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Duncan

The Wire

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So, for the last 2 weeks or so I haven't had any internet access and was digging through the folders on my hard drive looking for something to watch.

And that's when I realized I had 5 seasons of The Wire that I had not even begun watching.

Now I am halfway through Season 4. Its a great show, guys. I love it. 

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I love that point in The Wire where you realise you understand what all the disconnected images in the opening titles are about - particularly the ones that seemed like the creators had just stuck them there for flavour and hadn't really done due diligence making sure it was accurate.

 

The one I'm thinking about specifically here is the

bad data entry on the handheld device. It looks like they're just showing someone using a handheld scanner, and being incompetent about it, but what they're actually doing is showing a container being stolen.

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I love that point in The Wire where you realise you understand what all the disconnected images in the opening titles are about - particularly the ones that seemed like the creators had just stuck them there for flavour and hadn't really done due diligence making sure it was accurate.

 

The one I'm thinking about specifically here is the

bad data entry on the handheld device. It looks like they're just showing someone using a handheld scanner, and being incompetent about it, but what they're actually doing is showing a container being stolen.

 

Although I'm not the biggest fan of the music played during the credits, I do appreciate the credits themselves most perhaps out of any single element in the show. I love that images from each season are added to the credits as they appear, making them a kaleidoscopic impression of Baltimore's present-day problems that evolves as the series reveals more complexities.

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If you want to watch a good cop procedural with Andre Braugher (being funny, sporadically), you have to check out the first season of Homicide: Life on the Streets. It's based on David Simon's book "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" (which in turn was no small source of inspiration when he created The Wire).

 

The second season on the show gets a little more traditional, but that first season did all sorts of fascinating subversive stuff. Most episodes focus on the characters, not cases, so it almost feels like a workplace comedy like Brooklyn Nine Nine at times. There's one episode that takes place entirely in the office, on the hottest night of the year, that has no casework at all, another where the entire episode is centered on a single interrogation

 

What's hilarious is that Braugher looks the exact same as he did back in the 90's (except that he was slimmer then) but when they cut back to his "old days on the force" on Nine Nine he has a jheri curls. 

 

Anyway, just thought I'd plug the most underrated drama show of the 90's. Lot of great actors on that show, like Yaphet Kotto and Richard Belzer (it was the show where Detective Munch originated) Coen favorite Joe Polito, and Ned Beatty.

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Yeah, it's been since overshadowed by Law & Order. The first season isn't even available to buy on Amazon right now, weirdly. 

 

 

A good example of the level of acting in Homicide, and how good Braugher was.

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Well now I've fallen down a hole of watching videos from Homicide on YouTube and I'm gonna have to watch it again.

 

 

(This episode was written by David Simon and David Mills and takes place entirely from the perspective of the husband of a tourist murder victim. Amazing.)

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So I don't know if The Wire is still the greatest TV show ever made, but it's definitely important to the history of TV as one of the first shows designed to be seen as a package more than as individual episodes. It's also still pretty great.

 

Its scope and ambition is phenomenal, building from a police procedural with an interesting hook to a thorough indictment of American institutions. That it manages to stick the landing and feel like every episode was going somewhere is extraordinary.

 

I don't think they really managed to ensure that the early episodes of a season stayed compelling on their own - Season 4 manages it, with a storyline that reaches a climax halfway through the season, but Season 5 forgets that lesson.

 

Well worth your time.

 

(This does mean that my housemate now will force me to watch Breaking Bad, which is fine. It was next on the list, more or less.)

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I'm through three seasons of The Wire and it's fantastic. I've been replaying the season ending montages on youtube all day. 

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I'm through three seasons of The Wire and it's fantastic. I've been replaying the season ending montages on youtube all day.

I rewatched it not that long ago and I actually liked the second season a lot more than the first time I saw it. On the other hand I found the third season I originally considered one of the best and I was not a big fan of it the second time around. Nothing beats the first season for me though.

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I rewatched it not that long ago and I actually liked the second season a lot more than the first time I saw it. On the other hand I found the third season I originally considered one of the best and I was not a big fan of it the second time around. Nothing beats the first season for me though.

 

The second season definitely took a little longer to pick up but I certainly enjoyed it just as much as the other two. I think it has to do with how the docks storyline and the police storyline rarely intersect until the very end, while the drug storyline is in a kind of transition and rebuilding phase away from the other two. Has the best ending montage, though. 

 

But I'm currently on fire about season 3. The drugs and politics storylines worked amazingly well together. What did you notice about season 3 the second time around? 

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It just seemed a lot less tight than the first season. I guess I probably was comparing it more directly to season 1 than I should have. Season 3 has a much wider scope which means less time spent on each of the individual plot lines which made it seem slow to me and I lost interest in some of the threads. I guess it was just going from season 1 where there's basically just the police and then the Barksdale crew, or season 2 where it's mostly just the police and the docks witch the prison stuff on the side. There are some specific things that I wasn't a huge fan of like how it seemed like every single character was having an affair and also with the writing it started to stand out to me how everyone sort of talks in anecdotes. I didn't hate the season by any means, I just really loved it when I first saw it and didn't this time. A lot of that might have just been binge watching the show as fast as I did.

Also Cuttys plot line I really liked. One of the things I missed was the super low level street stuff from Season 1 did showing young kids getting drawn into the game and Cutty was sort of the reverse of that.

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Also Cuttys plot line I really liked. One of the things I missed was the super low level street stuff from Season 1 did showing young kids getting drawn into the game and Cutty was sort of the reverse of that.

 

The low-level aspect of the show is one of the reasons why I think Bubbs is such a great character. Cutty's plot was really good, too; loved his talks with Avon.

 

I do miss the relative intimacy between the police/drug world in season 1, but enjoy the fact that now I can see the political angle as well. With all the institutions in play in season 3 it felt like the show was really making good on its thesis about how hard it is to change a fundamentally flawed system. 

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Rewatching the Wire and just noticed McNulty has a photocopy of the 1916 Proclomation taped to a cubicle wall at his desk which makes perfect sense for that character. This shows attention to the little details of peoples personal spaces is the thing that has so far stood out to me most rewatching this time.

 

 

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