The Wire

GOAT show. havent seen a usual traveling crustie punk this summer hopefully shes in NA with bubs

I think we just need to get rolling.

Yeah I think Sergei is a more important and memorable character than Glekas for sure. Some of the best quotable lines on the show.

One of the few tv shows I’ve gone through twice. Just finished rewatch of season 5. The FBI profiler scene detailing the homeless serial killler’s likely personality profile in front of McNulty is TV gold.
Final rankings:
3
4
1
5
2

I will get a bracket posted for this at the very least this month, but hopefully earlier.

yeah, in most rankings either 2 or 5 is on the bottom.

personally i think the issue with 2 is the complete change in setting and introduction to a whole bunch of different characters is kind of a shock. you just spent a whole season getting to know all these characters and their environment and all this shit happens and suddenly you have to learn about a whole bunch more. and of course one of those characters is Ziggy, so you have to deal with that too.

but i think the ending of season 2 elevates it above season 5. not that there is anything wrong with the finale of season 5, it wraps up the series great, but the finale of season 2 just really gave me an emotional gut punch.

if Frank Sobotka isn't a top-level seed in the bracket, then someone is gonna be getting upset lol

I've sometimes ranked them 43215, but my real ranking is probably 43125. But I truly love season 2. I appreciated it much more on rewatched.

Season 2 is the most self-contained story by far, for obvious reasons.

What's the best depiction of journalism in fictional media? I feel like it's very hard to get people to care about the job. Even Spotlight I wasn't nuts about.

I haven't seen too many....probably because they came off as boring. I need to set aside more time for dramas/award-contenders and the like.




I would need to re-watch it because it's been years but I remember loving the movie Good Night & Good Luck. It was extra credit if we went to see it in college for my media studies class but I ended up loving it. David Strathairn was great.








Also, as much as it didn't live up to the original and people mostly dismissed it I love the parts of Anchorman 2 where they basically show why 24 hour news networks (and news stations that cares more about ratings than actual information) took over and dumbed everything down. It has a few nuggets of greatness in an overall silly sequel.










Almost Famous about music journalism, I guess.

I don't know. I've seen good arguments for McNulty's actions (at least from a character perspective....not saying he's in the right). First off, obviously the alcoholic stuff sucks but that comes directly off of him feeling responsible for Bodie. He got involved and it ended in tragedy. Easy to see why he'd revert.

And even the faking stuff......if you keep in mind that his whole character is a cop who breaks the rules then it kind of tracks. He has ALWAYS played the system. Gone behind his superiors backs, talked to Judges to get what he wants, McNulty is all about the greater good and is willing to lie/mislead in order to take down the big fish. That's been his character for a while and he definitely has had it bite him in the ass more than once.


I always like David Simon's defense of that whole storyline. Here's one interview:



NEWSWEEK: Season five, more than any other, seems to pivot on a major plot device--the phony serial killer created by Detectives McNulty and Freamon, and by Scott Templeton, the Baltimore Sun reporter who unknowingly joins in on the lie. You pull it off with the show's usual verisimilitude, but I do think the plotline has asked fans to take something of a leap of faith. Knowing how much of the show comes directly from the experiences of your writers, was there a specific incident that inspired this storyline? And was there any debate among the writing team about whether it was believable enough?

David Simon: I disagree in all respects with the premise. We legalized drugs in West Baltimore in season three and did so in full view of half the police department, if not the community itself. Certainly, on that basis it required as much a leap of faith as anything conjured in this season. The manner in which the serial killer is faked--the forensic ambiguities of a post-mortem choking of a fresh corpse--are precisely accurate. I was in the chief medical examiner's office one morning when a county detective had to fight hard to avoid having an OD turned into a homicide by a cutter who was misreading the trauma. And the lack of attention paid to deaths in that particular cohort--the homeless--is rather stunning. We didn't stretch very far at all.

As for a reporter lying about it, I regard this development as not a device at all. We had a guy cooking it at The Sun, repeatedly. The newsroom got wise to it after repeated retractions. And cooking it is a commonality in all newsrooms. [Jayson] Blair … [Janet] Cooke, [Stephen] Glass--you ask any veteran newsman at any major paper and he'll recollect reporters who were caught and quietly dispatched, or who, for various reasons, were allowed to skate. And I love the way that whenever the latest incident occurs, the journalism community reacts as if it's the rarest of aberrations. At what point do we begin to acknowledge that the ambition inherent within the construct provokes some to fraud? The problem, I believe, is far more systemic than journalists will comfortably admit, and in fact, most Americans sense this. More than 60 percent believe that some portion of the news report is manufactured or exaggerated by reporters. Count me--a lover of newspapering--among that 60 percent, having seen it happen routinely in my own newsroom. So I don't feel as if there is anything particularly unbelievable about a guy cooking it.

Am I being too critic-y in thinking that the phony serial killer storyline is a dig at both the cultural consumption habits of Americans and Hollywood in general--that the only way to get anyone's attention these days is to throw a serial killer at them?


There is very much a critique in the fixation that Americans have with the pornography of violence, as opposed to the root causes of violence. We have zero interest in why the vast majority of violence actually happens and what might be done--politically, economically, socially--to address the issue. But give us a killer doing twisted s--t or, better still, doing it to pretty white girls, and the media and its consumers lose all perspective. We are definitely speaking to that.

The serial killer is killing homeless men. In Baltimore or elsewhere, who gives a f---? They are not white ex-cheerleaders lost in Aruba. They are not close. Nobody cares about that cohort. There were a series of homeless men killed the year I was in the Baltimore homicide unit [for Simon's 1991 book "Homicide"]. There was no task force, no outcry, no publicity and no arrests in any of the murders. This is America. Nobody gives a good f--- about the poor. Not really.

- www.newsweek.com/david-simon-end-wire-93337