For as gritty a show as “The Wire” was, it also had many, many great moments of wry humor in it. What are some of your favorites?
Anyway, here are a couple that stand out for me.
The scene in the first season where Bunk and McNulty were collecting evidence and spent five minutes saying literally nothing but the f-word, or some variation thereof.
And, don’t remember exactly what season this took place in, but there was an episode where McNulty and Kima had to go to some backwoods town to collect a security tape of a couple of thugs buying disposable cell phones. They drive to the local sheriff’s office. McNulty, assuming that the sheriff is going to be your stereotypical racist yokel tells Kima (who is black) to wait in the car, while he goes to talk to him. While in the office, he’s trying to butter up the guy and says something about how the blacks are ruining Baltimore. Then he sees a black female deputy filing some papers in the background, and backtracks saying, “but there are a few good ones.” Then the deputy comes over and kisses the guy and McNulty realizes she’s the sheriff’s wife. His eyes bug out and he says again, “yeah, some real good ones. Hey, you want to come meet my partner.” The kicker is when they go out to the site, the sheriff says to Kima, “Your partner - he’s kind of an asshole.”
Omar going out for breakfast cereal in his PJs and terrorizing the neighborhood in the process. “Omar comin’!!!” Then he stops to light up a smoke and somebody drops a bag of drugs from the window above him. I’d love to be that kind of bad.
Stringer trying to apply what he learned from his business management courses to running meetings between his various corner crews, with Robert’s Rules of Order governing who gets to speak.
When Carver and Herc with their girlfriends, run into Bodie and Poot and their girls at the movie theater. Bodie takes a moment to introduce the officers: “Herc and Carver here? They try to jack us every day.”
Another favorite scene is when Herc asks a corner boy where you can find the hats with the brim on the side. The corner boy politely explains you can just buy the regular one and turn it sideways.
Oh yeah, and Snoop buying the nail gun. The salesman spends some time helping her choose a model. She asks him to ring it for her, and tips him several hundred dollars. When he protests, she answers, “Shit, man, keep it – you earned that buck like a motherfuck.” Shakes her head and leaves.
Oh! and when D’Angelo totally thinks he’s getting capped but it turns out Weebay just wants him to feed his fish.
The pricelessness of that scene is the way she really thinks it goes without saying that he will just ring her up, willy nilly, no box, no reciept, no nothing. Snoop was just spoiled for normal social interaction outside of the game.
I have never said the following before except once to a co-worker, and I will never say it again, because that co-worker got seriously pissed with me, but…
I don’t think The Wire is nearly as ‘real’ as people say it is. It is closer than any other show that tries to show inner city, ghetto crime riddled cultures that I have seen, but it isn’t on the money. There are many…moods of the culture that it just doesn’t get, and that comes off really phoney. I speak only of my own experiences, of course I don’t pretend to know it all about Baltimore crime culture, although I have spent much time there, I’m still a Bama to them, always will be.
But from what I have experienced, the show is not nearly as real as folks think. Sorry for the hijack, but this topic brought it out of me because it made me think of Snoop, who really DID capture with pure and utter realness, the mood of that culture. She gives me chills. Not with her brutality, but with her ability to bring the hood to Hollywood without it being filtered through that Hollywood machine that always loses the essence of it. And if she was the realest of The Street, Cheese was the absolute least real.
ETA: Disclaimer: I’m not a drug dealer. I’m not from Baltimore.
First of all, I hesitated to use the word ‘real’ because I know that is a triggering word for a lot of people that think ghetto culture is a bunch of wanna be stupid thugs who think ‘keeping it real’ means shooting over someone stepping on their new white shoes. I shouldn’t even have used that word at all. My mistake.
But secondly, I don’t think Snoop was being phoney in that scene at all. I think that scene was awesome, comical and cool. I think Snoop in general is the most…authentic portrayal of ‘hood’ culture I have ever seen depicted by Hollywood. I am sorry that my post was so jacked up that my meaning wasn’t clear.
I think that when you use actors, you get everything filtered through that training. There’s little chance that the best direction will get rid of that. The depiction of the plight of the ghetto, the schools, the government, etc. and the story of personal interactions was what they were shooting for in this series, and they had to be able to sell it to the public as entertainment. Probably the only way to make it any more real would have been to use local folks to make a documentary, but the results would probably be unwatchable without substantial narration. I agree about Snoop; the actor had a very real feel in her portrayal of this character (this being said without my having any familiarity with the culture). The raw psychopathic nature of her and Chris was fairly scary.
When they were trying to move the desk through a door
Poot’s sex life
The guy with the bratty girlfriend, sitting on a bench in the office, and his comment about how jail wouldn’t be so bad. What was his name? Two syllables is all I remember. Or maybe it was one syllable and she dragged it out to two.
