The Wire
2002 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by David Simon
Told from the points of view of both the Baltimore homicide and narcotics detectives and their targets, the series captures a universe in which the national war on drugs has become a permanent, self-sustaining bureaucracy, and distinctions between good and evil are routinely obliterated.
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It means access from anywhere.
Want to watch an episode of that series while you're sitting at work waiting for a long test pass? Plex.
You're hanging out with friends and they want to watch that movie you own? Plex.
You're at the gym and want to watch The Wire instead of whatever reality show is on the gym TV? Believe it or not, straight to Plex.
To your direct point, it doesn't have to be a terrible vacation. Any time I plan a vacation longer than a week it includes down day(s) with no itinerary, just recuperating. Sometimes that involves staring at a screen. Sometimes I've been out for 10 hours, it's only 7PM and I don't want to go to sleep, but I want to chill out in my room (maybe I'm overstimulated, maybe I'm just tired, doesn't matter).
I have very little sympathy for “You couldn’t write X today” arguments. Here, X is The Wire.
There is a spiritual successor to The Wire: 2022’s miniseries We Own This City. Same complicated representation of Baltimore. Same complicated representation of American policing. Good critical reception, but less widely-known than a legendary show that ran for six years and sixty episodes.
The substantive difference between the two is that 2020’s-era HBO doesn’t make long-running serials like The Wire and The Sopranos anymore (Hacks is the notable exception).
That’s not a political change forced on them by unnamed leftists. That’s a change in business model.
The funny thing is for younger British people this tends to be highly asymmetric - we can (sort of!) understand Scouse or Glaswegian due to growing up here, but also almost everyone under the age of 50 grew up on a steady diet of American TV shows, hip hop etc.
I can understand The Wire fine without subtitles because most of the actors just speak relatively generic African American English instead of a proper Baltimore dialect, and that's no problem at all for someone who spent their formative years consuming Nas and Biggie and all the rest of it.
On the other hand Snoop who is the only main character with an actual Baltimore street accent is pretty much unintelligible to me, but I suspect she would be for a lot of middle class americans as well
if you've ever watched the wire (season 1 2002) you will know that burner phones were very much a thing.
Wasn't this the plot of the Wire season 3 or something?
I would say just the opposite.
Think about all the serial killer and urban crime movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or the film noir of the postwar period.
TV is more complicated, but cop shows like the early seasons of Law and Order and all of SVU, NYPD, and then later The Wire and The Shield were pretty gritty.
Video games have always been a mix of squeaky clean Mario and Zelda and gory content: Think Doom, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Postal, etc.
Somehow it fizzled out for me somewhere in season 3. These days I can see myself powering through with some skipping, but I would probably rather rewatch The Wire.
"The Wire" TV show portrays these things well. In it, the powerful people often have the least clue about anything. They are just playing the game and often winning by sheer luck. They also often do fuck up, but because they are powerful, are able to get other people to take the hit for them or build a narrative that hides the fuck up.
The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.
Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies.
It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way.
There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
> I'm not alone in finding the specific emphasis on drawing the line at domestic surveillance a bit odd
We've always been OK with this in the pre-AI era. (See the plot line of dozens of movies where the "good" government spies on the "bad" one.) Heck we've even been OK with domestic surveillance. (See "The Wire".) Has something changed, or are we just now realizing how it's problematic?
My wife and I are both "book a week minimum" readers. In 2025 she finished 80 novels. I was in the mid 70's. We've been doing this basically since middle school uninterrupted. Reading is just our preferred form of consumption based entertainment. Last year we watched maybe five movies and I finally got my wife to sit through the fourth season of The Wire. The only "modern" show we're actively watching is The Pitt.
It's starting to sound like reading books has a similar distribution as consuming cannabis. The "daily" users account for 3/4ths of the spending on cannabis despite being 1/3rd of overall users. The heavy consumers consume A LOT and skew the statistics.
Watch it. Best TV show I can think of, ever. By that I mean that the writing and acting and production values are top notch; it's entertaining throughout - some of the other greats are not (The Wire falls down here, sometimes; Keislowski's Dekalog, likewise - though its best moments are better than anything else); and Andor nails its cultural moment, by being directly about, well, all of the Important Stuff we're talking about in this thread. Also, it's a tragedy; it's about sacrifice and loss, and the human consequences of following your convictions - regardless of the side you choose. (That last note's a personal taste, but I'd stand by the former points as being reasonably objective.)
I sat through it going, "how the hell did they manage to make a work of art out of a Star Wars series?", which even makes it better. You don't have to care about Star Wars AT ALL to appreciate Andor, but if you do, watching Andor -> Rogue One -> Originals back to back makes the earlier stuff better.
You'll think I'm over-selling it. Please watch it, then come back and tell me I'm wrong.
He calls it the "miracle", I want to shout "It's not a miracle! It's other people!"
I feel he's depending on others' kindness and not even really acknowledging them. It's like he feels it's a miraculous power that's helping him (God?) rather than the actual individuals choosing to help him. Maybe that explains why he doesn't seem to feel the need to give back to them.
It reminds me of an episode of The Wire where a mediocre detective tries to use magic to solve a case. After he wakes up the next day he goes to the office and finds the case is solved. He says the magic worked! And the police chief tells him it wasn't magic, it's his colleagues who worked all night solving cases.
I'm an avid reader (several dozens of books per year at least), and one of the things that bums me out is all of the morality around my hobby. 3 or 4 times out of 5 when I talk to people about it the reaction is "oh man I'm such a bad person because I don't read enough books."
It's fine! The number of books you read is not a reflection on your quality as a person.
Reading absolutely has positive benefits, but really it's exactly what you said. It's just more interesting than other options out there. The tradeoff is yes, it can require some effort, but that's the same as any other effortful activity. You have to get past the cost, but there's a really nice reward on the other side.
And for what it's worth, there ARE television shows, movies, etc. that have more value than many books. ("The Wire" is a prime example, probably better than 70-80% of the books out there.) The point is just generally that more cognitively demanding avocations can have a higher cost-benefit ratio than cheaper ones like TV. On average, books fall more into this category than other media, but that's just on average.
Anyway this is a long way of saying that feeling bad about the media you consume is counterproductive. The message should be that there is potentially a more rewarding experience out there, but whether you pursue it or not is totally up to you and doesn't make you a good or bad person either way.
I am as pro-drug-legalisation as they come, but the US opioid epidemic can't be blamed solely on heroin being illegal.
Heroin is illegal in Europe as much as in the US, yet we do not have a horde of zombies high on fentanyl on our city street corners. What's the difference?
I honestly do not have the answer, but there is a brilliant TV show called "The Wire" that shows how the drug problem cannot be traced to a single cause, but it is systemic and you can place the blame at any echelon of society — which means it starts at the top. It's the result of corruption, collusion, lobbying, overpolicing the addicts yet underpolicing the doctors and private insurance companies that give opioid prescriptions out like candy. It's the politicians pocketing indirectly the result of this trade. It's the narcos being propped up by the US three-letter agencies because they play a certain role in whatever is today's bad dictator to be toppled. It's the massive inequality for some minorities that have often no other choice than start dealing, or start using, to deal with the stresses of increasingly expensive food and rent.
Good luck untangling this knot. You'd unravel the entire structure of modern USA.
There’s the theory about grandparents presence helping their grand children, with wisdom.
Having watch the TV series it was pretty sobering that many were only being brought up by grandmothers.
Not that Wire is society, but it was deeply rooted in it. I’ve never been to Baltimore mind you.
Competitive markets provide natural death of weak content, without premature euthanasia of strong content. With on-demand streaming, viewers can stop watching if/when a show deteriorates in quality. Some shows have maintained relatively high quality over multiple seasons.
The Americans (6 seasons, 75 episodes) Battlestar Galactica (4 seasons, 88 episodes) Borgen (3 seasons, 30 episodes) Burn Notice (7 seasons, 111 episodes) The Shield (7 seasons, 88 episodes) Slow Horses (5 seasons, 30 episodes) WestWorld (4 seasons, 36 episodes) The Wire (5 seasons, 60 episodes)
Sad news. HBO has a veritable treasure trove of TV shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Silicon Valley etc. Even their more recent ones like White Lotus, How to With John Wilson are leagues above Netflix. Only HBO can bet on artists’ vision like that.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription 7 years ago, 99% of their content is algorithmic drivel. Mindhunter, Dahmer, House of Cards were something I liked but nothing beyond that. I knew they were trash once I saw the sheer number of spinoffs they have just on Pablo Escobar. They had had one decent run of Narcos but then they just tried to extract every drop of juice out of that one persona. Most of Netflix dramas are just the equivalent of abhorrent and ugly graffiti. Their shows are Exhibit A in what happens if you give into algorithmic drivel and have no human touch to curate them.
HBO has some timeless TV classics that I keep rewatching every year even though I have watched them multiple times. Netflix can’t produce TV dramas like that, ain’t in their blood. Completely different DNAs.
Netflix does deserve all the plaudits wrt to their streaming experience though.
I'd wager that it would accelerate rather than decelerate the growing insignificance of US entertainment.
Good for Bollywood, chinese and russian cinema, and so on. For me personally, I have trouble imagining that HBO would ever again be involved in something on par with The Wire, Sopranos or True Blood, and it's not exactly hard to keep them around on a hard drive somewhere.
I watched both; both are good, in different ways. Some scenes that I remember being beautifully composed in 4:3 lost to the transition, while others have improved markedly.
They made a ton of effort on it, recognising it's a different version altogether:
> The new version of The Wire, then, will differ both creatively and technically. In certain cases, such as a scene in season two where longshoreman gather around a body, Simon said he believed the added space would add a vulnerability to the scene that wasn’t possible in 4:3. But he describes other scenes where the added space distracts the eye, and the remaster zooms in on the characters to retain that intimacy.
https://www.techhive.com/article/599415/hbo-remastered-the-wire-in-169-hd-and-it-was-a-lot-harder-than-youd-think.html
Jellyfin's a media server first and foremost.
