The Wire Series 1

[Borracho]

The Wire Series 1

Well, he does say "We".

[E10 Rifle]

The Wire Series 1

Of course Sobotka was bent, and an operator. But in that he was like around 50 per cent of the characters in the series, at least: someone who reasoned that being a bit fly, cutting iffy deals, was the only way to survive. From the perspective of someone in a neglected industry, with neglected workers, from a neglected area in which they were about to be gentrified off the radar by The Markets' plans for the docks. None of that reduces the impact of that little rant, or what the character brought to the series as a whole, which was considerable. He was very central to what the programme was trying to portray.

[Seven Saxon Kings]

The Wire Series 1

I didn't like two so much the first time but on re-watching it I love it, I'd rank it just behind four as the best two. Sobotka is an awesome character.

I thought five was by some distance the weakest season.

[danielmak]

The Wire Series 1

I don't want to post any spoilers since this is a season 1 thread, but there are two things I want to highlight: (1) season 5 was just too far beyond what could take shape; it was the weakest by far even though the media plotline was good. (2) In season 3 or 4 two things happen that were so minor and never appeared again: when the brother moves on assistant guy goes into the gay bar there is a brief shot where we see Rawls hanging out chit-chatting. Later in that same series there is graffiti shown for a split second in a police bathroom that says "Rawls is a co**sucker" or something to that effect. I never knew if that latter was in reference to the former or if the latter was just general disgruntled employee graffiti. Both were blink and you miss them moments, but interesting little moments.

[Anton Gramscescu]

The Wire Series 1

Season 2 would have been good as a standalone mini-series, but it;s still my least favourite season. It's off-putting in the context of the Wire because it was a white season on a black show.

[EIM]

The Wire Series 1

Two is my favourite. Not least because of the Omar court scene, which is my favourite moment in all five series.

[EIM]

The Wire Series 1

Oh, and McNulty studying tidal charts to land the bodies on Rawls's desk. Proper po-lice.

[Felicity, I guess so]

The Wire Series 1

I'm with E10R on season2 and Sobotka (as on many other things!).

I use that quote about 'making shit' all the time.
And I pronounce Mark Serwotka's name quickly/like Sobotka, whenever he's on telly.

And what makes him a GREAT character is precisely the ambiguity/tragedy: he is stuck in a situation where he believes he has to be bent to make a difference. By the end he is wrong whatever he does. And I mean tragedy in the classical/Shakespearean sense, not offering any spoilers nor nowt.

[Nefertiti2]

The Wire Series 1

You're right about the moment Omar testifies.

The crossword makes explicit the parallel with Achilles from the iliad when Omar sees Brandon's body

My spirit rebels -- I've lost the will to live,
to take my stand in the world of men -- unless,
before all else, Hector's battered down by my spear
and gasps away his life, the blood-price for Patroclus,
Menoetius' gallant son he's killed and stripped!

... Enough.
Let bygones be bygones. Done is done.
Despite my anguish I will beat it down,
the fury mounting inside me, down by force.
But now I'll go and meet that murderer head-on,
that Hector who destroyed the dearest life I know.
For my own death, I'll meet it freely -- whenever Zeus
and the other deathless gods would like to bring it on!

More here

I also like the gag of the photos of the surveillance van making its way around the world, and the introduction of the Greeks. And Beadie.

[garcia]

The Wire Series 1

i think the reason a lot of people initially don't like season 2 is that it is set in that incredibly unglamorous world of the docks; people who have enjoyed the first season recoil from the setting and it takes a while to understand how it connects with what we have already seen.

frank sobotka is a great character but i'm not sure he's a good one in the moral sense. he wants to defend himself and his community against the power of capital which is globalising and mechanising the industry. he uses illegal methods, not caring about who suffers in consequence, and realises too late that he has sold himself into the power of the thing he was fighting against.

[Nefertiti2]

The Wire Series 1

But who is a "good" character in the moral sense? Omar the killer?

[garcia]

The Wire Series 1

yes, omar has integrity.

obviously the show isn't really about showing unambiguously good and evil characters. i was responding to E10's earlier post about sobotka where he talked about how he thought FS would be and indeed was "on the right side". i'm not sure that's true of self-serving union man frank sobotka.

