I’m outside the edit window, but I’d like to make anothe point. While the Wire did not have any leading women characters that rose to the level of McNulty, Bunk, Omar, etc., it did have very interesting and entertaining women characters. Mainly, I am thinking of Rhonda who had to keep fighting for the Baltimore PD. Also, Carcetti’s campaign manager was really interesting to watch and she brought about the very important series point where Carcetti refused to sleep with her on election night. While we’re on the subject of Carcetti, I thought his wife had an interesting angle, but I’m sure you guys with disagree with me. Kima wasn’t that bad at all, and Snoop was one of the most interesting and memorable characters of seasons 4 & 5. The certain scene where she was in the car with Michael at the end of Season 5 will always stand out to me.
Not remotely that. Despite what you may think, “subtle” is not synonymous with “incoherent.”
I can live with that, but I’d say maybe Enterprise instead of Dr. Who. (I haven’t watched the latter since about 1985, though, so I don’t have a current baseline.)
Oh, so you were being too subtle for me. I think I understand now. Oh subtlety, you are such a mystery to me.
But I’m still confused as to why you dislike Breaking Bad for being unsubtle, and it’s your primary complaint about the show, but your appreciation of The Wire is undiminished by its total lack of anything resembling subtlety.
Rome.
What, that wasn’t one of the choices? 
Easily enough explained: the Wire doesn’t lack subtlety, nor have you made any case for its lack of subtlety beyond mentioning a particular scene that works on several levels.
Do you want me to start listing scenes? I could do that, give you a ton of them, just off the top of my head, having not seen a single episode of the series since the finale. In addition to the whole McNuggets speech (which is super unsophisticated, and basically David Simon himself coming onto the screen and explaining what the series is about), the very first scene of the series (which is easily forgiven, since it’s basically a thesis statement), D’Angelo’s chess metaphor (which is later reiterated by Bodie when the writers needed yet another world-weary drug dealer), and Omar’s dressing down of Levy, you have the entire Hamsterdam plotline. There’s nothing fine or delicate about any of that stuff.
Speaking more generally, drug dealers don’t monologue about their existential crises or make trenchant statements about the system in which they live. Neither do detectives or their superiors, for the most part. The characters in The Wire are more like statements and less like traditional characters, which is fine. Characterization like you’d find in The Wire doesn’t lend itself to subtlety, but that’s not a bad thing.
I think David Simon would agree with my assessment, too. I don’t think he was trying to be subtle. He was angry and passionate, and he wanted to be unequivocal in his statements about institutionalized dysfunction. Subtlety was never his goal, which is why it’s always amusing to me to see The Wire described as such. If I had to guess, i’d say that most people are mistaking complexity for subtlety when it comes to the show. Because while its complex as all hell, it’s by no stretch of the imagination subtle.
Meh. I disagree with you, but that’s fine. It’s likely a question of semantics. There’s a clear difference in style between the scene I described in Breaking Bad’s pilot, and the scenes you’re talking about. “Subtlety” is the word I’d use to describe the difference, but if you don’t like that word, pick another word to describe that difference.
To help those still undecided:
‘Breaking Bad’ Collides With ‘The Wire’ for TV’s Best Mashup, Yo
another reason to love the internet and people with time to amuse us. Pretty damn good.
Not that this will help, but I just started reading this cool book:
The Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall.
It discusses how a few shows have changed the face of TV and pop culture over the last 10 years or so.
Not surprisingly these were 2 of the 12 that he writes about. Each show gets a single chapter and goes into details about who created the show, why it was created sometimes how it got made, etc.
There is some spoilerish details, so if you’re sticky about that you might want to skip the chapters of shows you haven’t watched.
Here are the 12 show/chapters he writes about (I’ve seen 9 of the 12!):
The Soprano’s
Oz
Deadwood
The Wire
The Shield
Lost
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Friday Night Lights
24
Battlestar Galactica
Breaking Bad
Mad Men
I’m about halfway through, as one of the reviews on a cheesy romance book my wife was reading said “It’s highly readable”!
MtM
For Breaking Bad, I think you could skip from the end of Season 4 to the last 10 mintues of what we’ve seen Season 5 without missing anything important. I think the characters tend to dramatically and rather inexplicably change personalities between seasons, especially Gus from 3 to 4 and Walt from 4 to 5. It also relies far too heavily on cliffhangers.
The cartoonishness of Brother Muzone was a problem for The Wire. It’s meandering focus across the seasons might be a problem. It also may have had too many characters and therefore uninteresting scenes on those side characters. Season 5’s serial killer thing was pretty goofy and probably a blemish.
Honestly, I don’t really get how someone could think Breaking Bad was remotely close to The Wire. Maybe something like Six Feet Under vs The Wire. I like Breaking Bad, but let’s be serious here. It isn’t all that good.
Now this is something I wholeheartedly agree with.