Out of the box, what you get is a server with (Optionally! But included by default in e.g. the Docker image, I think) an official web UI.
It's multi-user, has decent parental controls, automatic metadata fetching from a bunch of sources, can live-transcode when a client needs it (I have that disabled because my server is too weak, LOL), lots of good stuff.
You'll manage it through the Web UI, mostly. Set-top platform clients tend not to include much in the way of management features. (which is fine, it's way more pleasant to do that through a browser)
The web UI is also a Netflix-alike interface. Watch straight from the browser, if you like.
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The one major concession that puts some people off it is that it works butter smooth if your file naming conventions match what it expects, but it gets a lot less-pleasant if they don't. There are some minor variations allowed but mine's basically like:
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).mp4 /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).en.srt /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).fr.srt /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.mp4 /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.en.srt /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Final Cut.mkv /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/The Making of Apocalypse Now.mkv /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/Trailer.mkv For movies. This demonstrates naming for the movies themselves (in this case, three different cuts of the same movie), extra features (you can change the extra features folder name if you like; it may default to "featurettes" and I may have changed mine, can't recall for sure) and external subtitles. I think you can handle external audio files similarly, if you have any of that going on. There are also ways to categorize special features into like trailers or whatever, with directories, but I haven't bothered with that.
I think there is a way to put your subtitles in a "subs" directory or something like that, but I don't do it. Then again I rarely keep more than two sub languages, maybe three or four total files if there are separate SDH options, for a given video. Usually just English and if it's a foreign film maybe the original language's subtitles (the French file for Apocalypse Now above is just an example, I didn't look at a real directory to write it)
For TV:
/tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 0/s00e08 - Reunion.mkv /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 0/s00e10 - Season 1 gag reel.mkv /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 1/s01e01.mkv /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season 1/s01e02 - The Detail.mkv The naming on these is pretty flexible. Basically as long as it can find the series (the year helps a lot) and everything's got `sXXeXX` somewhere in it, it'll be fine. Spaces, dots, dashes, doesn't affect much. "asdf.s03e05 - Some Name (stuff in parens).mkv" will find TheTVDB's entry for season 3, episode 5 (even if the name and all that in the file name are wrong, doesn't matter, it ignores that). External subtitles work like for movies (just stick them alongside the video files)
One pitfall: every now and then you find a case where DVD/BluRay and aired orders differ. TheTVDB usually records multiple orders in these cases. I dunno how to force Jellyfin to prefer one or the other, I just figure out which it's preferring (usually the one TheTVDB shows you on the Web by default, I think?) and adjust to that.
Also note that rarely (but sometimes for important cases, like e.g. Looney Tunes) TheTVDB uses years for the seasons. So you'll want "Season 1965" and such for those. No big deal, just a weird quirk of certain shows' metadata. Not that common.
I think you can name the "specials" directory to... specials, and maybe even give it an arbitrary name in the Jellyfin settings, but I like "Season 0" or "Season 00" (either works, prepended zeros are ignored, I have both hanging around) because it matches the special episode naming in TheTVDB (like "s00eXX").
In a pinch, you can override which IMDB, TMDB, TheTVDB, et c. ID that Jellyfin decided belonged to the movie or TV show, using the web UI, and make it re-scrape the metadata. Usually it's better to figure out why it got it wrong and fix that instead—that way you don't even have to care about Jellyfin's database of scanned metadata, you can always just have it re-create it from scratch with little or no fuss. (and you can also set it to write the metadata alongside your shows and movies in files, like Kodi can)
I think there might be a way to put things like IMDB IDs directly in file names to make it even more clear what you mean, but "name (year)" has been so reliable for me I've never bothered to look into it.
I base my naming and years on what I find in the metadata sources themselves, usually IMDB and TheTVDB for me. Surprisingly often, Wikipedia disagrees with these, and sometimes [ahem] acquired files also have file names recording years that disagree with those sources. Usually it seems to be a festival-circuit vs. wide-release thing, as those often fall in different years. The metadata source should win, since otherwise it'll make auto-scanning worse.
Some people are really set on things like having their movies categorized in folders by director or whatever, and that doesn't work too well with Jellyfin.
(I know that file naming explanation is a lot, but it's really not that complicated in practice, and there are docs but I found there were some "but can I..." or "is it necessary to..." gaps in it for me that I've tried to fill in above)
DESPITE the impression probably given by all that text, I've found this one of the greatest parts of Jellyfin. Delete a file? After a couple minutes, it's gone from the UI. Add some files? In a couple minutes, they show up. (and you can force re-scans to speed it up). Slightly rename a file? But Jellyfin still reads it as the same movie from its metadata source? Your watch history survives. Hell I think you can even delete a movie, then add it again later, and your watch history survives (as long as Jellyfin decides it's the same movie by ID). There's no cruft that hangs around to deal with. It's very low-stress. Like 99% of my "management" of Jellyfin is just rsycing files, LOL.
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As for non-Web clients:
- There's an official Roku client, but... most Roku devices have pretty limited codec support. The client works great though. If your server can transcode, this may be a totally fine choice. It's what I used for quite a while until enough of my files were in formats newer than h.264 that it was no longer viable.
- AppleTV has an official client. It's pretty good, but... if you can't transcode, there's one somewhat-common Dolby audio format (I forget which exactly) that AppleTV doesn't have a license to, so it causes problems. However, for that problem there's:
- Infuse (also AppleTV). It's amazing. The recent release supports multiple user accounts with different server access settings (not only can they log into Jellyfin with different credentials, they could conceivably use totally different servers), which is brilliant if you want parental controls or just to have different "watched" lists. It's free but there's a paid version with a few extra features that includes a license to that tricky audio format. I've been using this for years, at this point, and aside from wishing it supported multiple accounts (and it does now, as of very recently!) I've had no trouble with it at all. Also, Infuse supports other media servers as backends.
There are clients for tons of other platforms, too. And you can always Airplay or whatever from (say) a laptop.
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For going on the road (and short of taking your server with you) I have used two options:
- You can just use it directly over a VPN to your house, like Tailscale, if the client end's connection is solid (and your home connection is good, for that matter). I've streamed mid-quality 4K over such an arrangement, halfway across the US. You can even connect an AppleTV to Tailscale and take the AppleTV with you (it's much smaller than most servers, lol) for the full at-home experience while traveling (Christmas movie marathon at the in-laws' house this holiday season?)
- Long road trip with the kids and want them to watch Apollo 13 (and perhaps a couple Disney movies) while you drive to Cape Canaveral? Browse your Jellyfin web UI on the tablet they'll use, and download the file(s) you want straight from there. Play files in VLC. Done, no internet connection required. Being able to use the web UI is nice because you can browse categories and such, it's actually a fair bit better than something like using an SFTP client.
Police interviews on scripted TV copoganda dramas, or fly on the wall 'reality' police TV shows?
Either way a great many police are believers in the power of theatre. As they should be, staging power imbalnce, inserting faux sympathy, etc. are all powerful tools with strong potential for misuse which has prompted regulation in a number of countries demanding full recording of interactions with suspects.
Speaking of police interviews on TV shows:
Opening scene to Season 5 of The Wire. Classic moment where a copy machine is used for a lie detector. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgrO_rAaiq0
Being “widely consumed” has no bearing on its correctness or relationship to reality. Should we also use Breaking Bad as a reason to surveil high school chemistry teachers in case they are drug kingpins?
The Wire is not a documentary. It is, above all designed to be entertaining. If they thought having a character reveal themselves to be a reptilian alien with bananas for hands made for a more entertaining show people would like, they would’ve done that. The Wire is not a proxy for reality.
Is The Wire a documentary, or a fictional TV show? Do you also criticise doctors who are careful and attentive with their patients because they don’t behave like Gregory House?
Obviously one of the greatest shows of all time has multiple interwoven themes.
But the literal name of the show should be a clue that Wire taps are important. See how they evolve for one. Gangs are always learning, getting more secure with their communication and making it harder to build a case against them. What worked in Season 1 (pagers) doesn't work in Season 3 (burners). Once Season 3 is over everything about how burners were surveilled is then public record, so criminal gangs switch up once more, making it even harder.
Now if you made a show with all the criminals using encrypted, disappearing messages - that would be basically unbreakable. Which was my point.
I wouldn’t put The Sopranos in that list. It was telling a story about a small subset of New Jersey people (Jerseites?) but it specifically deals with the complexities of cultural identity, stereotyping, and how the majority of Italian Americans view mafia. Tony attempts to deflect accusations by claiming stereotyping. Dr. Melfi’s ex husband is derisive of the mafia destroying Italian American’s image and is hypersensitive about perceptions. Many normal Italian Americans are collateral damage to the mafia’s parasitic activities.
I wouldn’t put that in the same category as reality tv shows selling hyper dramatized personalities to conform to, and make fun of, stereotypes. Its like saying The Wire and the Real Housewives of Atlanta are both caricatures of black people.
I'm just keying off this thing you wrote:
For example, the suicide was very poorly handled. It was used as vehicle for discussing open source vs proprietary code. But you could have easily done that without the death [...]
It's totally fine if we're not making any productive progress in this part of the thread. It's art, it's all subjective, we can just disagree. I think the interpersonal dramas in HACF are as earned as they are in any series; certainly, I'd put every season of HACF several notches above Six Feet Under Season 4 and its Scooby-Doo finale.
At the same time, I don't think there's any kind of important broader theme or message or ideas in HACF; the A-tier of prestige dramas have that --- The Wire, Mad Men, Better Call Saul. Mad Men and The Americans are I think the best comparands; both period shows with high-concept settings, both bigger idea/theme shows than HACF.
Pretty sure I saw that episode of The Wire.
