THE WIRE- season four
djanna
1,543 Posts
it's ON DEMAND if you got that shit. I am watching it right now- aww yeah, good TV is back in effect. 
djanna
1,543 Posts
Comments
Is the kid that plays the one kinda strange kid (ummm, Dooky?) the brother of the kid who plays Chris on Everybody Hates Chris?
no doubt, but what do you use to grab stuff like that? bit torrent? or itunes store?
with out giving anything away, whats the basic storyline of season 4?
I saw a little 30 min. special they had on HBO about the coming season. It focuses on 4 friends in middle school I think. The theme is education, whether in the schools or on the streets. Each kid represents a different path/problem children face in the inner cities.
This is not only the best show on TV, it's the best show about America's cities EVER.
In the HBO special they gave a lot of background from the two creators on characters. The Deacon on the show was one of the biggest drug dealers in Baltimore in the 70s and 80s, went to prison, and then changed his life around for example.
13 Hours Ago I Was A Different Person
On the other hand, having something new to look forward to each week makes life worth living--I will be watching each episode as soon as it is available.
"What you got here is your word and your reputation. With that alone, you've still got an open line to New York. Without it, you're done."[/b]
snoop (the butch girl with marlos crew) is just gangster. i liked her in season 3 and i like her even more now. chris (marlos sideman is pretty raw) and her are going to be doing dirt all season.
the mayoral race should be interesting to watch.
i feel bad for bodie. i like that dude too.
anyway... it looks like its going to be another great season of the wire. id rather sit and watch the whole thing at once though. definitely the way to watch it.
And Jinx, that girl you talked about was a real street kid involved in dealing and such before she got a 2nd chance with acting on the series.
In the meantime, here's a nice review from the SF Chronicle that ran today:
Yes, HBO's 'Wire' is challenging. It's also a masterpiece.
Tim Goodman
Wednesday, September 6, 2006
The Wire: Drama. 10 p.m. Sundays, HBO.
Over the course of its first three seasons, "The Wire" on HBO has been one of the great achievements in television artistry, a novelistic approach to storytelling in a medium that rewards quick, decisive and clear storytelling. It has never flinched from ambition -- dissecting a troubled American city, Baltimore, as well as and certainly more truly than any history book could have. It has tackled the drug war in this country as it simultaneously explores race, poverty and "the death of the American working class," the failure of political systems to help the people they serve and the tyranny of lost hope. Few series in the history of television have explored the plight of inner-city African Americans and none -- not one -- has done it as well.
On the off chance that you need to be reminded, this is not "Desperate Housewives."
And yet, the curse of "The Wire" and the thing that makes its creator, David Simon, nearly apoplectic, is the notion that "The Wire" is difficult and dense and hard to follow if you haven't been there from the start. Simon, perhaps the best writer in all of television -- a label one should not toss around lightly -- has a point when he jokingly suggests that critics who love the series should temper the part about it being difficult to jump into. That scares away viewers. It makes people believe he's forcing them to eat their vegetables on a cable channel that offers brilliance in other packages, some of them a whole lot easier to swallow -- like "Entourage," for example.
And yet here are the hard truths about "The Wire," not all of them the kind of accolades that might sit well with a producer hoping for a big turnout come Sunday. First, it is, in fact, a difficult series. Viewers would benefit greatly from having seen the first three seasons, currently available on DVD or waiting like little orphans at Netflix. (That said, you can slide into Season 4 on Sunday with less effort than it took to hook yourself on Season 3, in part because "The Wire" is essentially starting from scratch, and new viewers could check out the immensely helpful HBO Web site to familiarize themselves with the characters, and also come to Jesus on the issue of great art taking a little more effort than, say, watching a sudsy hospital drama.)
Second, the argument over whether "The Wire" is the best show on television needs only two other participants -- also from HBO -- in the form of "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood." Rather than split hairs, let's just say that the breadth and ambition of "The Wire" are unrivaled and that taken cumulatively over the course of a season -- any season -- it's an astonishing display of writing, acting and storytelling that must be considered alongside the best literature and filmmaking in the modern era.
If you're not interested in "The Wire" after that, Godspeed to your unexamined life. That said, expecting the series to be simple, easy or unchallenging is a ridiculous notion. And we speak of it no more.
