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jpx7 said:
Season Three was, interestingly enough, the season that hooked me, after I'd aborted my initial attempt to get into The Wire a couple years earlier (when the first four episodes didn't really stimulate me). My girlfriend at the time was watching through all five seasons, but I'd decided, like I said, a couple years earlier that I was bored The Wire, so I would intermittently or peripherally see episodes she was watching. Then it happened: something about those heaping doses of Stringer Bell and Clay Davis in that middle season convinced me to blaze through what I'd missed to catch up to her progress. Ultimately, it might be the weakest season—especially since the back-half of Season One picks up nicely to compensate to the slow-open—but it just happened to have the right combination of sheeeeiiiitt factors to lead me into the show.
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I think Clay really shines in season 4, when the heat it on.

I'll take any mother****er's money if he givin it away!

They gonna talk to me about money launderin'? In WEST BALTIMORE? Sheeeeeeit.
 
Heywood said:
Just as I typed that last post, I see the confrontation between Avon and Stringer over D.

Man I love Stringer taking the Michael Corleone legitimate enterprise approach. It's cool to see him trying to transform into a business guy with the classes and using some of the economic lingo with his crew.
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Do the chair know we gone look like some punk ass bitches?

Chair ain't recognize your ass.
 
In no particular order:

The Wire (Season 4 is devastating)
Breaking Bad (Maybe my favorite show on this list)
Justified (from the great Elmore Leonard / severely underrated)
The Sopranos (spawned many imitators)
Hannibal (I mean did you see the Mason Verger - dog episode?...holy ****)
Community (Even taking points away for season 4)
The Simpsons (Seasons 4-8 make it the best comedy of all time)
Game of Thrones (I love the books more, but I love the show as well)
The Americans (Probably my favorite show right now)
Cheers (An old school favorite)
 
Heywood said:
Now when you say strangle, are you meaning I want to strangle them because of the writing being that engaging to the audience, or strangle them like Jax Teller and Rick Grimes where I want to strangle them and slap every ounce of stupidity from their character because that's how much I hate them and wish they were gone from the show?
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Strangle like Jax and Rick.
 
jpx7 said:
Season Three was, interestingly enough, the season that hooked me, after I'd aborted my initial attempt to get into The Wire a couple years earlier (when the first four episodes didn't really stimulate me). My girlfriend at the time was watching through all five seasons, but I'd decided, like I said, a couple years earlier that I was bored The Wire, so I would intermittently or peripherally see episodes she was watching. Then it happened: something about those heaping doses of Stringer Bell and Clay Davis in that middle season convinced me to blaze through what I'd missed to catch up to her progress. Ultimately, it might be the weakest season—especially since the back-half of Season One picks up nicely to compensate to the slow-open—but it just happened to have the right combination of sheeeeiiiitt factors to lead me into the show.
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Season 3 is pretty much a walking allegory for the war in Iraq. Finale title is "Mission Accomplished" and the quote that sticks out from that episode is "War....once you're in it, you're in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie."
 
50PoundHead said:
Strangle like Jax and Rick.
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McNulty doesn't reach that level for me until season 5, which has that and worse issues, not least of which is Simon taking out all of his frustrations from his newspaper days in ways that approach the self-indulgent.
 
Julio3000 said:
McNulty doesn't reach that level for me until season 5, which has that and worse issues, not least of which is Simon taking out all of his frustrations from his newspaper days in ways that approach the self-indulgent.
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As a newspaper man myself, there wasn't too much inaccuracy there. The little **** stain executive and managing editors were spot on with how leadership is these days.
 
Julio3000 said:
McNulty doesn't reach that level for me until season 5, which has that and worse issues, not least of which is Simon taking out all of his frustrations from his newspaper days in ways that approach the self-indulgent.
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bravesnumberone said:
As a newspaper man myself, there wasn't too much inaccuracy there. The little **** stain executive and managing editors were spot on with how leadership is these days.
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Yea, I dig Five, and never found it excessively self-indulgent. (I guess I dig a little self-indulgence, too, as long as it isn't cripplingly excessive.)
 
I imagine it rings true to someone in the business, but it's a little inside baseball for the uninitiated. I appreciated the characters (the old campaigners and the weasel-y ****birds alike) but I didn't find that it had the kind of punch and immediacy that the autopsies of the other institutions—the police, the stevedores, city hall, the schools. I found myself missing the corners a lot in season 5.
 
To expand on that a bit—I worked in publishing for a few years, at a time when media consolidation was the order of the day and huge structural changes were roiling the industry. A lot of the same tensions existed there. The newsroom stuff seems pretty spot-on, from that perspective. But sometimes it just seemed like Simon might as well have been addressing the camera directly. It just scanned a little too much like personal grievance sometimes, to the detriment of the rest of the characters. Still, if anybody earned a little self-indulgence, it's him.
 
Julio3000 said:
To expand on that a bit—I worked in publishing for a few years, at a time when media consolidation was the order of the day and huge structural changes were roiling the industry. A lot of the same tensions existed there. The newsroom stuff seems pretty spot-on, from that perspective. But sometimes it just seemed like Simon might as well have been addressing the camera directly. It just scanned a little too much like personal grievance sometimes, to the detriment of the rest of the characters. Still, if anybody earned a little self-indulgence, it's him.
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For me, I'm of the right age that I could both (a) imagine, as a bit of a bookworm child, that journalism would be a cool occupation / life-choice, and (b) hit college at a point where—even though being a journalist wasn't really a primary goal for me anymore—it wasn't even a viable fallback option. I was watching The Wire right about the same time as the latter.

I also could really appreciate the meta-narrative of Season Five: that the world Simon was presenting—a world that needed exposure, or to have its mirror held up to it—was, whilst not addressing its ill, in the same breath crowding out one possible scalpel or salve to its ills. Like, he gives you this text, and then in the final act shows you how soon it will be that much harder for someone to come up like he did and craft such a text. So, between that and the former, I was pretty enamored of the final season, even if it isn't at times as good television as Two or Three, or as back-breakingly poingnat as Four.
 
Season 5 also gave us Gus, one of my favorites.

Rank the seasons from most favorite on.

I'm torn between 4 and 1, but I'm gonna stick with 1 because it introduced us into the world.

1

4

2

3

5
 
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