Aside, this is a pretty useful comment, unlike your other one on this thread. More of this and less of that, please.
> an RTL-SDR dongle costs like $35.00 or so
FuzzyDunlop has graduated to HissyMarconi in The Wire season 12 :)
More content will be made in a single month than all of human history up to this point.
No more Disney-fication, no more Marvel / Star Wars "mass media slop". We'll have media that caters to people's long-tail interests. If you have a passion for Egyptology and Atlantis, you'll be able to watch a steampunk adventure about the Egyptians waging war with the Atlanteans. But perhaps with the serious tone of "The Wire". That would never have been greenlit before, but it'll soon be possible.
Good creators will arise just like good indie music, indie manga/comic, and indie game creators. Discovery will be the problem to solve for creators. There will be an abundance of talent that is finally able to create their vision rather than nepotism their way into one of 500 limited annual roles of autonomy.
Small creators who grow large like VivziePop [1] and PsychicPebbles [2] will be the model for the future of content. They start small on YouTube, grow large, and eventually have their own large-scale distribution and franchises.
The creative world is about to get orders of magnitude better. Not 2x, not 10x, but easily 1,000x.
I hate most movies and tv shows, but love the medium. The problem is most content produced just isn't my vibe. I like super artsy stuff, but also have particular tastes. That's going to change dramatically. Stuff will start fitting the shape of my interest graph.
I'm so excited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Medrano
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Hadel
Not OP but Andor is definitely "up there" for me.
My two favorite shows ever are Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (w/ Alec Guinness), The Wire, The Simpsons seasons 1-8.
> It took television about 50 years to hit stride and go beyond film, but it got there. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men achieved something not replaceable by the movie or the novel.
Can you elaborate on the differences between television and film? Especially considering the examples you cite. I'd agree that live broadcasting is a considerable departure from a film as a medium. Still, the shows you reference are very cinematic - longer, sure, but for me, they are as close to a film experience as possible.
> Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation.
Nice to see this because I drafted something about LLM and humans riffing on exactly the same McLuhan argument. Here it is:
A large language model (LLM) is a new medium. Just like its predecessors—hypertext, television, film, radio, newspapers, books, speech—it is of obvious importance to the initiated. Just like its predecessors, the content of this new medium is its predecessors.
> “The content of writing is speech, just as the content of the written word is the content of print.” — McLuhan
The LLMs have swallowed webpages, books, newspapers, and journals—some X exabytes were combined into GPT-4 over a few months of training. The results are startling. Each new medium has a period of embarrassment, like a kid that’s gotten into his mother’s closet and is wearing her finest drawers as a hat. Nascent television borrowed from film and newspapers in an initially clumsy way, struggling to digest its parents and find its own language. It took television about 50 years to hit stride and go beyond film, but it got there. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men achieved something not replaceable by the movie or the novel. It’s yet hard to say what exactly the medium of LLMs exactly is, but after five years I think it’s clear that they are not books, they are not print, or speech, but something new, something unto themselves.
We must understand them. McLuhan subtitled his seminal work of media literacy “the extensions of man”, and probably the second most important idea in the book—besides the classic “medium is the message”—is that mediums are not additive to human society, but replacing, antipruritic, atrophying, prosthetic. With my Airpods in my ears I can hear the voices of those thousands of miles away, those asleep, those dead. But I do not hear the birds on my street. Only two years or so into my daily relationship with the medium of LLMs I still don’t understand what I’m dealing with, how I’m being extended, how I’m being alienated, and changed. But we’ve been here before, McLuhan and others have certainly given us the tools to work this out.
I wasn't being snarky. The Wire is the embodiment of prestige television drama. There's nothing wrong with not being into TV.
I also admitted the topic hasn't been popular of late. Your comment didn't say anything about recency. It's likely that the dwindling percentage of Americans in unions has something to do with fewer recent depictions of labor struggles in TV and movies.
I don't know if that's true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_season_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_and_Girls_(The_Office)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Rae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesar_Chavez_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Waterfront
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exit_to_Brooklyn_(film)
But it's true the topic hasn't been en vogue for a while.
Somehow a lot of TV seems far more subtle (or at least nuanced) to me than popular movies. The Wire or Scavengers Reign are a couple off the top of my head.
Anyone who has watched The Wire will recognize the use of the term here. (Minor spoilers ahead)
In season 3 (I think) Herc caught the mayor doing something inappropriate in his office and his silence was rewarded with promotions. Later on, someone told him "[The mayor] is your rabbi. If he loses the election, your career will go no further."
Honestly, it reads like an episode of "Wire" script. Something is clearly going on behind the scenes and we get to speculate on the actual reasons for every single piece of this. I have zero idea what is really going on, but I am reasonably certain some of the details will be out.
No, watch it.
And speaking of old goodness, The Wire, possibly the best TV series ever. And with the 1080p re-release, I’m going to claim it’s younger than 10 years old.
Edit: oops. 1080p happened in 2014. https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7457291/the-wire-hd-screenshot-comparisons
Has Netflix done anything that comes close to the first and third greatest television shows of all time? No. They did Black Mirror, Stranger Things (hey: season 5 of The Wire was no great shakes either), BoJack, the Flanagan halloween miniserieses, Dark Crystal, and most recently Man on the Inside. Those are just the things I personally appreciate. They're holding their own with FX, which is not a small achievement.
We have hundreds of years of scholarship based on ancient Greek theater plays. They were created as entertainment. I wonder which 20th/21st century TV series will be written about in the year 4000. I think The Wire is likely to be one of them.
Not uniquely corrupt but uniquely violent (before the Ukraine invasion one in eight violent homicides happened in Brazil... not South America, Brazil).
Besides, I don't know great movies that explain the corruption and violence on each metropolis, just this one (and The Wire for Baltimore, which is by the way great television).
I'd recommend also watching the Vice piece on how Brazilian gangs are fueling violence in Paraguay. It's quite jarring to see the slang of street criminals of Rio and SP spoken across the border in what is a war like situation.
I'd like to note that Brazil is not at all unique in being corrupt or even in the methods used. For example, watch HBO's The Wire and you'll find the police and politicians playing the exact same numbers game. It seems to be inherent to democracy, a side effect of reelection.
The films do a wondeful job depicting the poverty of Brazil, and the way it attracts people to organized crime. It attracts so many of them, they form a nation unto themselves. Complete with their own army, territory, laws, tribunals... It gets to the point it's a silent secession.
Im hopeful US will have some subsidy for real creative works like ive seen in europe.
My limited understanding is that AI could generate Netflix top 10 hits that mostly recycle familiar jokes. The creators made a great product, but i expect anyone who attended film school would rather try something new, only issue is Netflix wont foot the bill (i know, they take a few oscar swings a year now).
Recent examples: TV Glow, Challengers, Strange Darling. All movies with specific, unique perspectives, visuals, acting choices, scripts, shots, etc. Think about the perspective in The Wire, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is plenty of great work that obviously is nearly impossible to reproduce by an AI and i hope that AI "art" is taxed in a way that funds human projects.
>The internet exists.
Yeah, that's the problem if we're talking about cultural relavance. We all have accedd to 24/7 on demand media, and that inevitably means we will form our on cultural bubbles based on taste, community, etc. There really isn't any single TV show these days that everybody watched compared to Breaking back in the '10's, or The Wire in the 00's, or Friends in the 90's.
We're a culture more specialzied than ever and lonlier than ever. Especially if you don't like Sports (pretty much the last remaining "cultural media"). That also makes it much harder to get the 1000 true fans you linked to (interesting read, thanks!).
Kind of tangential, and I know this is taking the number too seriously but: it doesn't help that 1000 true fans can no longer sustain an artist either. I want to work on my own game, and even if I could somehow get away with 1000 copies sold at $30 (basically pricing myself at the top of indies)... I wouldn't even make minimum wage in California. With no benefits!. and of course that's before the platform cuts and potentially paying for any tools I use. And assuming I work alone on all this. Making more monetization in games these days is still a controversial topic evolving in real time.
1000 true fans more became 10000 true fans these days. Thanks, inflation.
To be fair, they rotate the burners in the series every 2 weeks and it takes the police more than a week to get up on the new ones.
It was cool to see that it was in fact an opsec fail (the guy buying the phones all over the country got lazy and bought too many from the same shop) to break through that. Pretty realistic. Like most of the wire in fact.
Although one thing in the wire I don't understand. Pagers are really easy to intercept, anyone with a scanner (with discriminator output) can do it and could do it in those times. I did it many times during the days when pagers were still in full swing. I really don't understand why they needed a court order for that (in season 1).
Because we don't listen to music the same way we listened in Bach's time.
The Italian movie director Frederico Fellini hated television because it destroyed the ceremony of movie theatres. He complained that before television watching movies was a ritual. People would program it in advance, invite friends, dress sharply, take hours to go downtown (no multiplexes back then) and discuss the movie at length with others. That's how you'd get dense movies like the ones from John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.
When television came it banalized the experience. As Fellini said, people would watch movies in pyjamas while the dog was barking outside spoiling it all. True, after some time, television learned how to make solid drama (Sopranos, The Wire, etc). But that was just a glimpse, streaming will erase that.
Similarly, in Bach's time, music was rare and, because of that, meant to be transcendental, to be extraordinary and to be played in extraordinary gothic cathedrals, audiences expected it that way. And, btw, Bach-like music was extremely rare during baroque times. Apart from a few Italian and French composers, no one in the Baroque era did anything really remarkable.
Today, music is played on Spotify. It is cheap and discardable. Can't be Bach, will never be.
Edit: remember, the shift from Bach's standards began during his late years (1750). He was considered old-fashioned and his sons (Carl Philip Emanuel and Johan Christian) began composing in a style different from his father's. 3 crucial elements to understanding this change were the rise of a bourgeois class demanding entertainment, the growing market for concert halls and the industry of music publishing for private entertainment. This lead to the production of music more "accessible", simpler and easier to play. Mozart and Haydn were the new masters.
