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The Wire is awesome, British TV less so

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David_Dovey:
Thread necro from beyond the grave!

So I am three episodes into Season Five and mostly I was hoping to get other people's opinions on the "serial killer" plotline, especially re: it's plausibility.

As far as I can tell based on other places I've read (mostly Alan Sepinwall's INCREDIBLE blogs on The Wire: thank you so much John for linking to them, they have really really helped me pick up on all of the connections and callbacks and myriad characters and significant stuff I never would've got on my own) that the general mood towards that storyline was that it was a complete misstep for the show and based on everything that had come before was completely out of tune.

I however see it as being completely in line with McNulty's character, and even when Lester joins in at the end of Ep.3 I think it still makes sense, as both characters' most basic attribute is a willingness to not only fuck everybody else over, but also to throw themselves on the fire in service of getting their man. Remember that when we first met Lester he'd been shuffled away to the pawn shop unit for doing pretty much the exact same thing years earlier.

My only gripe with it is that it all seems a bit rushed and there is a tad lacking in the subtlety ('there's a "b" in "subtle"?') department, which to me is an unfortunate but also understandable side effect of being cut down to ten episodes in Season Five, while still expanding the scope out to include the newspaper as well as the cops, dealers, politicians and so on and on and on.

Inlander:
I think I've said it in this thread before somewhere, but I've always liked to think of the "serial killer" plotline as a satire on other American cop shows, almost all of which are utterly obsessed with serial killers.

Also Dovey, how's your emotional state post-Season 4?

KvP:

--- Quote from: David_Dovey on 12 Mar 2010, 23:26 ---(mostly Alan Sepinwall's INCREDIBLE blogs on The Wire: thank you so much John for linking to them, they have really really helped me pick up on all of the connections and callbacks and myriad characters and significant stuff I never would've got on my own)

--- End quote ---
N/P. Sepinwall writes about a lot of great shows, but he made his name on the Wire stuff, for good reason. He's in the middle of a labor of love going over the seasons of the Wire and posting a second set of reviews that reevaluate the show for those who've already seen it, because The Wire is just the kind of show that gets better on second viewing. When you're done with that check out Sportnsight, which is for me far and away the best thing Aaron Sorkin has ever done, West Wing be damned (Sorkin apparently hates Sepinwall for being a big critic of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). I think he also had some good commentary on In Treatment.



--- Quote from: David_Dovey on 12 Mar 2010, 23:26 ---I however see it as being completely in line with McNulty's character, and even when Lester joins in at the end of Ep.3 I think it still makes sense, as both characters' most basic attribute is a willingness to not only fuck everybody else over, but also to throw themselves on the fire in service of getting their man. Remember that when we first met Lester he'd been shuffled away to the pawn shop unit for doing pretty much the exact same thing years earlier.

My only gripe with it is that it all seems a bit rushed and there is a tad lacking in the subtlety ('there's a "b" in "subtle"?') department, which to me is an unfortunate but also understandable side effect of being cut down to ten episodes in Season Five, while still expanding the scope out to include the newspaper as well as the cops, dealers, politicians and so on and on and on.
--- End quote ---
Maybe you haven't gotten to this yet (and it's not really a spoiler) but the main gripe that Sepinwall had was that the Newspaper storyline really does feel like score settling on David Simon's part, coming out of the journalism business a bitter idealist the way he did and seeing the fourth estate reduced to ruin. It's a valid complaint, especially when you compare the Newspaper storyline characters to characters from other seasons of the show. They don't feel nearly as fleshed out - the editors are well and truly idiots, the white guy is an opportunist, Clark Johnson is the principled Simon stand-in, etc. As savage as the Wire universe was there were very few real villains (at least until Marlo Stanfield enters the picture) yet the paper administrators have no redeeming qualities at all. Perhaps that's a function of the squashed time limit (though past seasons had just as much plot and never felt nearly this constricted).

But if you're worried that all this will mean the game ending on a muddled or bad note, I wouldn't.

Inlander:
I've watched season 5 a few times now and I think there are more subtle shades in some of the newspaper characters than they're given credit for. The editor (can't remember his name, but he's played by the guy who was Mel's husband in Flight of the Conchords) strikes me as being someone who deep down knows he's peddling bullshit, but has decided to toe the company line to save his own skin. Gus Haynes meanwhile is not entirely, I feel, the golden saint he's usually described as: early in the season there's a scene where he completely brushes Templeton off by saying something like "That's good, stay hungry" - and this is before he's even started to have doubts about Templeton's work. I get the sense that Haynes clearly plays favourites and that if you're not his favourite it would be very frustrating trying to work under him and get yourself noticed.

Of course it's very arguable that these kinds of subtle shades of grey come almost entirely from the actors and/or directors rather than from the script.

David_Dovey:
Yep Harry pretty much said what I was going to. I generally think that any gripes about the newspaper storyline and it's applicability to the goings-on in a real newspaper can be applied to any other area of the show. There are certain aspects and events which have been amplified or simplified for storytelling expediency, and generally most characters have direct analogues with other characters on the show, particularly within the police hierarchy. It's worth thinking about the portrayal of a character like Bill Rawls or even Daniels in the first season and comparing that with the roles newspaper characters play with regards to their institution.

Sepinwall repeatedly states that the complaints leveled at newspaper characters have more to do with reviewers and writers being more familiar with a newsroom than a police station or a drug corner and so inaccuracies are more apparent and takes the veneer off of what they previously saw as The Wire's infallible adherence to facts. The Wire was never 100% accurate, it's just most people never knew better, and it was still many orders of magnitude more accurate than anything else out there.

For the record I work in a newspaper's editorial department and seen the effect of the decline of print media (including two rounds of redundancies that went through the entire company in the past two years) and so have witnessed first-hand idealistic journalists have to make do with some very limiting realities. So when the editor makes his "do more with less" statements or dismisses Gus in their debate over the education series, I have a lot more sympathy with him than maybe most do who simply see him as another bureaucrat standing in the way of the truth in the vein of a Burrell or pretty much any of the political characters who aren't Carcetti.

John is right that they are pretty one-dimensional but in my opinion even though they pretty much serve as conduits for a viewpoint but I don't think those viewpoints are as concrete good/bad as it might seem.

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