The Wire is a much better show but didn’t get 1/100th the fanfare of GoT
Too many black people? People would rather see fantasy words with swords and sandals?
I recall it getting plenty of attention. If anything, more people I know were interested in and watched the wire than did Game of Thrones.
I’m pretty sure the Wire actually got pretty poor ratings, considering how well it did critically.
Game of Thrones also started off with a built in fan base from the books.
There weren’t millions of “The Wire” books sold decades before a TV show was ever conceived.
It’s really simple and it actually doesn’t have anything to do with book sales (though that matters a bit) or ratings (again, sort of important, but not the big reason). Instead, it’s because…
The Wire was a very good cop show. There have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of good cop shows in the history of television.
Game of Thrones is a sprawling medieval epic. This has never really happened on TV before. So it’s a BIG HAIRY DEAL.
Did the Wire have a lot of Sexposition scenes? You know, like exposition, but with whores? Because that’s one of the selling points of GoT (or was when it first started, I think)
The Wire had very good ratings in urban centers and very poor ratings everywhere else. I think this was because the wire had a large black cast, the story was complex and demanding (not to mention depressing, it’s about the death of a city); and it required the viewer to really pay attention.
While Game of Thrones is complex (for fantasy), it also has boobies and dragons and any time they need to explain a complex plot point, they do so while two hookers go down on each other.
They’re both great shows, but I would put The Wire several levels above GoT as far as overall quality and depth of writing. GoT has a higher production value, I’ll grant you, but The Wire was a much more “important” show.
I still call Littlefinger “Carcetti” any chance I get.
Dramas with a largely black cast have often struggled in the ratings, though oddly sitcoms can fare well. Also The Wire–while highly entertaining–is very bleak. Granted Game of Thrones can be dark as well (I imagine, I’ve only read the books) but inner city darkness is probably more depressing than fantasy darkness. I avoided the Wire until just now because I didn’t see the need to watch a show that would just make me feel bad. This was a mistake, The Wire is very entertaining and compelling–I definitely get that “just one more episode” feeling when I know I should go to bed–but I get why people would tend to avoid it.
It’s too bad, it really is a great show and reaches heights TV rarely even aspires to.
I haven’t watched either series, but as for “getting attention,” I am much more aware of the existence of The Wire than this other show. I’ve heard the name, (maybe only on the Dope) but until this thread didn’t know it was a medieval epic.
Also, The Wire required a lot more attention, in my opinion. It was a tough show to get into, even from the beginning, not because it wasn’t any good, but because it was so “inside”.
I also think that GoT came out in a time of more mature social media, so it’s easier for things to get talked about and tweeted and retweeted and so forth. Not like The Wire (which is amazing) came out all THAT long ago, but one might imagine it being more likely to find a fan base today because of that.
The Wire was a cop show that followed cop show formula very, very well and did a great job with it.
GoT is getting attention because GGRRM’s story takes everything from Fantasy/Sword and Sorcery stories and tweaks it just slightly, and a little more realistic in behaviors. Those tweaks and the need to not become too attached to characters and complete lack of any heros or ‘good guy’ amongst the protagonists is what is getting the attention because it defies what people have come to expect.
MaxTheVool it’s also easier now to find and download a brand new show and talk about it immediately than it was 11 years ago when The Wire first aired.
It first aired in Ireland on an Irish language channel TG4, which may well have been the first channel here or in the UK to air it. I watched it when it was on there and hadn’t heard of it before. A year or two later FX aired it in the UK and it got a wider audience but FX wasn’t one of the main channels in either UK or Ireland. I would hazard a guess that more people here (and maybe in UK) watched the show on DVD quite a while after it had aired or illegally downloaded it than ever watched it on a regular channel. I know The Guardian and other newspapers championed it but I don’t think it was ever the genuine watercooler success that GoT has been.
1. Because The Wire was a show, at least on the surface, about contemporary cops and gangsters. There are A LOT of shows and movies about that genre. While The Wire was on it had to compete for attention with The Sopranos and The Shield, and a slew of other less impressive shows in the same genre.
2. Because The Wire isn’t a better show than Game of Thrones. I twice made a genuine effort to get into The Wire and I honestly couldn’t see what people found so appealing about it.The Wire might have hit a little too close to home for me. I’ve had to work with Baltimore criminals in one way or another for the past several years of my life. And the idea of them waxing poetically about their Machiavellian power struggles is laughable. Most of them are so stupid that they actually have great difficulty even communicating with other human beings.
The Sopranos went down hill in its last seasons but one thing I really liked about it was that it went out of its way to establish that most people who decide to make a career out of violent crime are unintelligent and emotionally damaged people. It wasn’t a show about power struggles as much as it was a show about psychology.
Were we watching the same show? What cop show formula exactly and how?
The Wire was nothing like any other show on TV. Its excellence remains unparallelled. However it was not an accessible show because of its dense plotting. Its creator actually said “fuck the casual viewer”. This may be true of GoT too, but perhaps less so.
I think it’s this. It premiered in Summer 02, which may have contributed to it not being noticed right away. Today it would have been reviewed by countless pop culture writers on blogs even before the first episode.
For me, HBO On Demand was crucial in hooking me on the show, because I didn’t really pay attention to it until before season 4, and I was able to watch the first 3 seasons in wonderful four episode chunks on my couch. HBO On Demand debuted in 2001, but it took some time to roll out everywhere.
When the Wire trotted out cop show formulas it did so to turn them on their heads, the cop who plays by his own rules is a barely functional alcoholic who not only pisses off everyone of his colleagues, he ends up being kind of shitty at his job. The bad guys often get away with it and make a lot of money doing so.
I don’t think The Wire was a cop show. It was a SOCIETY show, and cops were a part of that as were the politicians and crooks (one and the same in some cases), the schools, the unions, etc - and how all of these pieces of our society affect each other from the top of Government all the way down to the kid slinging crack on a corner in Baltimore.