That one is the next-to-last one.
That one is the next-to-last one.
The website Dio gave is probably the best place for info.
It's impossible to describe in a synopsis, but basically it's about a special Major Crimes Unit in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, which was originally formed to deal with drug dealers in the inner city. However, the show spends as much time with the drug dealers and their families as with the cops. It also branches out into politics of the mayor's office, internal police politics, union corruption on the city shipping docks (in previous years), and the public school system (this year). There's about 15 main characters and about double that in terms of significant minor ones, so you have to pay close
attention pretty much from beginning to end of each episode or you miss something. (I usually find myslef watchign each episode at least twice because the dialogue and accents get pretty thick.)
Anyway, the plotting is incredibily detailed (and the depiction of police work reportedly very realistic). and the actors, mostly a bunch of unknowns and some actually recruited off the streets of Baltimore, is great.
thoughts on the season finale? i don't know if y'all have already seen it or wait for the re-runs throughout the week.
apparently season number 5 is the last one, so it should be a good one. the thing that has me thinking is that they're setting up the carcetti thing like he's going to be running for governor in 2 years... so maybe due to the popularity of the show they'll stretch it out a bit more.
I've finally gotten around to watching season 1 on DVD, and it truly one of the best shows I have ever seen.
Did you rent or buy it?
I think I may buy the 1st 2 seasons.
Omar Little is one of the best characters I've ever seen on a TV series.
Bought them. Tired of waiting for Blockbuster customers to return ing disk 4.
I've been a huge fan of the show since I caught the first four episodes of season one over the fourth of July when I was staying, ironically enough, in D.C. It is the finest television series I have ever seen. Here are a couple more reviews:
Season One at Amazon.com
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
After one episode of The Wire you'll be hooked. After three, you'll be astonished by the precision of its storytelling. After viewing all 13 episodes of the HBO series' remarkable first season, you'll be cheering a bona-fide American masterpiece. Series creator David Simon was a veteran crime reporter from The Baltimore Sun who cowrote the book that inspired TV's Homicide, and cowriter Ed Burns was a Baltimore cop, lending impeccable street-cred to an inner-city Baltimore saga (and companion piece to The Corner) that Simon aptly describes as "a visual novel" and "a treatise on ins utions and individuals" as opposed to a conventional good-vs.-evil police procedural. Owing a creative debt to the novels of Richard Price (especially Clockers), the series opens as maverick Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West, in a star-making role) is tapping into a vast network of drugs and death around southwest Baltimore's deteriorating housing projects. With a mandate to get results ASAP, a haphazard team is assembled to join McNulty's increasingly complex investigation, built upon countless hours of electronic surveillance.
The show's split-perspective plotting is so richly layered, so breathtakingly authentic and based on finely drawn characters brought to life by a perfect ensemble cast, that it defies concise description. Simon, Burns, and their cowriters control every intricate aspect of the unfolding epic; directors are top-drawer (including Clark Johnson, helmer of The Shield's finest episodes), but they are servants to the story, resulting in a TV series like no other: unpredictable, complicated, and demanding the viewer's rapt attention, The Wire is "an angry show" (in Simon's words) that refuses to comfort with easy answers to deep-rooted societal problems. Moral gray zones proliferate in a universe where ruthless killers have a logical code, and where the cops are just as ambiguous as their targets. That ambiguity extends to the ending as well; season 1 leaves several issues unresolved, leaving you begging for the even more impressive developments that await in season 2. --Jeff Shannon
Season Three at Amazon.com
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
With volatile issues of Baltimore city political reform as its narrative focus, the third season of The Wire superbly maintains the series' astonishingly consistent status as the greatest "novel for television" ever created. While the Baltimore police department's wire-tapping investigations continue to monitor the intricate and now legitimately fronted drug ring of Russell "Stringer" Bell (Idris Elba, smooth as ever), detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) continues his loutish ways, navigating through a series of shallow sexual conquests while doing some of the best cop-work of his career. Stringer's ex-convict partner Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) is back in the picture and bent on eliminating a drug-dealing compe or named Marlo (Jamie Hector), and Baltimore P.D. Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin (Robert Wisdom) tries his own defiantly independent brand of street justice by essentially legalizing drugs in "Hamsterdam," where isolated sections of the city are established as open drug-dealing zones, utterly without the knowledge or approval of Colvin's superiors. As city councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen) plots his own ruthlessly ambitious strategy for the mayor's seat, Baltimore officials, McNulty's wire unit, and the entire Baltimore P.D. stand poised for the inevitable fallout from street-level and executive-level manipulations of power.