> easier to read than to watch live.
Obviously there are some benefits to reading like being able to skip around, pause, take notes, look stuff up, sit wherever you feel most comfortable, etc. But in general I'd say this is only true for people with a ton of experience reading old plays. For everyone else, good acting is tremendously helpful at helping the audience to follow the characters' actions, relationships, and intentions.
> language that we don’t speak
It really not that far off, and doesn't take that much practice to get into. It's similar to trying to watch a TV show set somewhere with a strong accent you aren't familiar with (e.g. the Baltimore accents in The Wire). It starts out challenging but human brains are amazing language interpreting machines.
More and more TV shows these days are realistic as FUCK And inspired by reality. The Wire Especially
> As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film
Doesn't matter when they remaster it to be way too dark or screw up with colours and tone mapping to give it a "more modern" tint.
Some are also re-cut from original aspect ratios (whether 4:3 or CinemaScope) to be equal or closer to 16:9.
e.g The Wire on DVD is 4:3 (as originally shot) and has been re-framed to 16:9 on BD. They did a a seriously good job at it but it really changes the impact and/or mood of some key scenes. And that's when it goes well.
On the other end of the spectrum I've seen 2.55:1 movies butchered into some lazy [anything-between 1.77 and 2]:1 crop + autopan conversion "remaster". Those are 1080p alright and not upscales but are a totally shoddy cash-grab job.
Yes I shouldn't have used the word episodic. The problem with your third solution is that it seems to be difficult to do with the current way TV series are financed and produced: You can't commit to multiple seasons at the outset and you also want to have an arbitrary number of episodes depending on how well the show is doing (milk more episodes if the show is doing well). There is also incentive to create cliffhangers so that subsequent seasons can be produced.
There are lots of mini-series which do book adaptations but it's hard to come up with examples that span multiple seasons: "My Brilliant Friend" did it I think and maybe you could argue early "Game of Thrones" but the story was never finished in book form either so it couldn't be said to be telling a complete story.
I don;t think "The Wire" gets enough credit for creating a format that conformed to the constraints of TV production while still being able to tell stories that spanned many episodes. You could have ended the series at any season (had it been cancelled) and it wouldn't have felt incomplete and yet the final season did feel like it completed an even larger story arc.
I don't think they're confused about episodic vs. serialized shows; they're talking about the plot structure of serialized shows often having a change of direction at every season boundary instead of resolution of the existing plot threads. That sort of meandering never-concluding plot can be annoying. One way to avoid that pitfall is by staying episodic, (Old Trek,) another is to wrap up each season and start from a relatively blank slate on the next, as if the seasons are episodes. (The Wire.) I think a third is to have all the story structure written in advance, as with a book adaptation, so there is a real through-line.
No. Every season ends on a cliffhanger that seems critical to the story and then is quickly resolved as if it were some minor point in the first episode of the subsequent season. This is the nature of this type of episodic television that runs for an indeterminate time and therefore has no real overarching story (but pretends to) like soap operas do.
I only know of a few examples where writers escape this. The first is to have the episodes be essentially disconnected from one another (e.g. Star Trek). The other is what "The Wire" did by having each season have its own plot that is properly resolved at the end of each season.
But my point is that's not the only way people find it hard to stop.
If you're addicted because your life was roughly fine, but you discovered that a drug make you feel amazing, keep taking it too much, and get to the point where withdrawal is so painful that it's impossible to resist taking another dose to feel good again, then that's exactly how you describe it.
But if you're using heroin or whatever drug as a mental health treatment, e.g. because if you hadn't started using you would instead have killed yourself, then sure you'll still have the nasty withdrawals when you stop, but it's a totally different equation. For many addicts, taking illegal drugs is the only way to feel OK about life. Some of these people never manage to get clean, but the ones with this reason for addiction who do (or who try to) get clean, it can be surprisingly easy to deal with the withdrawals, because they're aware of how shit life was before they first started using the drug, and the idea that the rest of your life will be as shit as before you started using drugs can be a far more scary thought than someone who's life was basically good except for their getting hooked on a drug.
To quote one of the all-time great TV shows, and surely the best about authentic portrayals of drug users, dealers, and cops - The Wire - Waylon, a former addict and narcotics anonymous sponsor, says “Getting clean’s the easy part. And then comes life.” I guess that's true for both types of addict I've talked about, but it's even more true for the addicts who turned to drugs because they hated their lives than for people who had lovely lives until they accidentally got addicted to a drug that they thought was fun to try.
>“Yes,” I said, “but I want us to talk about any of the films that made people uncomfortable. Let’s discuss the discomfort." Her face fell. She started crying and ran out of the room. Her friend followed her. Right after she left I showed the scene with Omar. Later that day, she came to my office again, sobbing.
For discussing a Wire scene? Or whatever scene for that matter.
Sorry, this isn't university, this sounds like kindergarten. Perhaps that's what modern universities became past 2010 or so.
And this isn't a geniune response, but either the reaction of someone with mental health problems, or emotional manipulation, or both.
> Where would these legal use sites be? Near which schools, homes, and businesses? Which agency would administer them? Or rather, which agency would administer the contract to a grant-supported non-profit entity (because that's how these things work here)? How would you convince qualified people to work there?
Watching The Wire Season 3 play out in real life has been unfortunate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire#Season_3
> Like all educated middle-class Americans, my core understanding of urban crime comes from The Wire
Lol this is accurate for people like me too who know almost everything they do about America from TV shows
The great thing about Season 2 of The Wire is that it works well both as a standalone mini-series and as a segue from Season 1 to Season 3.
Aside from great acting and direction, of course.
Season 2 of The Wire is the single greatest work of television I've ever seen. It's as rich as a novel, as tragic as something out of Shakespeare. Seriously. If anyone hasn't seen The Wire, do yourself a favor and give it a watch.
I love unions in American fictional media. The Wire seasons two is centered around the dockworkers who take bribes and are arguing about how corrupt they should be (I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far). Ozark features a union on the periphery which is introduced by a man carjacking a truck and kneecaping the driver with a shotgun. Can’t wait to see what’s up next.
Because everyone wants to bank/invest with the US. The money is being pushed in, not pulled in. If it were being pulled in, rates would have to be relatively high to pull it in, but they are not, so it is being pushed in.
Why is money being pushed in? Put yourself in the shoes of a wealth-weighted non-US citizen. Wealth weighting is critical for understanding many aspects of economics yet systematically under-discussed to make the economy seem more altruistic than it is, but that's another story. So you have a bunch of money and you're outside the US. You want to preserve or grow your wealth, but your local government keeps devaluing the currency to pump the real economy, or hiking taxes, or there's a labor party that you think might get in power and do those things, or your government is literally called the Chinese Communist Party and is ideologically predisposed to confiscating your wealth tomorrow. Where do you put your savings? Some of it you still keep locally, for practical reasons, but the rest you invest abroad. Where? A peer country with the same issues? A developing country where investment never comes back? A small banking haven that will fold at the first sign of hard power? Or do you send it to the rabidly capitalist country with a 50 year track record of delivering investor returns and dozens of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines to put between your bank account and the New Workers Collective of Yourlandia? That's right. You send it to the USA.
What happens when the money lands in the USA? It pumps assets, because that's what the money buys, and it dumps exports, which now must compete with a literal money printer for access to talent and resources. Asset holders do great. People who sell services to the asset holders do OK. People who build shit for export, though, oof. Software, chip designs, and movies might be lucrative enough that they don't have to care (thus far) but in general, oof.
"We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket." - The Wire
That's exactly right, but it's extremely important to understand the macro that drives this so that you can understand how the macro affects you and make informed guesses about where it is headed. For example, I wouldn't bet on this dynamic collapsing tomorrow.
Just disappear the containers like the stevedores did in the Wire season 2 /s
I wanted to see where The Wire landed. Season 5 was the weakest but also rounded out the series by showing several cycles completing. Perhaps not the best, but in some ways the most important?
Coke comes in and cars go out and it'd been like that for ages. The port is run by the local mob in a way that makes season 2 of The Wire look like a documentary.
I highly recommend watching The Wire as it provides a stunningly accurate depiction of how this strategy failed in Baltimore. As a sibling comment points out, the "war on drugs" was an abject failure, because the people getting imprisoned for their role in the drug economy were usually street-level dealers and foot soldiers. The people who run criminal enterprises tend to insulate themselves from its everyday operations, which is why they could only get Al Capone off the streets by charging him with tax evasion.
I wholeheartedly agree with your notions on drug usage and decriminalization of certain substances though! You might be interested in Dr. Timothy Leary, who wrote extensively on "control over your own nervous system" as long as it did not affect others [1] (on page 49).
1. https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/565255/AZU_TD_BOX34_E9791_1972_138.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
And The Wire had a notable hiatus between seasons 4 & 5 as the final fifth season wasn’t guaranteed. The show only really was lauded at a popular level after it'd already completed. No way a show like that gets past its first season in today's climate.
> we are in the golden age of tv shows.
I disagree.
> Streaming services enabled serious writers to work on tv shows.
There weren't serious writers in TV before?
https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/10/27/a-golden-age-of-tv-is-losing-its-shine
> Some of the people who helped to create tv’s golden age are downbeat about its future. hbo “died at 50”, Michael Fuchs, who ran the network in the 1980s, tells Mr Biskind. “There’s no longer an hbo.” A producer of “The Wire”, one of hbo’s grittiest and most celebrated shows, says the company would never make it today.
There's an episode of The Wire, in which Presbo finds kids in his class betting on dice; so he collects the dice from all the board-games in the school store, and starts running classes on probability. The kids are totally engaged, and they start winning money from street-corner dice games.