[Seven Saxon Kings]

The Wire Series 1

There are a few unambiguously good characters in the season, but not many. Lester is maybe as close as it gets of the main characters though he still has character flaws. I can't think of much that Dukie or Gus Haynes did wrong.

A lot can be said to be good in the sense of their heart being in the right place, but they aren't aware of or can't/don't control the negative impacts on others of their actions - Bubbles, Bunny Colvin and Kima for example.

It's off-putting in the context of the Wire because it was a white season on a black show.

I don't understand this to be honest. David Simon has always said the show is about the city, and the city as a microcosm of America. It was never supposed to be a 'black' show, it's a Baltimore show that has a lot of black characters in. How Prop Joe and then others work and interact with The Greeks is pretty central to the overall storyline and seasons 4 and 5 would make a lot less sense without what we know from season 2.

[E10 Rifle]

The Wire Series 1

It's off-putting in the context of the Wire because it was a white season on a black show

Yeah I think I disagree with you on this even more than I do on the Greek economic crisis. Season Two is, I reckon, utterly essential in the sequential context of the whole show. It's a statement that says to the viewer, "any illusions you had that this was just gonna be more black-on-black drug/gangster porn can be kicked out now. Here's some class issues. Deal with them."

And it's not just a white series in any case, since what's going on with D'Angelo, Stringer and Avon are also key parts of Season Two.

Talking of white characters, another fascinating and strong character, to my mind, was always that of Tommy Carcetti. A lesser show would have had him as yer standard-issue oily, untrustworthy, ambitious slimey politician on the rise - and nothing more. Carcetti's certainly a lot of those things a lot of the time but you also get glimpses of public-spiritedness at times, and a palpable frustration with the corrupt entrenched old ways that he genuinely does want to do something about. He's a properly rounded character - not that likeable, but not a cartoon villain.

And his press secretary, Norm, is great - and has some of the best lines of the whole show.

[Seven Saxon Kings]

The Wire Series 1

Norm can probably go on my list of unambiguously good characters, though he's more comic relief than a central one.

Carcetti gets much slimier as the show progresses, going from someone who genuinely wants reform for the good of communities to being very self-serving. I saw this as just a continuation of the show's theme of how systems turn people that way and anyone who wants to change the system ends up failing - just as Bunny fails with the police, Stringer with the drug trade, etc

[Crusoe]

The Wire Series 1

I'm sure I read an interview with Simon where he said that if he'd made a sixth season it would have looked more at the Latino community and (I can't remember which) either low-paid workers (hotel staff, fast food joint staff, and the like) or the sex trade.

[E10 Rifle]

The Wire Series 1

[Continued apols for spoilers!!!]

A sixth series - appetising though it may have been - would also have been a bit of a risk. I agree with others that the fifth series was a bit of a let-down after the magisterial fourth. The media stuff was good - though offering a fairly standard analysis of stuff - but the 'serial killer' thing stretched it all a bit. Though you get one of the Pogues' best songs at the end, so it's not all bad.

Looking forward to WOM returning to the thread when he's finished season four.

[Borracho]

The Wire Series 1

The media storyline in Season 5 was notable for the manner in which it completely ignored the role of the internet in laying waste to the newspaper business. I found that really strange.

[Anton Gramscescu]

The Wire Series 1

E10 Rifle wrote:

It's off-putting in the context of the Wire because it was a white season on a black show

Yeah I think I disagree with you on this even more than I do on the Greek economic crisis. Season Two is, I reckon, utterly essential in the sequential context of the whole show. It's a statement that says to the viewer, "any illusions you had that this was just gonna be more black-on-black drug/gangster porn can be kicked out now. Here's some class issues. Deal with them."

The mere presence of white working class people did not make that season "about" class. I put it to you that you (and indeed all the UK Wire fans on here) only see season two that way because you equate the presence of white union leaders in a dramatic series with a discussion of class.

What if Serbotka had been black (clearly blacks didn't like the way he was running the union and thought of challenging him), would it still have been about class?