Of course, this is just the tip of a very large iceberg, as The Wire continues its labyrinthine yet tightly controlled chronicle of over 50 characters, major and minor, who are all flawlessly woven into the fabric of these 12 remarkable episodes. For season 3, series creator David Simon continued to recruit a top-drawer lineup of reputable writers (including novelists Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos) and directors (including Ernest erson, Tim Van Patten, and Agnieszka Holland), and by the time a major character is killed in the season's penultimate episode (arguably the series' finest yet), it's clear that The Wire has earned its crown as the most ambitious and intelligent crime drama in the history of American television. DVD extras are excellent, as usual, including five illuminating episode commentaries (an absolute must for devoted fans of the series), a Q&A session with cast & crew moderated by renowned TV critic and author Ken Tucker, and a classroom conversation with Simon that delves deeper into the creative process of the series. Having deservedly earned its renewal for a fourth season (out of a projected five, according to Simon), The Wire delivers surprises aplenty (keep a close watch for startling revelations) while proving, yet again, that cable-TV is the place to be for anyone seeking respite from the relative mediocrity of mainstream network programming. --Jeff Shannon
Just completed all 4 seasons, and I think it is safe to say that this is the best television series that I have ever watched.
My fav. seasons in order are
4
1
3
2
The fight over the kids was really awesome TV. I loved the fact that the one Mayoral candidate running on a School Reform Platform finished a distant 3rd. Michael Lee is really a heartbreaking character.
Oh, and Herc sucks.
Him and Bubbles.
This synopsis is probably the biggest reason why most people haven't gotten into this show. Too much going on if you don't have the time to devote to each episode every week. No cases closed on this series.
I don't know what took me so long to watch this show, but it was worth the wait.
I just finished Season 3 over the course of three days. I'm not sure I've ever seen a more perfect season of television in my life. I can't wait to finish season 4 so I can start all over.
Not a single nomination? This is ing insane. The Wire is the best TV anyone will ever watch. the Emmys.
At some point even people who generally don't view most events through the prism of race relations really have to start wondering if the continued emmy snubs are racial in nature.
I wonder if this show would be treated the same if this was a 90% white cast instead of 90% black?
Outstanding article in The New Yorker on The Wire:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...printable=true
It is a long-ass article, so I'm not going to paste it here. But if you're a Wire fan, it's a must-read.
... you werent kidding about it being a long article.... but a good read nonetheless.
cant wait for the new season.
An article about "The Wire" in The New Yorker? Of course it's outstanding. And about 13 people will read it.
Great article. Great show. Looking forward to the final season.
Damn that was a long article. One of the best paragraphs - it sums up what the creators were really trying to do:
I thought this provide some nice insight into the different yearly themes:
“The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unen bered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bull of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”
In anticipation of Season Five, I'm going back and watching all the previous seasons again. Right now I'm watching seasons one and two on HBO-On Demand, and after that I'm gonna rent seasons three and four. I'm totally geeked for season 5.
"Snoop" is doing an interview on The Ticket in Dallas about her new book. On right now.
http://www.theticket.com/listen.htm
i watched a rerun of the "misgivings" episode on HBO last night and the ending was ing INTENSE!
Bodie got got
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