If anything streaming makes shows like The Wire more accessible and viable as commercial successes. It's hard to keep details in your head when the show airs an episode once a week, and if you're tuning in for the first time you've got no idea what's going on and find something else to watch. Neither of those issues he to exists with streaming, although more and more they're switching back to an episode a week model, but rewatching episodes in between weekly releases is an option now at least.
IMO Dune needs to be a tv show that likely runs several seasons so all the world and backstory can be explored properly so the audience can get a full experience.
Think The Wire in terms of plot discovery and forwarding (leaves out bogus exposition, means you have to pay attention to get things etc that moves along at a good pace and has forward development each episode.
It would be expensive, but it’s the only way I can imagine Dune being done to its fullest extent on screen
It doesn't always yield the same result in reality. Very few fictionalized and even well-written, highly-entertaining crime dramas realistically portray schemes that would work as real crime. Something like The Wire probably showed measures to counter police surveillance and organize a criminal conspiracy that might have largely worked in 2002 if you were only targeted by local police and not feds, whereas if you try to implement a break-in to a military facility inspired by a Mission Impossible movie, you will definitely not succeed, but they're still good movies.
When "The Wire" came out, "The Sopranos", "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", I thought "woo hoo! We are in the golden age of television!"
Then I read about the billions(!) being dropped into new productions of classics like "The Wheel of Time" or a spinoff of "Lord of the Rings"
This was a great feeling!
Then all of those billions started delivering. If you were _lucky_, season one was put together with tons of care and picked over. It was also based on a novel series where the author had done the same. If you were unlucky, the TV became like the radio used to be: just background stuff while you do something else. You don't even pay attention to it.
No matter what, season two almost always had the dramatic quality of a baked potato.
And heaven forbid the algorithmic numbers don't work. Then the thing is a dead series walking no matter what the quality.
You can't make quality art by throwing money at it. Very strangely, it actually has the opposite effect: people stop wanting to take risks. You can make a somewhat mathematically-sound four-quadrant marketing pitch hoping to hit the right taste clusters with a guess at whether it'll work or not, but you're not looking at emotional impact over time. Hell no. Hence the current tidal wave of edgy mediocrity.
I leave the TV on in the afternoons when I'm not working and trying to decompress. I have seen a few good series. They are all lower-budget attempts by high-quality artists using a preexisting literary work. Too often, without a solid canon of literary work, season one is great and the rest of it is just doubling down on whatever stimulus was in season one that the algorithm said people liked.
My opinion is that people are going to like "classic" TV the same way they like classic rock. There'll be something about it that they'll argue about endlessly, but there'll also be a lot of derivative work trying to recapture the lightning of actually knowing what the hell you're doing and being lucky.
I thought so too coming from the same generation. But there was a moment, few years back, where I stopped worrying about it.
My kids made me watch Sex Education on Netflix. My initial reaction was just irritation. There is so much content that uses sex, shock and awe to capture attention. And once achieved, there is no further message delivered. My initial reaction was here we go again with this crap. It also took me straight back to my days as a kid, waiting eagerly with the neighborhood gang for episodes of the Wonder Years. It was innocent. It was beautiful. It was dealing with day to day stuff kids dealt with. At least that's what I thought kids needed to see. And was I annoyed at what they were getting instead.
But as Sex Education progressed, and it pulled me in quick, I was just blown away, by how the writers were handling so many complicated subjects. Not with the usual cynicism (think fight club or the wire) but with humor, imagination and loads of innocence and beauty. It was just so heartwarming. I was looking forward to the new seasons as much as my kids were :) And I cant imagine it being produced in the 90s.
And it showed me, as complicated as the world is getting, there is so much more possible today. And beauty isn't dead. It just looks different.
> You reduce organized crime by taking out the leaders.
You take out the leaders by arresting the weakest link and working up.
You may enjoy watching The Wire. Aside from being maybe the best tv show ever, they go deeply how to take out organized crime (and the societal issues driving crime).
This strongly reminds me of a scene from season 3 of The Wire. A bunch of gang leaders are making plans together -- by way of a meeting trying to be run by Robert's Rules of Order. A subordinate is taking notes -- have to minutes according to the rules. Eventually the leader notices and asks "is you takin' notes on a criminal fuckin' conspiracy?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly82nabRRYc
So sad that John Wilson is over now. One of the weirdest best shows ever. The S1 E2 episode How to put up scaffolding about all the scaffolding in NYC was one of my favorites. Never has a show loved and showcased a city so authentically, except maybe the Wire with Baltimore.
If you’ve watched the final episode (absolutely riveting in typical Wilson fashion) the conversation with “Mike” is just shocking. But in some ways it makes sense the show had to end. Similar to the Ali G show back in the day, once you achieve some fame, ironically strangers will know who you are and be less likely to tell their true stories and opinions. And at that point the show would be dead anyway.
The defense of “you shouldn’t change anything about my beloved series” is pretty flimsy.
If you don’t change anything, then what’s the point of watching/reading/playing the same thing over and over? Doesn’t any series just get incredibly boring without variation?
Great literature, TV, and films say things. Sometimes you might not agree. But at least it makes you think. Ideally, each entry in a series should say different or evolving things. Just look at how The Wire explores different aspects of Baltimore’s crime epidemic in each season as an example.
And I’m not saying Captain Marvel is great or even good by the way. I thought it was just another boring superhero move, and a D or F tier at that. Same goes for a lot of your other examples.
But I do think even beloved series have to have room for adaptation and experimentation. Because otherwise, they stagnate and can get to a point where they’re no longer worth watching.
Just look at Mission Impossible for example. Each film is well made and has fun action. But do we really ever need another one? Doesn’t essentially the same thing happen every time? Isn’t Ethan Hunt always going to save the day and risk everything for his friends and the mission?
Obligatory link to The Wire, Season 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO1zxPRRf4g
This is very relevant to me. There's a great song I heard on The Wire from HBO called "Analyze" by Sharpshooters [1]. Info on this group is almost non-existent; Only a brief synopsis repeated on Reddit and a few other sites. This was a song used on one of the most popular TV shows ever, I cannot imagine the amount of info being lost on lesser groups/songs.
Also related, I LOVE MF DOOM. Collecting his discography is a fun little task, considering he appears on various albums using one of many monikers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMlCLw4aCqA
I think you’d get a kick out of Chassol. He’s a French composer building entire compositions around the contours of environmental sounds.
I’d start with his Big Sun record. Listen to ‘Birds, Pt. 1’ and you’ll get it right away.
He also does these compositions he calls “ultrascores” where he’s composing to scenes from TV shows. Here’s one he did for The Wire:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bV1lY1UsEng&pp=ygUQQ2hhc3NvbCB0aGUgd2lyZQ%3D%3D
> We're going to look back on the era of prestige TV fondly.
I don't think prestige TV is necesirely expensive though.
The wire, breaking bad, Andor, the bear, severance all can achieve incredible results without hollywood budgets.
If anything big budgets have not translated into quality, see GoT, Rings of Power, Stranger Things all getting worse the more moeny thrown at them.
prestigue tv is about talent, and having longer story lines, it just allows for more character work than a movie, but not because of that does it have to cost exponentially more.
As a non-American, I think watching season 4 of The Wire, which has an education and politics focus, was both eye opening and profound. Highlighted the profound gap between US and where I grew up on a number of issues.
I think "high school chem teacher builds a drug empire that rivals Mexican cartels" is definitely a glorified macho-suburban fantasy elevated to an art form. In reality season 1 would have ended with Bryan Cranston's character dissolving in a vat of drain cleaner or buried out in the New Mexican desert missing his head and fingers. I mean, look at the drug addict that gets the most screen time in the show: he's the cofounder of the drug empire guiding the main character through the drug game like a methed out Master Miyagi.
Compare it with Snowfall: the main character's family has at least some history of drug dealing and he only succeeds because he discovers a cheap and ultra-addictive recipe for crack cocaine and because the CI-freaking-A is using him to fund the global war on communism. Recurring characters get killed off in dumb gang skirmishes all the time and the drug addict with the most screen time is literally a shell of her former self that can barely get through the day up until the latest season.
Or compare it with The Wire: all the people involved in the drug game are only in it because they have literally nothing else to live for except the glory of the game. Basically no one survives except the cops and Bubbles never really gets fully clean.
"but there's no reasonable expectation of privacy legally."
Um. Isn't that what this case is trying to establish? It's unclear what the legal expectation is or isn't.
Just because we have the technology to do something doesn't mean it immediately follows that erodes a given right. The government can tap just about any call, but courts have restricted that substantially (at least in theory...). If you have not, I recommend watching The Wire and checking out all the hoops that the police have to jump through to establish cause and perform wire taps. Technology is very dated now, but it gives an interesting view. (It is also, I'll add, a damn good show...)
Here, the ACLU is trying to establish that constant camera surveillance of a house is a violation of your rights. Nobody is arguing it's not technically possible, nor is anybody arguing that my neighbor can't have a Ring camera that happens to have my house in its field of view.
But the state planting a camera specifically to surveil a house for months at a time is, arguably, a violation without showing any cause or getting a warrant to do so.
There is value in that. One thing is tradition and one thing is media or history. I agree that traditions and culture should advance but by means of creating new things not overwritting existing ones.
The Wire would not be the wire without the accent, manerisms including slurs, drugs and police brutality.
Dazed & Confused would not be the same without the 70s issues and fortunes but you have the show Skins replacing those with the 2000 "revisions" or Euphoria with the 2020 ones. There is no need to rewrite any of those.
It could be argued that in movies like Blade Runner the rapey scene of Deckard and Rachel does not add anything to the story or characters. Ignoring the technical difficulty of changing those scenes without altering the story narrative or the character morals and flaws at the end of the day is a product of it's time with it's flaws.