You're quite right that it played an important role in signalling that the show was more than ghetto drug porn. The message in this series was much more about how drug money is an equal-opportunity corrupter. It that sense, it was still about race than class despite all the whites.

[Nefertiti2]

The Wire Series 1

David Simon would disagree with you

I guess what I’m saying is that the overall theme was: We’ve given ourselves over to the Olympian god that is capitalism and now we’re reaping the whirlwind. This is the America that unencumbered capitalism has built. It’s the America that we deserve because we let it happen. We don’t deserve anything better. The Wire was trying to take the scales from people’s eyes and say, “This is what you’ve built. Take a look at it.” It’s an accurate portrayal of the problems inherent in American cities.

More here -

[Anton Gramscescu]

The Wire Series 1

That's the overall theme of all five seasons, yeah?

I'd accept the notion that the whole series is about class because it's about people who've been left behind, about what happens when to working communities when jobs disappear. I have more trouble with the notion that season 2 is more about class than the others just because the characters aren't black.

[Nefertiti2]

The Wire Series 1

If anyone is saying that, that's clearly foolish. I think it's "more" about class than the others (or at least more explicitly so) because it deals with the remnants of the organised working class in a trade union and because it introduces issues of globalisation and international trade.
This is what the interview says specifically about Season 2

My writing partner Ed Burns said it best: “When the economy shrugs, it throws more people onto the corners.” It’s simple as that. Addiction is a growth industry in America. Not just in black America, but all across the country. Look at methamphetamine. Ultimately, because the drug trade is in part an economic imperative, meaning it’s the only factory still working in parts of America and therefore it is a viable employer where no other viable employer exists, it’s going to have its own fundamental lure. But it actually goes beyond money in this sense. People are defined by what they do in this culture. I think it’s the human condition. I don’t think it’s any different from any other time in history. You are what you do. You are your profession. You are your trade.

...
When you no longer have a trade, then you ache for meaning in a way that strikes to the very core of your being. It’s something that I think a lot of people don’t understand about people in the drug trade or people in the throes of addiction, which is that the choice not only offers them money. From the point of view of people getting high, it offers them purpose.

It does. Addiction gives you a calling when you’re desperate.
We pretend to educate the bottom 10 to 15 percent of American society to join the ranks of the existing economy, but it’s all pretense. We’re not really giving them a good enough education to make that leap into the service economy. We’re really preparing them for the corner and ultimately for the prison complexes. And they may not be educated, but they’re damn sure not stupid. They get it. So if they get it, what do you fucking expect? They understand that they’re being built for the corners.

The role is all laid out for them.
Every dope fiend I ever met knew what he was supposed to do when he woke up in the morning in just the same way that anybody with any other profession ever does. He was supposed to get $10 in a world that didn’t want to give him shit. He was supposed to get high and he needed $10 at the end of the day at a minimum.

It’s a strong imperative.
And that guy had no existential crisis. Whereas a guy who accepts the economic cards that have been dealt to him by postindustrial America and just sits there on his porch and says, “Well, I’m not necessary…” In a way, that’s far more brutal than addiction and death, but we don’t get that. From our perch, from our middle-class or upper-middle-class perch, from the policymakers’ perch, things like “Just Say No” sound relevant.

[Anton Gramscescu]

The Wire Series 1

I think that stuff about labour and meaning is very, very true.

I don't know, it seemed to me that the union was a bit of a prop in that series, much more so than say the newspaper was in series five. The union just seemed to be one more institution that had been corrupted by drugs. I mean, essentially this union's run in a fairly arbitrary and dictatorial style. There are never really any confrontations with management. It's kind of just one dude raging against the dying of the economic light, wanting his kids and friends to continue to have a shot at working a particular craft and derive meaning from it the way he does. The union is window dressing.

[Borracho]

The Wire Series 1

Season two has shitloads of black characters, far more than 90% of US dramas. It just happens to have several more white characters than the first or third seasons.

[E10 Rifle]

The Wire Series 1

Of course season two would have had a class theme if Sobotka had been black. Why on earth wouldn't it?