After the death of drug dealer and entrepreneur Stringer Bell and the incarceration of his partner and empire-ruling (and ruining) leader Avon Barksdale in Season 3, "The Wire" returns yet again to dilapidated Baltimore to explore what remains. And much of it does. The wiretapping of young gang leader Marlo (Jamie Hector) is up and running, producing encouraging results for Major Crimes detectives Freamon (Clarke Peters) and Greggs (Sonja Sohn). McNulty (Dominic West) seems happy walking a beat as a street cop, and the mayoral race between incumbent Mayor Royce (Glynn Turman) and the white challenger, Councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), is heating up. The big hook this year is that former officer Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski -- who accidentally killed a cop in Season 3 -- is now teaching in one of Baltimore's tougher grade schools.
The whole gist of Season 4, in fact, revolves around education. And not just in the wildly dysfunctional, borderline hopeless Baltimore public schools system, but as has been the way of "The Wire" -- a series that has managed to contrast the mundane failures of office work (police) with the mundane failures of being a drug dealer running a syndicate -- the show will explore all facets of education, from what volunteer boxing instructor Cutty (Chad L. Coleman) brings to young kids trying to stay off the street to what kids on the corner are learning about the drug trade from older dealers to what "Bunny" Colvin (Robert Wisdom), the repudiated major in the police department (who tried to set up a legalized drug experiment), can do to help a Maryland university study at-risk kids.
It is a bold, sweeping and dense look at what education means on all levels in a faltering urban structure. Not the kind of fare you're going to get on NBC at 9 p.m. Not easy to decipher, not easy to access. Rewarding? That's a wholly separate issue.
The beauty of Season 4 is in how Simon and his team of writers deftly and slowly reintroduce past major characters into their new roles. In a way, Simon has decentralized the cast structure that nominally had West as the lead and Bell (Idris Elba) and Barksdale (Wood Harris) as co-leads. Now the enormous cast serves as one lead (how they act when they bump into each other -- wonderful plot elements at every turn -- should delight longtime fans without overly confusing new viewers, which is a structural marvel all to itself).
Yes, McNulty is back. Bunk is back. Pretty much everybody is back. Hell, even Wee-Bey is back. Best of all -- "Omar back."
And yet, what was true of "The Wire" the past three seasons is true here. It starts slowly. It continues to move slowly, with intricate strands of story revealing themselves at a leisurely pace, like a good, well-crafted book. No, check that -- like a great novel. As in seasons past, it's not until the third episode, where directions announce themselves, that the myriad stories pile up with irresistible pull and depth. By the fourth and fifth episode, once again you're caught in a bracingly complex, enriching tale you don't want to end.
"The Wire" is an inherently sad story. Though Simon and his writers infuse it with street-smart humor and even a droning, Dilbert-like quality that strips workplaces and government institutions to their flawed core, the heart of "The Wire" is a dark one, as always. The tale that Simon has told for three seasons can best be summed up this way: "It doesn't work."
The war on drugs is flawed not only from a police procedural standpoint but also because the department is beholden to the mayor and the mayor to special interests. Even the most cleverly constructed, forward-thinking drug gangs are flawed because the greed, hopelessness, laziness and fearlessness of others always intervenes. Politics fails because so much of Baltimore is in the death grip of immediate need, of decadeslong failure that demands reparation. And now we see how the education system doesn't work, from a strapped school district that advocates "social promotion" so that teachers don't have to deal with bigger, stronger troublemakers, to the cruelty of poverty and how it strips away chance and, ultimately, to the much more damning, complicated notion of historical nonparticipation of poor families in the very idea of necessary education for betterment.
An after-school special this ain't.
There is a crushing sense of failure at all turns in "The Wire," but that has never, in three seasons, been as disheartening as it might sound. That's because Simon has ratcheted down the age range of where hope meets reality. And at that intersection, we meet a whole new batch of kids on "The Wire." Emphasis on kids. Simon catches them at a crossroads, their innocence still intact despite it all. Their vulnerability exposed. Season 4 follows the lives of a band of grade-school kids who will find out sooner than they should that their world begins and ends at the corner.
