Les Jones

A&E > Have I Mentioned How Much I Like "The Wire"?

Well, I do. Years ago I read Homicide by David Simon, then a "Baltimore Sun" reporter hanging out with the Baltimore homicide unit. The book begat the TV show of the same name. It never drew me in, but its commercial success paved the way for the HBO series "The Wire," which is unbelievable. It's one of the few shows with the confidence and realism to regularly kill off main characters every season. Anyway, here are a couple of related The Wire notes.

From Slate's review of Generation Kill:

I was eager to watch this series because David Simon and Ed Burns, who co-produced it, were the wise men behind The Wire; I wanted to see what these masters of urban narratives would do with a military story. Here the miniseries is revelatory, because it shows a similarity between the emotional hydraulics of a military unit in Iraq and a drug gang in Baltimore. As in The Wire, the Marines who are the focus of Generation Kill are crude young toughs who have a hard-to-decipher patois of their own. (By the end of the series, you still might not know the meaning of ROE, MSR, RCT, POG, and AO.) Their chain of command is led by an intelligent lieutenant and a veteran sergeant known as "Iceman"; if you put together the characteristics of these two warriors, you have Marlo Stanfield, the coolly analytic gang leader of The Wire. Just as a drug gang can be more sophisticated than we thought, a Marine battalion can be less perfect than we wish.

And from Entertainment Weekly's interview with Watchmen/V for Vendetta/League of Extraordinary Gentlemen creator Alan Moore:

Do you ever relax and just watch television? Selectively, mostly on DVD. The absolute pinnacle of anything I've seen recently has got to be The Wire. It's the most stunning piece of television that has ever come out of America, possibly the most stunning piece of television full-stop.

That's a great example of storytelling that takes its time.
Absolutely, that is grown-up television! It's novelistic. You get to find out about all these tiny different aspects of Baltimore, to build up a huge picture of the city with all of its intricacies — from the wharf side, to the kids in the projects, to the power structure with the boardrooms and police department and governor's office. And it's got some great writers: It's got George Pelecanos and David Simon. And so many wonderful characters, Bubbles, Omar. So yeah, everything else looks pretty lame next to The Wire.

PS - BET is showing re-runs again, starting with the 2002 season.