Posts
I just wrapped up watching the last season of The Wire on DVD. Truly, we have lived in the Golden Age of television.
In no particular order:
Has there ever been a series in which almost every word and gesture of every major character has been so cranked up on full-octane testosterone? Will there ever be again?
Am I the only viewer who didn't figure out until this season that Snoop was actually a woman? I thought she was a twelve year old boy.
Did the series jump the shark when it made Detective Freamon the mastermind of an illegal wiretap? McNulty, I can see, except that he didn't have the brains to do it alone. But Freamon never showed any bend-the-rules kind of attitude. Without being a scold, he knew the rules of evidence and was always careful and meticulous about building a solid case.
The show's verisimilitude has been the subject of much more intelligent commentary than I could offer. But I have to say: whatever it's accuracy in depicting the complex interaction between the media, politicians, police, educators, and their underclass clients, never once were we shown, say, a small business owner struggling along under Baltimore's oppressive taxation and property crime. Sometimes, I got the impression that David Simon doesn't know, or doesn't care, about where all the tax revenue comes from that funds this vast enterprise, and the series was poorer for it.
Maybe other trenchant observations will eventually occur to me.
1 comment:
Yours aren't numbered, but I'll number mine since I don't know how to do the flower thing you use.
1. Having finally just watched The Shield, I think it's a close call.
2. I thought she was a boy at first, but she said something early on that caused me to pause, rewind, and say to myself "Oh, she's a girl!" I can't remember what that was, though.
3. Didn't really bother me. I actually thought it was a little stranger that McNulty would show the ingenuity that he did. If Freamon could have built the case a right way, he surely would have, but since it was evident that he couldn't he provided McNulty cover. Made sense to me.
4. That strikes me as a bit of a detour. Not sure I would have cared all that much for a lecture on taxation or regulation, pro or con.
Post a Comment