It's not Simon who should worry that people won't watch his show because it's difficult. It's viewers who should worry that they are missing the absolute best of what television has to offer merely because it requires effort.
Thought I'd bring the Wire discussion back to this thread, having migrated into the general HBO thread...
Season 4 so far has been up to par, thanks to OnDemand I'm up through episode 3. I can understand if people thought the first couple of episodes were a little slow, one of the cool things about the Wire is that they show you things in earlier episodes without exposition that you can't understand until you're further into the series. I see bad things for Royce, I imagine things won't go well for him if or when Marlow's body stashes are found. I guess that's one of the things I like about the show, there's plenty of foreshadowing without big neon letters flashing "this is foreshadowing".
I'm not too surprised, HBO sent out the whole season to reviewers for season 4. I guess they thought the strength of the whole series as a complete story would outweigh the inevitability that unethical types would get ahold of the series and make it available through illegitimate channels. Then again, perhaps they're following the Creative Commons model that free distribution will drive legitimate consumption through increased visibility.
either way, those who post spoilers will get teh BAN![/b]
edit: Brother Mouzon is watching
well, 13 hours of your social life at least.
PS, the ladies pursuing Cutty are giving my favorite quotes of all time
"I throw down in the kitchen, among other places"
I spent the whole of season 3 (and now I'm starting on S4) with this trusty player:
No conversion necessary. A match made in heaven for torrent fiends.
That's what I dig about the show, those little detailed touches. Stuff like that makes the whole thing just ring with truth. anyone who has worked in DC or Baltimore knows those women.
I love the musical sequences at the end of each season, basically showing things wrapping up and going back to normal.
I like how they injected some more comedy into this season, e.g. the Method Man "dog" subplot and McNulty's failed attempt to play the rac(ist) card with the Virginia cop! Shit was hilarious.
This show, and particularly this season, is some of the most serious TV I've ever seen - from a screenwriting, acting and directing standpoint. You could learn so much from just watching Season 3: about politics, relationships, crime. Shit was realer than real.
Fucking Donette. Talk about some sad shit.
And McNulty's character development really reached a crescendo in Season 3. He was always the wiseass, obsessive cop. But to see the case end like it did (for the second time), the amount of emotion in those final scenes was deep. I like that Daniels decides to keep him on but he decides to go back to the Western. "It's not you; it's me." Man what a great line.
Can't wait to get up on Season 4.
PS What was Rawls doing in the gay bar?!?!?
Yeah, this new season has been great so far - I like that the pacing has been closer to S1 than S2 or 3, both of which took a while to get started. I know others disagree, but this season feels really fast to me already and I'm enjoying that constant drive of the storylines.
I also don't think the bootlegging will hurt the show so much considering HBO has already announced that Season 5 will be the last. The show has always had really poor ratings despite critical love and I have a lot of respect for HBO to stick with it for five seasons despite. Look at how Deadwood is about to get deaded after 3 seasons even though it's had double the number of people watching on a week to week basis.
By the way, I finally watched The Wire S1 (yeah, strange to have waited so long) and while it's easily my favorite season so far, I thought it was really strange that there was so much Rawkus music in the mix. I've interacted with Blake Leyh, the music supervisor, and he does a good job in terms of setting mood in most cases, but who really thinks a bunch of Balitmore crack dealers are going to be bumping Mos Def's "Hip-Hop" in 2002?
I suspect trying to get something more than just a stiff drink.
yeah and when Bodie, Slim and Cutty go to that houseparty just after Cutty gets released. it's like some hustler houseparty and they're bumping some wierd house music?! maybe that's just DC go-go and I am discnonnected, but...just saying.
Spelling more potential trouble for the Royce ticket.
Anybody listen to the commentary for S3? I haven't but my friend says that David Simon says that there's some significance of the position of the train where McNulty and Bunk go to get their drank on or something like that. Anybody know what I'm talking about and/or figured out what he's talking about?
i agree with o-dub about dudes listening to j-live, season 1 is on point but the music does seem
and Omar back. In silk jammies.
sorry I prefer ghetto house.
good to see him getting money on some real shit
that scene where omar and reynaldo rob the reup and dude pays for his cigarretes and yells at dude for his change back? priceless