Zeldar, those old threads are fun. I was very late to the party and am kicking myself for not paying attention to what people were saying. It would have been awesome, watching from the start in real time, reading the threads.
Re Frank and Valchek and the church window – that’s a good point, madmonk28, about how it would have made more sense to have the bodies turn up after Frank defied Valchek. The feds were already up in the union’s business, and Frank knew what kind of guy Valchek was. But it’s also true that Frank has a temper. Maybe he thought he was safe from Valchek, since Valchek wasn’t even in Frank’s district.
Boy, that didn’t add to the discussion at all, did it.
Did Wire jargon creep into your vocabulary while you were watching? It did mine. I responded “true dat” to an e-mail from one of my kids the other day, and he says “You’re watching The Wire again, aren’t you?” We had a cookout last Friday and I told someone to “get up in those ribs”. They looked at me funny.
I’m very impressed with the critiques in those old threads, too. Fun reading.
Whether it’s The Wire or other sources for street talk and slang, I love some of the ways of putting stuff.
That “up in here” for one. Stuff happening “behind that.” “Feel me?”
You have to wonder to what degree the writers are that hip and to what extent they rely on the actors to flesh out the dialog. I suspect it’s a two-way street.
I get a lot of pleasure reading at Urban Dictionary, and have always been a fan of the perfectly turned phrase. Slang is the evidence that our species has a chance to survive.
I doubt it. But McNulty is probably the closest thing to a protagonist in the series. He’s in almost every episode and we see him succeed and struggle personally and professionally to a greater degree than most of the other characters. He’s also sort of a twist on the old fashioned troubled loner cop with a heart of gold type. And if the protagonist of a story is the one who goes through a change, I think that’s McNulty, too. A lot of those things are also true of Daniels and to a lesser degree Kima, but I think we get a lot closer to McNulty than to either of them, and McNulty is more likely than either of them to make things happen by going outside the chain of command or doing something crazy.
Bunk solved murders and did it in a way that didn’t result in his fabricating crimes. The series made it clear that McNutty and Bunk equally respected each other as detectives. Bunk, like Jimmy, has a vocation, what’s he going to do? He wants to solve murders, B’more PD are the only people who are going to pay him to do that.
I didn’t think S5 was brave, I thought it was a bunch of cheap shots at Simon’s former employers and they were more cartoonish than any other characters in the series.
The only one who struck me as a little cartoonish was a pompous managing editor. And even then, the show was very hard on managers of all types. Who did you see as cartoonish?
Not to answer for him, but I found the whole storyline cartoonish. Season 5 seemed like a run-of-the-mill network cop show - the journalist fabricating a story seemed too obvious and cliched by that time, there was no real depth to any of the new characters, and I didn’t for a minute buy the whole McNulty fakes a crime (and even less the idea that Lester would have gone along with it). I thought they could have really done something with a storyline showing the workings of a major newspaper, but they did nothing with it.
ETA: Not to mention Omar jumping out the window like he was suddenly superhuman. I just really thought the writing was sub-par in S5. Still better than most everything else on the air at the time, though (all due respect to Deadwood and The Shield).
I agree with Marley. I think that overall the newspaper storyline was really great. Most of what was portrayed that season w/ the Sun was stuff that had really happened to Simon while he was there. Also, Templeton (the reporter busted for writing that bogus serial killer piece) was based on that New York Times guy, Jayson Blair.
The theme of season 5, according to Simon, is “what stories get told and what don’t and why it is that things stay the same.” Think about the article that ran w/ the news of Omar Little’s murder. Just a little blurb in one of the back pages about another gang-related shooting. As we viewers all knew, as did the police and the people on the streets - that was NOT just another gang shooting.
Blair is explicitly mentioned at the end of the season. And of course a lot of the background noise of the season about layoffs and understaffing is all too real for many newspapers.
