The Wire, seasons 1 through 3
Thursday, 17. April 2008, 12:05:54
What's there to say? Except Wow. This is some damned good television. Many thanks to Lothair for nagging me thoroughly and steadily until I started watching it.
The first few episodes of the first season bears what I'm almost starting to think of as the HBO-syndrome - slow start, many characters, little happening. Especially The Sopranos was similar to The Wire in this respect (and in many other, actually). Then, unnoticably, about halfway through the first season, the show's Captivating and you're Committed.
What is The Wire about? Well, it's about Baltimore City, and its corruption and misery. The focal point in the first season is the police department and the drug trade, shifted to (without ever dropping the first two) the docks, unions and politics in the second. The third sees a return to the drug trafficking-focus, but the politics keep being played up very heavily as well. And in the fourth, which I've recently started watching, we get introduced to the disfunctional school-system.
What the show does so well is introducing each of these aspects of the city's problems and spheres on top of each other, causing an eventually very layered understanding of what's going on and how everything affects everything. Most of the main characters are policemen - competent and incompetent, well-meaning fuck-ups and abusive bastards, they've got all flavours - but there is also a sizeable portion of the screen-time given to various criminals, both high- and low-level. And as the series progresses, an increasing amount of politicians start claiming their share of the screen time as well.
Several of the characters are quite awesome. In particular I love Rawls, a magnificent asshole of a high-ranking policeman, Lester Freeman, a silent and manipulative bastard with the best intentions, and even more so Stringer Bell, one out of the two main men behind the West Baltimore drug-operations. Every season introduces new people to the main cast, though, and every season does quite a darned good job of it. And almost all the existing characters all go through very good, interesting arcs - several of my favourite characters in season 4 used to be among the most two-dimensional and maybe even boring ones in season 1.
The plot is intricate, complex and engaging - a tiny bit predictable at times, maybe, but the predictable bits gets drowned out in the richness of all that's going on that you didn't see coming anyway.
A thoroughly recommendable show, and possibly - probably - among the top ten shows I've ever seen. Off the top of my head, I'll describe it as a few small notches over the thematically similar "The Sopranos", for instance, and I'm pretty sure it'd come out swinging after a comparison to geek classics such as "Babylon 5" and huge hits such as "Lost" too - because it might never have the Huge Big Awesome Episode shows like those three serve once or twice per season, but every single episode is as good as the one before it - and often better. And THAT's accomplishment. "The Wire" isn't so much a tv-show with a given number of episodes per season - it's more like an awesome miniseries, where every season is a well over ten-hour-episode.
And with the exception of "Battlestar Galactica", I know for damned sure I'm not currently watching anything remotely comparable to it. And what I've watched before that can compete can be counted on two hands - maybe just on the one. And people? I've watched a lot of TV.
The first few episodes of the first season bears what I'm almost starting to think of as the HBO-syndrome - slow start, many characters, little happening. Especially The Sopranos was similar to The Wire in this respect (and in many other, actually). Then, unnoticably, about halfway through the first season, the show's Captivating and you're Committed.
What is The Wire about? Well, it's about Baltimore City, and its corruption and misery. The focal point in the first season is the police department and the drug trade, shifted to (without ever dropping the first two) the docks, unions and politics in the second. The third sees a return to the drug trafficking-focus, but the politics keep being played up very heavily as well. And in the fourth, which I've recently started watching, we get introduced to the disfunctional school-system.
What the show does so well is introducing each of these aspects of the city's problems and spheres on top of each other, causing an eventually very layered understanding of what's going on and how everything affects everything. Most of the main characters are policemen - competent and incompetent, well-meaning fuck-ups and abusive bastards, they've got all flavours - but there is also a sizeable portion of the screen-time given to various criminals, both high- and low-level. And as the series progresses, an increasing amount of politicians start claiming their share of the screen time as well.
Several of the characters are quite awesome. In particular I love Rawls, a magnificent asshole of a high-ranking policeman, Lester Freeman, a silent and manipulative bastard with the best intentions, and even more so Stringer Bell, one out of the two main men behind the West Baltimore drug-operations. Every season introduces new people to the main cast, though, and every season does quite a darned good job of it. And almost all the existing characters all go through very good, interesting arcs - several of my favourite characters in season 4 used to be among the most two-dimensional and maybe even boring ones in season 1.
The plot is intricate, complex and engaging - a tiny bit predictable at times, maybe, but the predictable bits gets drowned out in the richness of all that's going on that you didn't see coming anyway.
A thoroughly recommendable show, and possibly - probably - among the top ten shows I've ever seen. Off the top of my head, I'll describe it as a few small notches over the thematically similar "The Sopranos", for instance, and I'm pretty sure it'd come out swinging after a comparison to geek classics such as "Babylon 5" and huge hits such as "Lost" too - because it might never have the Huge Big Awesome Episode shows like those three serve once or twice per season, but every single episode is as good as the one before it - and often better. And THAT's accomplishment. "The Wire" isn't so much a tv-show with a given number of episodes per season - it's more like an awesome miniseries, where every season is a well over ten-hour-episode.
And with the exception of "Battlestar Galactica", I know for damned sure I'm not currently watching anything remotely comparable to it. And what I've watched before that can compete can be counted on two hands - maybe just on the one. And people? I've watched a lot of TV.
