Uh…he was my least favorite character. The first season almost lost me because it seemed to be playing to that “White Man Saves the Day” trope. Fortunately the second season put an end to that nonsense and show him to be a jerkoff just like everyone else.
You know, that’s a good point I’d want to add. We basically watch no episodic TV in this house, so we mainly use the TV for sports events and PPV movies, AND we have younger kids, so we’re limited in what we can watch. Nonetheless, when a co-worker pointed out the Metacritic reviews for season 4 of The Wire, we queued the series up in Netflix and tried it out. Shortly thereafter we began watching one or two episodes late every night…it turned out to be that addictive. My only comparisons for whether that might be ‘best’ are other series we tried on DVD: Six Feet Under (we bailed about 2/3 of the way through Season 2) and Deadwood (we quit late in Season 1) and X-Files (have seen most episodes multiple times) and The Sopranos (I bailed late in Season 1, my wife finished it out), and in that universe The Wire is by far our favorite.
I was thinking he meant Omar.
Ok, sorry for assuming. My reason was that McNulty is certainly an anti-hero, and also an anti-hero is often the protagonist, which Omar is not.
I do disagree with your assessment of him in season 1. He was a jerkoff already by then. Or rather a flawed character with redeeming traits. And to the degree that the day was saved many from his detail, especially Lester, deserve equal recognition.
Regardless of which character monstro really meant, a glance at Who are your FIVE (5) favorite characters from “THE WIRE”? should give some idea of how 46 voters felt in September, 2010 – not that they would necessarily vote the same way today.
I’ve read of a lot of people having this problem with The Wire (some in this thread, even!). Try to force yourself to watch a few more. If it doesn’t click for you by episode 6 or 7 maybe it’s never going to, but for a lot of people it seems like that’s where they get into the rhythm of the show.
I think this is what in great part contributes to The Wire being one of the greatest shows ever. Plenty of recent dramas have dared to make the hero more flawed, more unlikable, more believable.
AFAIK, only The Wire tried to make the “bad guys” more human as well. On The Shield, Vic & co. might be horrible but the villains they’re up against are irredeemably worse without exceptions. Same thing with *Sons of Anarchy. *On The Wire, Bodie or Slim Charles might be violent drug-slinging thugs without a compassion bone in their bodies, but they’re also pretty cool guys with quite a few virtues, and quite a few fears too. I found myself empathising with many of the “baddies” at times, even guys like Chris or Spiros.
And then there’s Bubbles, one of the most poignant characters I’ve ever seen on T.V. He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s a dumbass loser, his story is heart warming, his story is gut wrenchingly horrible, he’s likeable and yet sometimes you get to loathe him so much. He’s in the margin of the stories and almost outside of society, yet he’s also pretty much a living embodiment of all the problems society has. Brilliant piece of storytelling.
Yes, The Wire is the greatest TV show of all time.
In fact, of all types of media I enjoy (books, movies, broadway musicals, pop songs, classical compositions) TV shows are the only one where I clearly and decisively have a single absolute favorite – and one where I feel confident that any serious critic will either agree with me or at least have The Wire very near the top of their list.
The Wire is so good that it makes it harder to enjoy other, very good, TV series because they lose so much in comparison. The West Wing, for instance, is an extremely well-written and entertaining show, but because it doesn’t have the feel of extreme authenticity that The Wire has, it now seems very staged and TV-show-y to me.
(Second place is probably Breaking Bad, by the way…)
The show is great because it also goes into how the “bad” guys become “bad”, with season 4. Those kids are the most realistic thing about the show. I liked how they all had counterparts in the adult world. You know which kid is going to be the next Stringer Bell or Chris (Michael) and the next Bubbles (DeShawn). You know Bug will probably turn out alright. Maybe he will grow up to be someone like Bunny or Gus. You see that none of the kids were born being evil. Michael is the most well-behaved kid out of the bunch and very likable and caring (for his brother and DeShawn). No doubt like Stringer Bell was when he was a kid. Maybe if he hadn’t been abused and had been raised in Beverly Hills 90210, he’d have a different outlook on life. 
The little loudmouth brat who killed Omar? It’s tempting to say he’d be the next Marlo, but no. I think he represents the wannabes that aren’t smart enough to avoid early death or life-long incarceration and don’t have an interesting enough story to tell.
Absolutely.
