Haven't seen it, but get a grip.
For shame, ogged, for shame. Piracy makes Baby Jack Valenti cry. Also, don't you now have that logy, sluggish "I ate too much Wire in one sitting" feeling? I'm feeling stuffed and I only watched up through episode nine.
Nope, I'm serious. I think it's now A Great Work of Art. You'll come around.
Piracy makes Baby Jack Valenti cry.
Feature, not bug, right? Anyway, I'm shelling out for HBO, and I'll keep it on for the rest of the Wire season.
And I find the show makes a hell of a lot more sense when I watch a season in a few days.
Video games reached this level with the Grand Theft Auto series.
When will blogs follow?
I haven't finished Season 4, but Season 1 has already been topped twice.
Season 1 has already been topped twice
So wrong, Scott, so wrong. Seasons 2 and 3 were thematically more ambitious, but didn't work or hold together as well as Season 1. Season 4 is the most ambitious yet, and works as well as Season 1. (By "work" I mean in terms of the believabilty of the plot and the characters' actions, the consistency of tone, stuff like that.)
I'll give you a chance to correct that, ogged.
No idea what you're talking about, Ben.
Season 3 was better than Season 1.
I agree with 11. However, Season 4 is mighty damn impressive so far.
Season 3 was great, but I thought Brother Muzzone was too artificial and some of his scenes with Omar weren't believable at all. I count those as stumbles.
So, um, whereabouts might some of these "bittorrent sites" be found?
You're going down the road to evil, JM. There's torrentspy.com, and isohunt.com, and you'll need to install a bittorrent client. I use utorrent (PC). Then, ideally, you'll want to open the ports your client uses. After that, you're all set.
Compared to almost any average webuser, I have been a model of IP-respecting virtue. And that's at least partly been because I'm afraid of breaking my computer. But I haven't even seen season 3! It's killing me.
Season 3 is out on DVD. You can do it legal like.
When did it come out? All of these damned Wire bloggers, and all of them are talking about season 4, muttermutter. Yes, the DVD would really be preferable---as long as I don't end up making an ass of myself, like I did with the first season, walking into the video store almost every day asking if the fucker who was hanging onto disk 3 had returned it yet. (Thanks.)
It came out on August 8, which I remember because I was laid up and counting the days until it was available.
Ah, that's about when I started the first season over again with my honey. It wouldn't be very sporting of me to start watching season 3 without him now that I've got him hooked midway through season 2, I just realize.
As for the other question in your post, some critics of the novel in my department have been talking very seriously about television as similiar to the kind of enjoyment that people in the 19th c got out of novels. I'm still thinking Dickens (sketches, institutions, caricatures to make up a cityscape), but we'll see how the form evolves.
I refuse to read this post or it's comments, but if anyone in New York knows someone who wants to lend me The Wire Season 1 on DVD, shoot me an e-mail. I must start watching this show. If for some reason you know someone who will lend but not to a 3rd person, I'm sure I can figure out collateral.
13: Agreed, but the same stumbles were there in S1. S3 made sense of the Stringer/Avon relationship. The one think that S1 had that S3 lacked that was astonishing was that young kid with the cornrows. Jeebus, his life.
Not nearly as pronounced in season 1, I think. Anyway, not really important; since we all agree that all the seasons are great.
Wallace is the kid you're thinking of. I think Season 4 does an even better job with the kids, in terms of detail and the twisted logic with which character plays itself out in twisted situations. But the emotional wallop of Wallace's story is tough to beat. I still get chills when I think about D'Angelo saying "Where's Wallace, String? Where the fuck is Wallace?"
21: Absolutely. Moreover, at the beginning of novels, the criticisms of them sounded a lot like the criticisms of television: low, populist crap that turned young people's (especially girls') brains to mush and taught them to think only about sex and romance and not about more important or educational things.
Which either goes to show that there's nothing new under the sun, or that it's all been downhill since the advent of the modern era, take your pick.
And what the fuck is going to happen to those kids he was handing juice boxes and potato chips to?
26: Yeah, that's probably the most emotionally effecting story of the show for me so far. It was the bizarre goodness and normalcy of it all. And the kid had such sweet, sleepy face. Ugh.
low, populist crap that turned young people's (especially girls') brains to mush
Except that this criticism is largely true. Most novels and tv shows are crap that turn your brain to mush. The mistake is thinking that that's inherent in the medium.
26 was to 24.
B, the positive critical approach is so much more difficult, if it doesn't resort to the whole-text, thematic, political, business. There's something phenomenologically comforting about the unfolding of the characters and the narrative--and that part is near impossible to discuss intelligently, I've found.
28: I don't really agree. I think that most tv and novels, the seemingly crappy stuff, does what JM is saying--there's something phenomemologically comforting about narrative. Moreover, I think it's not only comforting, it's a way for us to think through/express ways of seeing the world (which as JM points out, starts to bring in the political/historical stuff, but then, I like that stuff). There is something really fundamental about story. I kind of suspect that most crappy narratives are to good ones kind of the way sudoku or crossword puzzles are to theoretical mathematics or etymology.
28: Well, I agree with you, ogged. We almost certainly have different ideas about which shows are pap, though.
the seemingly crappy stuff, does what JM is saying--there's something phenomemologically comforting about narrative
Obviously it's massively appealing, but it's also limited or misleading or boring in lots of other ways.
We almost certainly have different ideas about which shows are pap, though.
It's easy.
Buffy=pap whereas The Wire=genius
The Wire lives in a different universe than Buffy; it's much, much better.
Which isn't to say I never watch anything some people might consider pap. I enjoy House. Curb Your Enthusiasm is also awesome.
B: The problem with your theory is that television was shitty for the first 50 years of its existence before they could be bothered to make something good. (Unless it took 50 years of novels before someone bothered to write a good one; in which case I'm completely pwned.)
No, some of the early novels were great, but part of their greatness--much like the argument I make for seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy--is that they weren't quite novels, b/c the form hadn't settled down into full-blown narrative realism yet.
No, some of the early novels were great, but part of their greatness--much like the argument I make for seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy--is that they weren't quite novels, b/c the form hadn't settled down into full-blown narrative realism yet.
This would be a stronger argument if you weren't simply plainly wrong about Buffy 6 & 7.
Buffy 6 was a mess. Buffy 7 was thematically interesting marred by poor execution (much like the third season of The Wire, ho ho hoh!). Buffy 5 was the peak.
Early novels are kind of bizarre, as B says. I haven't read, say, The Adventures of Telemachus, but Defoe takes great pains to deny the novelistic nature of his work, generally representing it at factual accounts.
(JM, if you need help locating some Wire torrents, shoot me an email.)
In reminiscing about Wallace in Season One, recall who pulled the trigger.
Wallace was freaked about the body on top of the car, out back. That killing caused quite a few subsequent developments, through Season Three.
Thanks, Steve, but my conscience got the better of me for now. (It's not the piracy I'd feel bad about, but skipping ahead without my Wire-addicted honey.)
But Buffy appeared in, what, year 49 of the medium? There's still the 48 years of suck of that the critics were talking about. (And it's not like Buffy didn't get its share of critical adulation.)
To 13
Ogged, I just don't understand the complaint that Mouzonne and Omar seemed artificial and outside of the show. I see that as their reason for existence. The show (in large part) is about the effects of institutions on individuals, so of course the two characters who exist largely outside of those institutions (and, to a lesser extent, Wise Bubbles. Junkie Bubbles, not so much...) carry a great deal of 'otherness' with them.