People who watch The Wire

Thanks for the article. The Wire is one of my favorite shows.

Pulitzer for drama, maybe. I think it's ridiculous that The Wire didn't get ANY emmy nominations this year.

I love the show (still upset about Stringer getting offed, but he had it coming). Thanks for this article.

Stringer was the shit.

I'm not sure if I'd call the Wire underrated because not enough people have ever seen an episode to rate it at all. But it is intense, dark, gripping, and complex in a way that hardly any show ever has been. It's amazing that's it's so phenomenal and yet so many people have never even heard of it.

A few months ago, I went to a talk by David Simon at Politics & Prose, a local bookstore. The event was ostensibly to promote the new edition of his book Homicide, but almost all the questions from the audience were about The Wire. Before the first person stepped to the microphone to ask a question, Simon laughed and said, "Let me guess -- you want to know why we killed off Stringer Bell?" Simon explained (I'm roughly paraphrasing from memory) that Stringer was merely a "tool" in the "toolbox" that allowed the writers to tell the story they wanted to tell. That made sense to me. Had Stringer remained alive, The Wire would have become just like any other cop show, with McNulty chasing Stringer until the series ended.

Stringer was a wonderfully complex character. A high level drug dealer who was taking night classes in accounting and trying to run his drug business like any other legitimate business. He also was trying to use the drug business as a means to an end, as he ultimately saw himself as a legitimate business man. I found it interesting that a man who had become so successful in an illegal business had trouble navigating a "legal" one (he didn't understand the world of bribery and kickbacks that surrounded his construction business). Finally, all he cared about in the end was himself (even at the expense of Avon Barksdale), which caught up to him. There was one scene between him and McNulty where he tried to sell McNulty a condo. Priceless.

I'm very interested in the next season to see if McNulty can resume his detective duties while, as I believe he put it, keeping himself away from himself.

What was everyone's favorite season? I thought season four was actually the best so far. The focus on schools and the children added a huge missing piece to an already brilliant portrayal of the lives of the corner kids and the rest of the people who grow up in the community. And Colvin's ability to get through to Namond, at least for now, is the first glimmer of any kind of hope we've seen in the series so far, though it's telling that it's solely at the personal, and not the instutional, level. Though I'm personally waiting for that to go bad in the fifth season.

I was surprised how much I liked the second season as I had heard it was the weakest. But I prefer the first just because of the intense focus on the surveillance of the street-level activities in the PJs.

+1

I think every season has been absolutely stellar. Not sure why the 2nd season gets crapped on, sure it was a marked departure from the 1st, but it was still fantastic.

The best drama of all time IMO.