I believe the chess scene is also in Season 1. Watch it and it will explain the show on many different levels. (“The king stay the king.”)
In fact, here it is right now. Enjoy!
I forgot to mention that this scene also includes some serious foreshadowing, considering the fate of the pawns and the ultimate fate of Wallace, DeAngelo, and Bodie.
I think, in a thread where the OP has asked about whether he should keep watching The Wire, it’s a bit irresponsible to start posting spoilers.
I don’t watch much primetime drama, mainly because what little I have seen has always struck me as highly artificial. Good guys are almost always unrealistically perfect people (moody or crotchety at worst), bad guys are irredeemably bad, police departments are gleaming and well-funded, with no office politics, no incompetent idiots, and no bureaucratic clock watchers. In short, they bear no resemblance at all to the real world. And the thing that pisses me off most about primetime drama: you always know that, come the end of the hour, everything will work out just fine. Good guys win, bad guys are in jail, and everyone survives, except perhaps the occasional bad guy.
The Wire breaks all those conventions. The “good” guys, almost without exception, are flawed individuals, our main “hero,” Jimmy McNulty, deeply so. Most of the bad guys, even the most brutal and vicious, have at least a few admirable traits, and some of them are more sympathetic than some of the nominal good guys. I find all of the characters, even small bit parts, to be extremely well conceived and acted.
The main theme of the entire show is that the organizations in which we work have their own imperatives and ends, often quite distinct from their stated goals, and shape the character and morals of the individuals within them. As such, the police department, drug dealing organizations, dockworkers’ union, political campaign, elementary school administration, and mayor’s office all have a great deal in common. People in them who try to improve things (i.e. “rock the boat”) rarely succeed as planned, and usually pay a steep price for making the attempt. Just like the real world!
One of The Wire’s favorite devices is to set up parallel scenes that demonstrate the similarities between opposing organizations. In Season 1, Episode 1, McNulty is called into his boss’ office and reamed out for not following the chain of command. A few scenes later, D’Angelo is reamed out by his boss for his stupid actions. The number of times such parallels are drawn between sides, between characters, or between other incidents is almost countless.
This is not intended to draw a simple moral equivalence between the police and the criminals, although it does show (realistically, I think) that the police are not the pure good guys they would like us to think them. And it does clearly show (also realistically, IMHO) the futility of the “war on drugs,” something that too few voices in our society have the courage to say.
Finally, storylines are carried across a full season, not wrapped up neatly each hour. And the show isn’t afraid to kill off major characters. This means that you can never tell what’s going to happen next. The fact that you have to track multiple plotlines and characters through five 10- to 13-hour series makes each season more like a complex novel than a conventional TV show.
So do I think you should watch it? To quote one of my favorite characters, sheeeeeeeeeee-itttt, yeah!
FYI, Dominic West is English, not Irish, but his character is supposed to be of Irish ancestry. When drunk (he always drinks Jameson’s) McNulty occasionally takes on a slight Irish brogue. This is, IMO, intentional, and not an indication of bad acting or sloppy filmmaking.
FWIW, I guessed at Irish; obviously I guessed wrong. He still does a terrible American accent, which is distracting.
According to Amazon, it will be available on DVD in August.
I’m sorry to report, though, that the general consensus is that S5 didn’t quite live up the to the standards set by the first four. But I’m not saying not to watch it, of course.
I don’t think it’s a terrible American accent. The main that bugged me (as a native Baltimorean) is that he’s supposed to be the son of an East Baltimore steel worker. As such, he should have had at least a trace of the classic East Baltimore accent, known as Bawlamerese. But it is so subtle and complex that, AFAIK, no non-native actor has ever successfully recreated it on screen. A few real Baltimoreans in the show have it, most notably Lt. Mello and assistant principal Donnelly (Season 4).
If you think West’s American accent was bad, you should have heard McNulty (the character) trying to fake an English accent in Season 2. It was hysterical.
Omar, like my other favorite character of all time, Al Swearengen of Deadwood, will grow on you. He seems like a scary thug and nothing more, but believe me, he’s more. Season 3 is his season, and that’s about how long story arcs generally last in this show. It’s not for people who are looking for a short-term payoff.
And the “fuck” scene with McNulty and Bunk was the scene that made me decide to keep watching the show. Brilliant, and yes, it is significant to the plot, but I’ll say no more.
ETA: Dominic West’s accent bothered me too, but not enough to even slightly ruin what was an altogether transformative TV experience.
Yeah, my wife and i almost cheered when the Assistant Principal first appeared. It was so clear that the actor was a local.
I think that the absence of the white working- and lower-middle-class accents on the show is one of it most disappointing aspects. It’s far more noticeable, to me, than McNulty’s occasional lapses. Even Season 2, which focuses much of its attention on Baltimore white working class culture, doesn’t have many characters who pull off the Bawlmer accent.
It must also be mentioned that S5 only could not live up to the past four seasons of The Wire. It is still better than 98% of the stuff out on television.
That’s exactly the scene I came here to mention. Why? Because it’s literally the only three minutes of the show I’ve ever seen, but it made me decide to watch the show on DVD when I got a chance. (Hate to come into the middle of something with complex storylines.) Now it’s on my Netflix queue; just waiting for the right time.
Prepare to “waste” a few hundred hours watching and rewatching this show. 
Yes. Although the accent seems to be dying out, and I wouldn’t expect many of the white collar characters like police or politicians to have it, we certainly should have seen it among many or most of the dockworkers. However, directors apparently don’t think it’s worth the time and effort to coach Hollywood actors to attempt it. It’s hard, and doing it badly would probably be worse than not trying it at all.
It comes up in all of Barry Levinson’s Baltimore films. The first time I saw Diner, I didn’t think anything about it until a bit player (a waitress, perhaps) spoke with the real Bawlamer accent, and then I thought, Oh yeah: they should all sound like that!
In Tin Men, Danny DeVito seems to be trying to do it, but it just comes off as a bad Southern accent. (IIRC: it’s been years since I saw it.)
Yes, absolutely.
I think you misspelled “invest.” 