In this case it was designed that way on purpose although I consider the reasons weak and it could have been done better if that was the intent. It doesn't help that the actress did not enjoy making the scene. https://youtu.be/vIdlYzbugT8?t=261
It can also be interpreted as Deckard being a lowlife scum that purposely rapes Rachel taking advantage of the fact that she is being hunted, he is the only one who is going to protect her and she knows it.
In this case maybe not you or me would care if the scene was rewritten but I'm sure someone trying to study older movies, a director or Harrison Ford cuestionable love scenes would if only the rewritten movie had survived.
If remakes add something to the table it's the ability to reimagine stories in a less flawed way by our standards without deleting the past.
TLDR; rewriting media is very nuanced and we should take the easy way out of remaking it or creating new stuff instead.
Netflix axing incomplete shows has become like Google killing products: people are starting to become aware of it, and that puts them off picking up new products.
It's also self-sabotaging behavior from the point of view of a back catalog. If people know in advance that a show had an unsatisfying ending, they're not going to recommend that people go back and watch it. But then Netflix and everyone else seems to treat shows as disposable these days, as if nothing mattered six months after it came out. Yet people still talk about The Wire (first broadcast 2002)
I experienced a very similar situation in Denver before I decided to leave. From friends and acquaintances I gather that Portland and Seattle are in similar situations as well. NYC doesn't seem quite as bad, but it's definitely trending in a similar direction.
All of these arguments over crime rates and policing remind me a lot of The Wire, especially Season 3. For those who haven't watched it, it deep dives into the relationship between crime on the street and the high-level political maneuvering to which those crimes are merely an inconvenience, not a problem that needs fixing. Lots of pressure from folks at the top of city government to reduce numbers, rather than fixing the issues. And the frustration at the bottom of that pile, when everyday police officers realize they can't fix structural problems.
Makes me wonder what happened to make US cities so much better in the 2010s. Is it just a prosperity thing related to tech wealth? Because it feels like these exact issues were a huge problem in the 90s, and they somehow got better for a decade and a half before covid brought them back worse than ever.
Metrics-driven policing often gets the blame here: shifts in policing policy that hold individual precincts, officers, etc., directly responsible for crime statistics under their watch were initially successful in more efficiently allocating police resources, but have now created a set of perverse incentives that encourage officers to either not file reports or to down-classify reports into less-grave categories (reporting armed robbery as theft, etc.). These kinds of programs originated in NYC, as the "CompStat" program under Jack Maple and Bill Bratton, largely during the administration of Rudy Giuliani as mayor, but similar programs have since been adopted by (particularly urban) police departments across the country, to arguably similar both positive and negative effects. This kind of stats manipulation ("juking the stats") featured heavily in the TV show The Wire, for example, which is set in Baltimore.
So, to more directly answer your second question: other cities absolutely also suffer here, but New York has been at it the longest, and so is perhaps best known for this issue.
For more background, Reply All did a two-parter a few years ago exploring the history here, which is quite good. This is the first part: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34
The Wire is the best TV series in my opinion.
> the culture that made those days happen
Literally one movie, that was an unexpected hit is your contender for better culture?
In 2001 the highest grossing movie was Harry potter, and right below lord of the rings was monsters inc and jurasic park.
In 2002 Lord of the rings, Harry potter, Spiderman
in 2003 lord of the rings, matrix,nemo and pirates of the caribean.
Like how is that any different to now when you have pirates, spiderman, some children disney movie and fantastic beats which is just more harry potter?
> the old skills are no longer there.
Dune had more practical effects than lord of the rings. In 2001 the TV golden age had not started. Shows like the sopranos and the wire where struggling to find an audience. Friends and CSI reigned. Nowadays House of the Dragon and Last of US two high quality shows, with good use of practical effects are doing better than comparable mediocre daytime tv.
Even blockbusters are in many ways better. Andor is a million times better than anything from the 2000s prequels.
That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows.
I tend to ignore new TV shows these days. Why? I just know they're gonna be great for a few seasons at best then start sucking, and I don't feel like wasting my time in the meantime. I can count on one hand non-episodic TV shows in the last 25 years that have maintained their high quality throughout.
The Wire The Sopranos Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Mr. Robot
Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end.
All cases where one person or a couple people had strong creative control of the project throughout.
I could sit here all day listing shows that started out really good but then it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing, or the writers who did left.
These shows are all written by committee now. All these garbage Star Trek shows. Westworld has really neat sci fi premises for each season but other than season 1 they always devolve into action schlock because the writers don't understand how to actually write good sci fi.
As for big movies, they feel like they're written by marketing people not writers. They're optimised for getting people into the theatre and everything else is an afterthought.
There's still a handful of auteurs making great movies you could think of as big. People like Tarantino, Scorsese, the Coen brother. Christopher Nolan gets lucky sometimes, but most of his sci fi is ruined by sloppy writing for me(Interstellar...)
One thing is certain for me though. I can't think of a single recent movie I've enjoyed that had lots of CGI in it. The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets.
The true art of filmmaking lies in the writing. You can have all the effects in the world, the best actors and directors. Doesn't matter one bit if the script is terrible.
It's double-worse-than-that, because all these dudes loooove The Punisher and like to post his logo on everything, which is a solid, full step worse than them thinking they're Judge Dredd. It's as if they don't understand the core point of their job. See that great season 3 scene from The Wire with the older officer telling the younger one what police work used to be like before the drug war—far less adversarial, a lot more about building ties with the community. "You call something a war, you're gonna get soldiers", I think one line goes.
Yeah, I think that's the real issue. People complain about 6 episodes not being enough, but the truth is that a lot of those 6-8 episodes now feels like filler - probably because some constraints (ad cuts on scenes...) have disappeared, so writers feel emboldened. Not everything can be The Wire.
The obvious solution is to wait until series are done before watching them, if lack of narrative closure upsets more than watching with everyone else excites you. E.g one of these days I might get around to The Wire or Breaking Bad, but probably not Lost or Game of Thrones or Twin Peaks, because I'm aware people were annoyed at how they ended. On the other hand I'm perfectly happy with seasons 1-3 of The Office or season 1 of Stranger things, or Season 1 of Severance even though it was a total life hanger, so it's not impossible to make something that's good even if it's not clear how long it'll run.
This is a major theme of the TV show The Wire.
It also doesn't have TV shows like Game of Thrones, House, The Wire, Breaking Bad, etc etc
Is it thinkable that after "hundreds of hours binging series and movies" you have simply exhausted the options?
Me, I haven't found a second The Wire yet, no matter how often a recommender claimed that to be so.
The Navy was directed by the Executive branch to release the videos. They released the videos and a non-statement about what the videos were.
My guess is that there's an internal report describing the FLIR system and how the FLIR system works and how the internal workings of the FLIR system caused the visual phenomena. But that's all classified.
So they did the absolute minimum the Executive branch required them to do and left it up to the White House Press Secretary to explain it to the American public.
To me it reeks of the brass not wanting to have any more of their time wasted. There's a great scene in The Wire where the metro police, the harbor police, the state police, and the county sheriff arguing that a string of murders don't fall under their jurisdiction; it's your problem you deal with it etc, subverting the trope of the local cops fighting with the federal/state police (usually the FBI) that "this is my jurisdiction" or whatever. I think this is the same. The Executive branch (I'm 80% sure it was Trump, coulda been Obama, too lazy to look it up) demanded that they do a thing they didn't want to do, and then they dragged their feet and did the bare minimum, and in the process made a mess that now the Office of the White House now needs to clean up. (which they didn't, because they don't want to explain a classified sensor system in a public briefing either)
So we're just going to pretend that Season 5 of The Wire never happened? Because that story sure stuck out like a sore thumb.
My point is, all shows have their ups and downs. Sopranos/BB/Wire were great and definitely kickstarted the golden age of television, but Mad Men just hits differently and I think I now know why: the visual richness and spectacular screenwriting/character development.
Recently someone gave me this book called "Difficult Men" by Brett Martin. Nope wasnt about mass shootings. It was about the protagonists created in the most popular TV shows in the US and the minds of the writers behind them. So Sopranos, Mad Men, Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under etc etc. Its a super impressive and ever expanding list of writing. But the common thread is dysfunction. They are all coping badly with whatever situation they are thrown into or run into. And the costs and consequences keep building up and nothing ends too happily.
While reading it I was feeling, this too is a sort of mass attack on the minds of people. Cause its a hope and faith killer. The message is always - here is some entertaining and mesmerizing hypocrisy your small chimp brain hasn't imagined and guess what? Whatever move you make you loose. After reading that book, I see that same message in stand up comedy, in the news media, in tech and business news etc. Probably exacerbated since social media finds and amplifies such things. But I feel the messaging and signaling underneath really needs to be different.
These shows are artistic creations. When it's clear that the painting is unfinished, and the artist's vision and intent incomplete, why bother? Not every show is like this, many say what they have to say in a single episode (many sitcoms, police procedurals) or season (e.g., Hacks, Watchmen, The Wire). But there are a lot of shows that are just unfinished works-in-progress without the end of their story.
Yeah given the numbers of shows being produced, as long as 3-4 new ones per year are worth watching what more do you really need? There's tons of back libraries of good shows and HBO and Apple TV is still making high quality stuff.
Let Netflix produced a pile of garbage and I'll sift through the diamonds the year after... I have yet to have a year where there wasn't 3-5+ high quality streaming seasons (this yr = White Lotus, The Offer, and Severence).
If not you can always rewatch The Wire for the 5th time.
The only losers are those looking to binge watch new stuff every week... AFAIK those people were previously the audience for garbage prime time network shows on FOX/NBC/etc that no one even remembers the names of 5yrs later.
So I guess it sucks for them - being the guinea pigs for the rest of us ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> There’s something seriously brainwashed about looking at what’s at offer today and still concluding that because the Sopranos exists we’re still producing good content.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
The Wire
You're the Worst
The Good Place
Too many decent-to-great sitcoms and sketch-comedy shows to list.
