snek_boiWhat's a TV series that you really, really liked and would enthusiastically recommend?
The Wire. It’s the best piece of visual media ever created. Not only is it the best portrayal of the inner city drugs trade but also the decaying institutions and social structures that allow it to flourish, and the corrupting influence of dirty money.
It also is consistently the best written show on TV and is grounded in it’s reality better than anything else. Half the cast were complete unknowns, in many cases plucked from the streets of Baltimore itself and there are standout performances all across it’s vast and diverse cast.
It’s a little slow to get going, the first few episodes have a lot of ground to cover to get the viewer up to speed, it also makes no effort to ease the viewer in, with a lot of jargon, slang and some very thick accents to content with, there’s also no “previously on the wire” to go over key points from earlier episodes so it definitely requires more participation from the viewer than most TV but it’s all the better for it.
I recently re-watched The Wire, and 100% agree with it. It’s at the cusp of being so outdated that only olds will get it and technical elements seem quaint, but wow, it still hits so hard. 25/10, I’ll probably watch it again in another 20 years and enjoy it all over again.
Season 5 has some questionable plot lines though… McNulty’s serial killer shenanigans are a little meh
Yeah, and Marlo Stanfield was very one-dimensional. That being said, I think it stopped far short of jumping the shark, and with the newspaper angle, made sense that a cop might leverage information asymmetry to get what they want by taking advantage of a bad journalist making mistakes. The core concept is solid, and maybe there’s some moving pieces that don’t quite work.
Yeah it’s still a great season of TV. Just in comparison to the previous 4, it doesn’t hit the same level imo.
Yeah, the serial killer angle might have been better if it was like Herc or someone else planting the evidence. Making it Jimmy was too far imo. They make it make sense, but I still feel like it’s a major stretch for his character as it had been established in past seasons.
Jimmy did some stupid shit, usually for the right reasons… But that was out of character imo