HBO's The Wire

[Primavera]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWY79JCfhjw

Very cool, but also depressing - you know Obama "gets it" on some level, to talk the way he does - yet so little can be done....

And he even belittled supporters who wanted to end prohibition and chided them to "prioritize", as if ending prohibition is all about privileged people wanting to "get high" in suburbia, rather than removing a boot off the neck of the poor and minorities and a key component of a Prison Industrial Complex bleeding America dry in resources and sowing a trail of broken families and human misery...

Well said, Could not have put that better possibly.

(cant open youtube at work but I assume this is his interview with David Simon)

Obama said the same nonsense on ending prohibition in the interview he did with Shane Smith of Vice too and it just came off as so irritating that he reduced the incredible social destructiveness of prohibition as some minor issue.

 

[praktik]

Well he didn't say that with Simon but it made the awareness he showed there all the more jarring when situated against his "prioritization" claim he used with Smith

 

[praktik]

New miniseries from The Wire creator David Simon coming to HBO in August | The Verge

 

[basketballjones]

 

[Jeffsus]

Family Guy suggested that THE WIRE is better than BREAKING BAD.

Is this true? And if so, is it on netflix, or do I have to download every episode?

-jM
A&D

 

[praktik]

Umm - its like comparing two different excellent works of art.

Breaking bad is very surreal. I think its visual palette is more engaging at times. It feels like a dream - and this dream like quality is grounded in a harsh versimilitude.

The Wire is a different kind of thing and trades on being real. All the little games you see the criminals and cops playing are lifted straight from the streets as Simon spent a year embedded with the Baltimore Homicide dept and wrote about policing issues in Baltimore for years for the Baltimore Sun. There's even a real cop that has a recurring role in the series and hes great about using tons of local baltimore talent. The dialogue and the "realness" of it - the characters - these are the Wire's strengths.

I think each show does some things amazingly well and each are what I would call "works of art" in television form. If I absolutely had to rank them I might find the engaging characters of The Wire taking me over the edge on this one, but it would be close.

 

[Bernnie Federko]