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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Why do "best ever" discussion always focus only on media (music, movie, drama) in recent memory.
What about "the Prisoner"?
and if i were to have my life revolve around a TV show this would be it. however, like Freddie, but not so clever, whenever i go to a movie (and drag my wife or kids along - i like company) based on the review, not only are all disappointed, but i get teased about it for what seems forever. so i easily can imagine getting another monthly bill, saying "you got to see this!", then ho-hum and then the ribbing. so i think i'll be satisfied with just the review - good review!
McNulty and Bunk throwing up in the gutter during a police officer's wake while singing the Pogues' Body of an American. How more real life can one get?
I live in Belfast - Baltimore should seem as alien to me as Mars - but after watching 50 episodes of the Wire I think of it as home.
What JayV said.
And yes, Twin Peaks.
I don't like being offered your two choices, and that they are the only two possible candidates for discussion. It's either one or the other, eh? That triggers every rebellious nerve in my body and makes me want to fight back.
It's a trait I picked up as a young lad from watching reruns of "The Prisoner," watching Patrick McGoohan outwit and humiliate a new No. 2 every episode was definitely a driving factor in my lifelong inability to "get with the program."
I wonder if either "The Sopranos" or "The Wire" would have the power to change someone's whole world view for life?
I haven't seen "The Wire," never really could get into "Sopranos," liked Twin Peaks a whole heck of a lot. I can stlll remember in great detail my visceral reaction to specific dialogue and visual elements as if I'd just seen it within the last month: "She's dead... Wrapped in Pla-stic."
We don't have to worry about which of these great shows is 'better', whatever that means. Cable TV is where contemporary writers get to stretch their wings, and these shows are like Victorian novels in their leisurely, enormous reach. The longeurs and distracted wanderings that some see as flaws in The Sopranos are part of the pleasure of this generous narrative flow.
Clive James's fine essay on the Sopranos (collected in "The Meaning of Recognition") traces its TV origins to "I, Claudius" -- not for nothing is Tony's mother named Livia. Tony's pathetic gang of deluded savages quote "The Godfather" at each other and perform as if in a great tragic opera, but mumbling their lines and falling over the props, while the truly tragic characters in "The Wire" are most of them wonderfully eloquent, and unfold themselves in almost poetic speech, even during one crime scene scene, where the only dialogue is 'Fuck!'
I gave "The Wire" my greatest personal accolade when, after watching the first two series from bittorrent, I went out and bought them.
Even granting the fluid nature of the television medium, The Sopranos still comes off as dated material. Nothing new here except profanity, nudity and graphic violence on TV.
Oh wow, smart assed middle class kids defying their self absorbed parents! Hoods killing each other and cheating on their wives! Federal agents on the trail of the bad guys! Where else could we possibly find drama like that?
And...
Didn't the real Al Capone go to a therapist back in the day?
Didn't Jimmy Cagney's character in White Heat have mother issues?
Didn't Crime Story already till the grey areas between good and evil? (And is it me, or didn't Tony Dennison's portrayal of Ray Luca kick Tony Soprano's ass?)
Didn't Twin Peaks already cut a new slice through the American family unit?
Christ, Rockford Files did more to educate me to the ways of the world than The Sopranos...and Rockford Files as a mainstream network program from 30 years ago!
The bottom line, for me, is that reruns of The Sopranos's are unwatchable. Once the story has been played out, the hollow core of the show is revealed.
I liked The Sopranos, but there were episodes that felt like one big arty indulgence - and times when I wanted to scream at Chase, "Yes! I get the $&*(@! point!" And the famed humor was there, but I think The Wire every bit as darkly funny. However, the latter show's humor is far more complex, real and bitter, and never veers towards the easy slapstick that Chase sometimes used.
There hasn't been a Wire episode that didn't have a moment or a bit of dialogue that took my breath away. How the writing of so many characters, each of them so multifaceted and real, can continue to be so true amid the chaos of the world portrayed is something of a miracle.
I think of the writing for Meadow, who got a decent amount of screen time in Sopranos, and then I think of Brianna Barksdale, who by contrast is a comparative blip on The Wire. Yet, there's a scene Brianna has with McNulty, where she learns the truth about her son's death, and you learn more about her (and McNulty) in that scene than you ever do about Meadow.
No "dream" episodes.
No doubt about it The Sopranos was quality fare and I enjoyed it most of the time, but I enjoyed The Wire EVERY time.
Was and is an extraordinary TV show. The difference is that the former is dealing in ludicrous iconography and the former is just narrative. But "just" is perhaps misleading.
The first time I saw "The Sopranos" - episode two, season one - I was unimpressed. It seemed like a highbrow attempt to rip off Scorceses' "Goodfellas" and I didn't think it did a very good job.
But "The Wire" was unique in every way. There was not a single movie to which I could pin it, and wow what a relief that was! It simply showed life as close to as it is really lived in those environs as it could, and did a magnificent job. It is comparable to nothing, in much the same way as "Six Feet Under", and that is what gives it so much power. Last but not least, Laura Miller does it great justice.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
