of Dexter with Mrs V as soon as I've finished typing this. Oh and I've got all my outstanding episodes of Battlestar season 3 cued up now too, along with the recently released 'unrated' cut of Razor.

Right, off we go then...

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Quite how they can keep this level of quality up for a further 3 seasons beggars belief, but I'm very hopeful.

They don't keep it up. They get better.

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Just to clarify, The Wire is about the baltimore drug scene? Started in 2002? Series 5 on at the moment?

Might try and get some.

On another note, I saw 3:10 to Yuma the other day - I loved it. Great story.

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Just to clarify, The Wire is about the baltimore drug scene? Started in 2002? Series 5 on at the moment?

Might try and get some.

Do -- the first season's superb so far.

And I believe they've just wrapped shooting of season 5, which should air later this year.

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Do -- the first season's superb so far.

And I believe they've just wrapped shooting of season 5, which should air later this year.

It premiered yesterday :clap:

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Speaking of the wire: This is just a reminder that the fifth and final season of the Wire has started and can be found on your favorite tracker

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We follow the US Army Guideline here:

Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

(Ginger especially follows this in many different ways).

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The Wire :tup:

On season 2 right now (about halfway through) and although I kind of miss the realism of season 1, it's still really good.

As for Marky Mark, at least he no longer feels guilty about the violent racist attacks of his youth:

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Oscars2007/story?id=2509542&page=1

He harassed a group of African American school kids with racist epithets [and throwing stones], and when he was 16, again using racist language, he [randomly] attacked a middle-aged Vietnamese man [with a 5 foot stick] and left [another Vietnamese ] man blind in one eye. Wahlberg was arrested for attempted murder, plead guilty to assault, and spent 45 days in jail.

And though the right thing to do would be to try to find the man and make amends, Wahlberg says, he admits he hasn't done so -- but says he's no longer burdened by guilt.

Yowch: http://www.modelminority.com/article225.html

Which is all weird, because according to my new fave show, The Wire, Baltimore is the least racist city in the world :hmph:

Edited by ThunderPeel2001

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