Ditto adult animated shows.
Justified
Evil
Several great limited series (e.g. The Haunting of Hill House)
I could keep going. The last couple decades have given us a lot of really good shows since The Sopranos. I watch a fair amount and still have a backlog of probably-great stuff I haven't gotten to yet (including, actually, The Sopranos!) and continue to stumble on shows I've never even heard of that turn out to be really good.
"Subsidized apartment buildings, often referred to as housing projects (or simply "the projects"),[4] have a complicated and often notorious history in the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidized_housing_in_the_United_States
Perhaps someone has better suggestions but look for example at "The Wire" TV series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire
You need to watch Season 4 of The Wire.
I haven’t (yet) watched Twin Peaks but I’d wholeheartedly concur with that endorsement. For quality / episode ratio, I’d put it up there with the first four seasons of the Wire (10/10).
The first episode of Severance is quite slow with regards to plot but still visually compelling. The cinematography, music and character building stay consistently excellent throughout the series but the drama and tension increasingly ramp up so much that my wife and I were on the edge of our seats for the last few episodes. It was so good that I intend to re-watch Season One before watching Season Two (I’m guessing that there will be follow-up) comes out.
My wife and I both really enjoyed the first two seasons of For All Mankind. She generally dislikes science fiction and anything to do with space but was soon won over by the human element and the great characters. However, we both felt that the quality of the show (particularly the writing) fell hard with the third season.
We both also thought that Shining Girls was an excellent mini-series and have Slow Horses lined up to watch next.
I don't get the positive reception I'm reading about Andor here.
I've watched it since I've seen it mentioned in positive light multiple times - the rebellion plotline is nice but main character development is super dragged out and feels pointless - the arduous childhood flashbacks, dramatic sister searching - to end up screwing in Miami - so many episodes felt weak and irrelevant. The heist was dragged out far too much - who cares what sw goat milk tastes like ?
Entire season could be condensed into a one and a half hour movie and nothing of value would be lost.
Not saying it's bad - but far from "the wire in SW universe" or other praises people seem to be singing it.
> I'm astounded that this article doesn't mention what to me seems like a no-brainer: We're in the golden age of television.
I disagree, the golden age of television was the late 90s to early 2010s, from the start of the Sopranos, to the last episode of Breaking Bad. I can’t name a series in the last 10 years that is on par with Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, or The Wire.
Streaming services killed quality television, House of Cards was the beginning of the end.
> It doesn't have to be this way, as long as you don't assume your audience to be complete idiots (as apparently The Wire's owners do). Go watch the new versions of Star Trek (the original series): it looks beautiful. Luckily, it was all shot with real film, so it looks fantastic in HD, but they didn't do something stupid like changing the aspect ratio, they just left it at the standard 4:3. They did redo all the FX shots since those just weren't going to work in HD, but they look good.
They also included versions with the original VFX upscaled in case you don't like the new VFX. I agree that that was a great release, same with TNG really even with the small nits you mentioned.
Unfortunate that DS9 and Voyager are (and will be for the forseeable future it seems) stuck on crappy interlaced DVD (or streaming rips for pirates) if you want an offline copy. I'd be happy with just a 720p non-interlaced and professionally cleaned up release.
Wow, it's really amazing these crappy remastered versions were ever released in these states.
It doesn't have to be this way, as long as you don't assume your audience to be complete idiots (as apparently The Wire's owners do). Go watch the new versions of Star Trek (the original series): it looks beautiful. Luckily, it was all shot with real film, so it looks fantastic in HD, but they didn't do something stupid like changing the aspect ratio, they just left it at the standard 4:3. They did redo all the FX shots since those just weren't going to work in HD, but they look good.
Star Trek: TNG on the other hand has a few problems, though nothing as bad as this other stuff. There's a few places where things that wouldn't have been visible now are, such as one of the early episodes (probably the pilot) where there's an extra piece of carpet under Data's chair. The old rounded screens wouldn't have shown this, so they just left it in on the original TV version, but in HD with rectangular screens it shows up. The other problem is that, with HD resolution, you can see the black cardboard they strategically stuck on the control panels on the bridge to prevent reflections from lights. It would have been nice if they had done a little more digital editing to fix these minor issues.
Recently, the CDC added this vax to the "approved" list of vaxxes for kiddys. Many don't realize that once this EUA (emergency use approved) vaxx was placed on the kiddy list, Phizer is now off the hook for law suits/any liability. Now since many states will REQUIRE this vax for kids to go to Public Schools etc... hey we can jack the price up.... Reminds me of the TV series The Wire...... sad
> It must be noted that documentaries are still interpretations.
Yup.
I agree The Wire is fine entertainment. More than that, nah. I read more than once that real mafioso started emulating the quirks, behaviors and characteristics of movie mafioso.
Being a nerd myself, I know that movie nerds have little or nothing in common with real nerds, but they are the popular misconception of nerds. Has anyone ever said to you "say that again in English"? Not to me.
It must be noted that documentaries are still interpretations.
Having said that, I understand what you're saying. I could talk at length about what I took away from Ordinary Men by Christopher R Browning. For example, german soldiers on the trains taking jews to death camps ran out of bullets because they were shooting them as they tried to escape the moving train. Think about how many damned bullets that is.
OTOH, The Wire to me is entertainment. It's one of those shows that hugely believable and once you learn the writers have actual on-the-ground experience, you start to understand why it seems so believable. That doesn't mean you don't recognize it as entertainment.
The Wire is a great story. Star Trek is a great story. RomComs can be very entertaining.
But taking life lessons from fiction is a serious mistake. I made those mistakes many times. They're fantasies dreamed up by writers, and being fantasies, those imaginary worlds work in the way the writer thinks things ought to work.
The real world doesn't work that way. Real interactions among people, if they have any relationship to movie plots, is simply accidental.
This is a large reason why I have slowly gravitated over the years towards reading history books rather than fiction. History is real, and it doesn't work like fiction (a beginning, a middle, an end). The life lessons in them actually work.
For just one example, Star Trek is the fantasy of the benevolent dictator, embodied by Kirk, and his idiot savant advisor, Spock. I love ST as much as anyone, but the benevolent dictator is a pure fantasy.
> My main takeaway from this is that I need to go watch The Wire
Please do. It took me a few months to get through it, but it’s worth it. The show broke many of the old conventions that were expected in a television series and paved the way for much of what we see today.
It is daunting at first, if for no other reason than the shear number of characters. It probably takes 3 episodes just to understand who is who, despite the amazing acting.
There is no show that I have seen before or after The Wire that puts such a lens to American culture in the inner city. It is a masterpiece of story telling. The writing and acting are just spot on and the story... it's brilliant.
Writing isn’t there for Marvel sure. But to me the achievement is reliably producing B grade movies. Entertaining, worth a chuckle, easy on the eyes. None deserve an Oscar, but none (or few) are really very bad. Even if that were easy to do with one movie, and I’ve watched a lot of real garbage, doing it with a string of 20 interconnected films? Culminating in Endgame? That required the steady hand of a few really solid people. It was the first of its kind by an absolute mile, a totally new achievement in cinema. Spielberg and his ilk have been obsessing over all the CGI and sleeping on the real achievements.
For reference my favorite movies would be No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Fury Road. I like The Wire, Breaking Bad, True Detective season one. But I think Marvel is a different sort of thing altogether. The sheer reliability of it is unrivaled. Which is why I say that’s what Rings of Power lacks for me. The writing doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Just keep the thing competent despite all the cooks in the kitchen. Many pieces of media seem to fail at this.
Lately I will say the formula has worn thin. I consider their run to be from Iron Man to Endgame.
> the fundamental rules of cinema - speak clearly and face the camera
You're literally describing the fundamental rules of cinema... in the 1940's. Back in the studio system, that was exactly with they did, so clearly they even used a fake "transatlantic accent" with heightened enunciation to do it.
And these rules (minus the accent) are still followed to a large degree in middlebrow TV fare like what you watch on ABC or the CW Network. It's also more present in comedies.
But if you're watching a prestige drama on HBO or Netflix? If you're watching The Wire or Succession? If a drug dealer or cop suddenly starts speaking clearly and facing the camera, all believability is instantly shattered.
Your rules for "bad acting" are outdated by about seven decades. In fact, "method acting" in the 1950's was precisely a reaction to the stilted "speak clearly and face the camera" acting of the 1940's. By your standard, Marlon Brando would be a bad actor, since "speak clearly and face the camera" is the polar opposite of what he did.
> The only way to faithfully film the book would be to make some sort of anthology series, and I don't think that format works well for big-budget prestige drama.
It wouldn’t work on traditional TV but this is streaming on AppleTV. Budget was not a barrier AND ‘ratings’ don’t really matter for Apple either. That was the best opportunity during the period of PeakTV to just do what works artistically best for the adaptation with no constraints…
If I were the producer I would have spent Apple’s money on actors instead of special effects. Every episode ~60 mins to 90 minutes~ would end on a Seldon Crisis. Hari Seldon, the mayor, the trader, the Mule, etc would be played by the biggest movie stars (Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Chris Evans, Will Smith… or Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry etc) and that’s your hook for the mainstream audience. You offer the actors movie scale pay checks for limited season requirements and thats how you attract them. That’s an easy hit.
Or hire David Simon to make ‘The Wire in space’. Update Asimov’s theory of empire evolution to acknowledge newer works like Guns, Germs and Steel. Easy Prestige TV adaptation.
Instead we got this abomination of an adaptation where it’s clear this only exists because they shopped around for IP to make an action series to fight the streaming wars
If I want to watch a history lesson, I can do that, there are some great documentaries out there. Probably produced for less money. And I would actually learn something.
But of course, there are many interesting narratives that don't involve the apocalypse. The Wire has a great one. Bladerunner is superb. The recent Black Bird was captivating, too.
Dragons though? Just boring.
