And if you don't click the link, you're a racist.
I enjoyed that and I've never seen an episode. Post title: disproved!
"Iff"
Sniff. I wholly deny that I enjoyed seeing it nonetheless.
I'm on the second disk of the fourth season right now and got HBO to see the final season.
After The Wire ends its run, the nation will turn to even more ambitious storytelling projects.
We a drunkass pair bunch of meta motherfuckers right now
Unfogged After Hours.
Somebody remind Blume that she needs to get going on season two post-haste so we can have a chance of being caught up before the new season ends.
Oh me oh my. That was awesome, plus it reminded me of that great crime scene analysis that went on and on and on and where Bunk and McNulty only used one word.
My birthday was in November. Anybody in possession of Season 3, please feel free to send it to me.
OT: Pittsburgh people need to cheer a little harder!
11: My favorite scene ever.
12: Copies could be made . . .
We might have to meet Mr. and Mrs. Oudemia for a secret exchange!
Will, the whole thing is available via bittorrent. And I think it costs just $50 anyway.
Sadly, I keep reading the post title as "If'n ..."
Pittsburgh is trying to cheer, but it's hard to hear over the gas bills. Where is season 5 of The/Wire to be found? I know some people have privileges....
Sorry Ogged. Didn't see it on bittorrent. Will look again.
ogged:
tell me about bittorrent, please. Is it safe? Better than buying the disks?
Will, you have a real job, and so you should buy the disks. I note, for your academic interest, that bittorrent is perfectly safe until they decide to throw all the users in jail.
Oh golly. This has turned into a whole thing while I've been watching Season 4. It is only $48 on Amazon. So, as you all will, Will. It rules. David Simon is worth the money. But I would happily lend it to you.
In terms of an entertainment investment, it's certainly worth the money. I've watched the second season three times in the past two months (once with self, once with wife, once with guest). Things pile on so quickly and you miss so much that you're damn near compelled to re-watch it. You know, somebody should write something about that ...
Started watching The Wire. I am intrigued, but not yet in love, but I am only two episodes in.
I've never watched The Wire, so I apparently would not enjoy the link, but I did recently spend some time in Baltimore and it was actually pretty pleasant, contrary to the impression apparently conveyed by the show.
I did recently spend some time in Baltimore and it was actually pretty pleasant, contrary to the impression apparently conveyed by the show.
People visiting L.A. probably don't think it looks like The Shield, but that's because they're not hanging out in the Pico Union area.
It occurs to me that you (from the pics I've seen) bear a passing resemblence to Pryzbylewski.
People visiting L.A. probably don't think it looks like The Shield, but that's because they're not hanging out in the Pico Union area.
True enough, and I certainly wasn't in the part of Baltimore depicted in the show, but in conversation with some people it seems that their impressions of the city as a whole are shaped by it to a surprising degree.
It occurs to me that you (from the pics I've seen) bear a passing resemblence to Pryzbylewski.
Hm, yeah, a bit, but his face is much more angular than mine.
Or maybe he just has a more prominent chin.
True enough, and I certainly wasn't in the part of Baltimore depicted in the show, but in conversation with some people it seems that their impressions of the city as a whole are shaped by it to a surprising degree.
Also that the other two recent critically-acclaimed TV series most characterized by relentless urban hopelessness were also the other two recent TV series set in Baltimore ("The Corner" and "Homicide: Life on the Street").
So it's the fault of David Simon's entire career and media empire, not strictly The Wire.
Right. Baltimore is like the new national symbol for urban failure, which isn't entirely accurate. It's certainly got its problems, but it's no Detroit.
I have never watched The Wire, fearing the necessary investment, and believing that I personally didn't need another heavy dose of social pessimism.
I also tried Oz and couldn't handle it. Just a softie, I guess.
Gollygee, I can be a better troll than that.
Having just finished watching Dench & Blanchett in Notes From a Scandal, and well, Little Children a while back, and Cache, & etc, I do wallow in vast rotting tubs of pessimism.
I guess I feel that the point of shows like Oz and The Wire is to comfort the middle to upper-middle white educated HBO subscriber by portraying slimepits so very distant & exotic from the slimepits the viewers inhabit on a daily basis.
I like my vicarious despair to run closer to home.
My Baltimore-resident sibling and husband hate The Wire (in a sense; they watch it while enjoying and believing it a great deal) because, as referenced in 31, it basically guides all of the city's bourgeois self-reflection, while adding an extra layer of confidence that it is, in fact, worldly realism.
On top of this, my schoolteacher brother-in-law reports that the kids the show is about just plain don't get it. It reinforces their own negative self-perception; the opposite of the "Believe" banners, stupid as they may be.
Basically, they think David Simon is an irresponsible ass. Who happens to make great art. I am, of course, renting it when i get back on campus.
re: 38
I have a cheap one:
http://www.mediongopal.co.uk/prior/index.php?BEREICH=produkte&produkt=1
Works fine, cost me about 100 dollars. No idea about the US market, though. Presumably different main manufacturers.
I feel guilty about not liking The Wire.
I just started watching the show last week on DVD; I finished Season 1 and am in the middle of Season 2.
I have a class-based theory for why the show has caught on (besides good writing, acting, etc.): It lets relatively well-off people feel glad that they are not trapped in the low-rent word it depicts -- not just the world of the drug dealers, mind you, but of the cops and union guys. You can feel good that you're relaxing on your sofa watching your widescreen HDTV, instead of working a dead-end job in the evidence room or hoping Frank lets you unload a shipment at the docks that day. Plus, your office probably has PC's instead of typewriters.
11: that great crime scene analysis that went on and on and on and where Bunk and McNulty only used one word.
Yeah, that was great. I was like, "all right, that has to be the last one," but it just kept going and going, and yet never felt forced or gimmicky.
45: oh nonsense you marxist. It's well written.
45: I don't know if that contributes, but you don't need anything beyond the writing and acting to explain the popularity. Combined, they are at (or near) a high water mark for TV.
Look, the Wire is an okay show, but it would be better with a laugh track.
45, 47: Looking at my bedside table, Maurice Lever's biography of de Sade is well-written, as is Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, but wussy honky bloggers -- cough Yglesias cough -- don't throw up a few thousand words every week about the sodomy laws of the ancien régime or "word to the transparent tigers, yo."
50: So now there's a serious lack of well written books? Everyone blogs about it on TV because it's such a novelty...
Everyone blogs about it on TV because it's such a novelty... it makes a certain sort of person feel, and feel morally superior about feeling, down.