Can’t believe a show apparently this good was under my radar al these years. I loved six feet under and deadwood, and watched other HBO shows, but never gave a thought to the wire. I honestly don’t even know the premise. I’m excited to give it a try.
I thought Omar, but it applies just as well to Stringer Bell. What a guy – going back to school to learn professional business tactics and strategies that could be applied to drug dealing! He’s certainly the best drug kingpin ever written for television.
As others have said, it’s not a show that “grabs you” right up front. With the same admiration for the HBO track record that you mention, I watched the first episode of The Wire expecting wonderful things to happen. I was so bored with the pace and the lack of any forward movement that I can’t remember if I finished that first episode.
It took SDMB threads, and Auntie Pam’s zeal on the subject for me to get the Netflix discs of the first two seasons and then catch up with the last three (S3 was in progress if my memory is right – might even have been S4) either “live” or from On Demand.
Knowing that I should have been more patient with S1 made me dispense with the need for things to happen fast, and the growth of the characters became the important thing to watch for. That, for me, was the main trick. And for HBO and the producers of the show to have had the balls to go against public expectations is one of the most fascinating (and praiseworthy) aspects of the whole idea.
I disagree. Strange as it may seem, Omar is one of the good guys, in the way that Robin Hood was a good guy. He only took from the dealers. He even joined up with the guy who was hired to kill him.
I’m not even sure he was an anti-hero. I’m leaning toward him being a just plain hero.
Oh man, I could go on about The Wire for hours… days. There are so many great characters that haven’t even been mentioned yet.
He was an anti-hero because his motives weren’t altruistic or for the “good of all”. He was simply filling a niche–a robber of criminals–that no one else had the guts to fill. He never went after “citizens”, but that’s because they didn’t have the kind of money that drug dealers have. He wasn’t a philanthropist. He was an unapologetic thief and killer.
He only worked with the cops when he was getting revenge. Not because he respected the law.
He was intruiging because he defied a big stereotype–that of the “wimpy” homosexual. Folks were straight-up afraid of Omar. His name was legendary. He made even Chris Partlow look like a boy scout.
That’s an understatement! It was that very fact that led Bob Ducca and me to flood SDMB with polls for choosing the best (or favorite) characters by category (as set forth in The Wire - Wikipedia and subordinate pages) before even attempting a “final poll” on the subject (linked to above).
Those polls drew a fair amount of negative commentary (at least about the number of them) but also a fair amount of participation from The Wire fans, and if there’s been a comparable set of threads going into as much detail as those did, I don’t remember them, and certainly didn’t particpate in them all that much.
The show was loaded with unique and compelling characters, not that other HBO shows weren’t as well – and even FX and Showtime and AMC for that matter, but the quality of the exploration of character dynamics is unmatched in any show I have spent any time with.
There are a lot of series that are the ‘best’ for different reasons. The Wire was outstanding, and pretty much ruined cop shows in the past and future. I tried to go backwards and watch The Shield; I gave up partway through episode one, as it just seemed stupid to me. Band of Brothers is arguably the finest WWII series ever made; anything else will likely come out a distant second, including The Pacific. The Sopranos was the ground breaker for gritty, realistic series and will always have that distinction. It was riveting and addictive, although some like to sneer at it in retrospect. Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Carnivale, Rome and others were examples of superbly made and innovative series. Trying to pick The Best from all of these is a pointless exercise for me, as I enjoyed them all.
The Wire is one of several highly-regarded TV shows (others of which have also been mentioned in this thread) that I have been hesitant to get into because I’ve been afraid they’d be too dark and depressing, too obsessed with crime and violence. What I love about The West Wing, aside from the fact that it’s intelligently and entertainingly written and acted, is that it’s a show about fundamentally good, admirable, likable people who are trying to do fundamentally good, admirable, worthwhile things, and I often feel like a better person for having watched it. I don’t get the impression, from what I hear about those other critics’ darlings, that I would have that same response to them—in fact, they seem to be praised precisely for focusing on the dark side of life.
I don’t think Omar is in particular a bad guy, I was saying I don’t think he is a protagonist:
A protagonist (from the Greek πρωταγωνιστής protagonistes, “one who plays the first part, chief actor”[1]) is the main character (the central or primary personal figure) of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative’s plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify.
Sheeeeeeeeee-it yeah, it is.
Actually I’d say there’s the seed of an Omar somewhere in little Kenard. Then again, there’s also the seed of a Cheese.