If there is anything wrong with the newspaper storyline I’d say it’s that the ending depends on the crazy copycat guy, which is not impossible but is very coincidental. The Wire usually didn’t go that route. So Templeton gets off the hook and so do Freamon, McNulty, Carcetti and much of the police brass. It could happen and it tied in nicely with the theme of the end of the show as I saw it - living with the consequences of your compromises and lies - but it was not the most believable thing in the series by any stretch. To make all of that worse, Templeton is not only never exposed, he wins the Pulitzer while Gus is demoted and Alma is shipped out. So in that season they may have gone too far in trying to show the bad guy getting away with it and being rewarded and the good people being punished. Most of the other endings for the various stories were more ambiguous. On the positive side we do see Fletcher get promoted and he’s presented as the anti-Templeton: he’s thorough, he’s honest, he’s thoughtful and he’s scrupulous. He even gives Bubbles a chance to kill his story.
The theme of the end of the series, I thought, was that the peopel who try to do good have to keep compromising and then live with the compromises they have made: Freamon and McNulty get a bunch of criminals off the street, but they miss out of Marlo and the money trail and they’re no longer cops. And standing up for yourself, drawing a line in the sand and saying no more, might not be possible: Daniels swears he won’t manipulate the crime stats, but he has to resign because if he doesn’t go along with Campbell, they’re expose his theft when he was in the Eastern District. The conclusion for him made me think of John Proctor in The Crucible- but even with that in mind Daniels seems to land on his feet, and he’s doing better than some of the other characters.
Gus the editor was absurd. Every other character on the show, even the most sympathetic, are deeply flawed, but Gus was an absolute saint, with no depth to him. He was the heroic editor that everyone should had listened to, pure wish fulfillment for Simon. Also the higher ups in the paper, not just the main boss, but his toady sidekick were less well drawn than any othe characters on the show. In general, I think the season was rushed and made its points sloppily (no surprise, since it was three episodes shorter than the other seasons).
I can’t really argue with that. I will say that he was suspicious of Templeton from early in the season, and if he’d acted sooner he might not have been able to get away with everything. The managing editor was very unsympathetic but he was also a very minor character.
While I largely agree with this, I thought at the time ‘oh well, I’ll cut Simon some slack for the joy of the past 4 seasons’. Worked for me.
S5 is a triumph if only in the redemption of Bubbles and the circularity of the younger characters taking the place of older - Dookie for Bubs, Michael for Omar etc. The more things change etc.
Said it elsewhere on the dope, but the moment Randy tells the school deputy head he knwos where there’s a dead body, I was literally stood in my lounge shouting ‘NOOOOOO!’ and then cried for 10 mins. I could see the house of cards tumbling ahead. No other tv show has ever got me like that. (It got me again when Bubs went upstairs for dinner)
It’s pointed out in the commentary that whilst Gus appears to be the patron saint of journalists they very deliberately had him miss the majority of the actual stories.
Honestly I had no problem believing in the newspaper bosses, especially having done a bit of reading about where the newspaper industry is headed at the moment.
It shows us Templeton’s lying in action and how he tries to wriggle out of admiting the errors in his story. And it shows us that Gus and Fletcher are interested in the truth while Templeton isn’t.
I see a line about drug prohibition and some aspect of the war in Iraq but that’s all. It’s part of the fabric though - any dramatic work involving Iraq automatically invites parallels with the unwinnable (sic) ‘war on drugs’. It’s as inevitable as it is trite.
Slim Charles’ line in S3 was intentionally foreshadowing S5, imo. S5 wasn’t about ‘the war in Iraq’ in any event, it was (in part) very specifically about the media’s role in the manipulation of the public - well the linked article makes that case.
For some reason, what really moved me about that scene is how Snoop, knowing she’s about to get killed, uses her last words to trash Michael for being such a loner. “Yeah, thats what you say, but it’s how you carry yourself. Always apart, asking why when you should be doing what you told. You was never one of us, and you never could be.”
For me, this is exactly why I ranked S5 last. There is a scene at the end of S1 that makes this same point so much more elegantly: During the closing collage of S1, they briefly show the sofa the drug dealers all sat on in the courtyard of the projects. All through the season, it had been an orange sofa, but at the end of S1 it was a black sofa. Simon seemed to be saying that all this effort and drama and the only thing the war on drugs succeeded in doing was changing the color of the sofa.
Instead, in S5, we get Simon hitting us over the head "Michael is the new Omar (clunk); Dookie is the new Bubs (clunk). I just think the series suffered when HBO cut it short and he had to cram a lot of stuff in a shorter period.
Having said all that, it is still the best thing ever aired over a television set. The worst episode of the Wire is still great.