Most "tech" shows or hacker scenes are akin to the police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and medical shows that generally don't bear much relationship with what it's like day-to-day for cops, lawyers, or hospital workers. (Hence shows/films like The Wire and Reno 911, My Cousin Vinny and Suits, St. Elsewhere and Scrubs stand out.)
As a founder of a venture-backed startup with first-to-market tech that went through an accelerator in Palo Alto in the 2010s, Silicon Valley is basically entirely accurate. Actually tamer and more restrained than reality in many regards, at least anecdotally.
>MGSV flashed his name at least five times on every load and every mission before it let me start anything
It's meant to be like a tv series, just like how Game of Thrones or The Wire flashes the directors name before an episode.
Just how MGS 3 was meant to be a James Bond style movie so starts with a female vocalist singing a overly passionate ballad. They're stylistic elements from cinema, and in that case TV he's bringing to gaming to set a tone.
Tod Lasso is pretty much universally loved by friends of mine who have watched it. You don't have to be a soccer fan to watch it.
I don't know as many people who have watched Severance, but it's an incredibly good show- as long as Season 2 maintains the quality, I think it'll rank up there with shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad.
To chime in about how the article is cherry picking rather than doing deeper analysis: Dark and gritty superhero deconstruction was a product of the '80s and maybe early '90s, and then the '00s had the gritty reboot/reimagining trend for TV shows and movies in general. You also had a lot of prestige drama doing gritty realism with complex, dark antihero male protagonists starting in that era, which kicked into high gear in the '10s. Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Also shows where society was the gritty complex realistic antihero. The Wire to Game of Thrones.
I wouldn't say contemporary culture is any more unhappy than that era, it's just harder to read because there's no GOT type "event" series that everyone is watching right now. Maybe there will be a new cultural phenomenon, or maybe with this glut of streaming content, there won't be. (And if we look at blockbuster films, so many of them are shiny happy Disney-MCU fare, which are definitely not dark and gritty.) It just feels like right now we have a huge array of choices. When presented with that variety, it's really hard to say that it's generally more or less happy.
I do wonder what will replace comic books as the dominant subgenre of pop entertainment. I was hoping we'd get a reconstruction trend with comics like Astro City or Kingdom Come getting adapted, but in writing the previous section, I realized there's no need. For every dark and gritty realistic The Boys, there's multiple Disney+ shows. Batman is a character who's inherently going to have darkness. The majority of superhero comic screen media is escapist and optimistic, and this not-study is cherry-picking.
Yes, some of the best titles have none or just 1 top tier actor at the time: Star Wars (Alec Guinness), West World (Anthony Hopkins), Game of Thrones (Sean Bean), Breaking Bad, The Wire. I'm sure there's other's I can't remember.
Some directors prefer fresh actors for some movies. It s not necessarily a red flag, but it could be. Time will tell.
There was a private showing of the next episode of Better Call Saul yesterday at a film festival of sorts, the rest of us won't see that episode until July.
It's probably just trending topic and you fit a similar profile to people that would watch the show/Breaking Bad. My viewing habits are pretty stable and I noticed I get recommendations for The Wire even after resetting all my cookies as well as not logging in to my Google account
For David Simon fans, there's a new mini-series called "We Own This City" that also covers a similar situation in Baltimore.
Highly recommended, albeit a short spiritual successor to "The Wire."
https://www.hbo.com/we-own-this-city
Non-paywall link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/arts/television/david-simon-ed-burns-the-wire-anniversary.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DIDm0biO0PH5PH50rJaLRifNo02XOXTcFAPPo0Rfl1yKpSMwlnVhOuud6YmJlAPCQvpMe6WGU3wZ_XRrki4Hnqcmy9Yq9Z9YGIgiinYnK2EOHXz2tyZ0s-884yawz50H0MxqjDDrIljdlh2fx2VoQqRTwDeCONu6PvWxl7PdzVaArOqVVjA5EvUjrXlN-Y7LISIk4FWR-dEiQJsStr48hcOdgXIK_4MxQjHcH-ir4bAWdjR5y7U9xzH8OH0uU37sOe7ECE28G0xP4pFapLvrqisW2yN1cnS7P-L0y3ptUmmLCSYqyPg9xPlz0l&smid=url-share
One of interesting bits is how Ed Burns rails against the 5th season, almost universally considered by fans to be the worst season:
> NYT: In retrospect, is there anything else that you wish that the show had done differently?
> BURNS: I wish that Season 5 took a different direction, as far as the newsroom was concerned, and didn’t debase the idea of investigation. But it’s fine. What we tried to get across is that the kids that we saw in [Season 4] were becoming, as they approached adulthood, the guys that we saw in [Seasons] 1, 2, 3 and 4. It was continuous. This is just the next generation.
What's interesting is that David Simon has no response to this question. I know he's said that S5 was not ideal, because HBO allowed him only 10 episodes, making it the shortest season by far. But basing the season around the Baltimore Sun newsroom was definitely Simon's idea — and arguably, his baby[0] — and that almost necessitated the major subplot of the homicide detectives going off the rails as a thematic foil. I wonder if Simon 20 years later thinks the final season could have ended any other way?
[0] https://davidsimon.com/the-wires-final-season-and-the-story-everyone-missed/
I can't think of the last time I thought about a Mapsco book. Actually, the most recent reference was a few weeks ago when I was rewatching The Wire which the particular episode was shot in 2006 or 2007. Mapsco was probably on it's way out by then. GoogMaps was out in 2005, so MapQuest and others were even available before then. (wow, mapquest was available online in '96)
I'm the opposite of you. From age 20 to about age 45, I did not watch TV at all. Part of that was because I grew up in the UK, and the experience I had with the BBC (and a bit of Channel 4 and very occasionally ITV) made US TV just look stupid to me. Endless stupid ads, laugh tracks, completely unrealistic characters, dumb plots, and more endless stupid ads.
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO.
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
Mad Men
This habit of cancellation is, for me, the biggest failure of the lot. Some of their shows were very high quality and quite unique: One Day At A Time, The OA, The Baby-Sitter’s Club. You know what else all of these shows have in common? They were cancelled at the top of their game.
People forget that many huge shows, e.g. Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, only became hugely popular several years into their run. The Wire is even more extreme: it only really became huge after the last episode was broadcast. But in each of those cases, someone made the call that a high-quality show was worth running, either because they hoped it would find a wider audience or because they believed it enhanced their brand.
+1, some good stuff over there, all the HBO classics and new movies are available quite soon after release - watched the new Batman yesterday, about to rewatch The Wire. Also the new platform is really improved in terms of usability, it the old HBO GO service which HBO MAX replaced was really bad with buffering and "adaptive" quality which somehow was always 480p for me. Now it's crisp and nice.
The Wire? A bunch of stuff mentioned here:
https://dismantlemag.com/2018/12/03/sorry-bother-you-pro-union-movies/
They're not portrayed a ton in pop culture to begin with, and when they are it's often bad.
The Wire was written by David Simon, a Baltimore journalist who wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (made into a TV show named Homicide before The Wire) after embedding with the police for a year. It's basically the magnum opus of crime documentary from that era. The Wire is fiction but draws strongly from that work. I don't know how his experiences influenced him, but David Simon's politics are extremely left wing these days so make of that what you will.
Also today's shows always feel so overblown. Crack investigative teams operating from luxury offices that could double as a nightclub, wisecracking all day. Earplug 'comms' with unlimited range. Explosions and gunshots in every episode.
Real police work is not like this. I feel like the shows of the 70s were a lot more realistic. Columbo, Hill Street blues etc.
Even though Columbo was not really a realistic depiction of detective work, it did make it feel like work and not just competence porn.
Then in the 80s the whizzbang started with Miami Vice and its blue night skies, cops driving Ferraris etc.
The good shows these days take a step back from this. Like The Wire. But must of them are just fluff IMO.
In the U.S., the gutting of newsrooms has largely already happened, with disastrous consequences for democracy. There is simply too little actual investigative journalism, particularly at the local level, being done today. There are too few independent newsrooms.
Consider that this was already a plotline in the early 2000s TV show "The Wire", written by former Baltimore-Sun reporter (and NewsGuild member) David Simon.
The papers being organized are those that found a business model that works to a degree. The fight now is largely about whether their owners will continue to operate real newsrooms, which requires employing journalists at a living wage and having a fairly long time horizon for investment, or whether they will become essentially hollow brands with little original content.
But to your point: yes, the broader political question of how the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains unresolved for now.
Graeber's books reprogrammed my brain. But I'm still struggling to connect the dots:
What does Iroquois style participatory democracy actually look like?
We need movies and soap operas. To tell the stories.
Like West Wing, House of Cards, Mr Smith Goes To Washington, The Wire. Show the human drama and machinations. Events, issues, and people. Conflicts and resolutions.
Participatory democracy is not all puppies and ice cream. The advocates would be well served to show that it's just another decision making strategy. Hopefully superior to what we have today.
Like how Approval Voting is better than Winner Takes All. We'd still run elections. Just more robust with better outcomes, so therefore less drama.
Discussing only on the merits of their content, and stipulating that this is neither here nor there with respect to Netflix's long-term prospects vs. HBO:
Breaking Bad isn't an HBO show. So I assume we're just asking, "has Netflix produced any world-class content". The answer to that is yes.
The jewel in their crown, their "Game of Thrones", is clearly Stranger Things. It's undeniably successful, each new season a cultural event. I'd put Stranger Things up against any HBO show for relevance and impact. (Perhaps not for artistic excellence; but, The Wire is the best show that's ever been on television, and it's far from the most watched).
Add to that Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, Sex Ed, the annual Flanagan miniseries (Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass), Master of None, and Big Mouth.
They're doing about as well as any premium cable channel ever has. Doesn't, of course, mean you like their content! But I have about as much faith in Netflix coming up with a new prestige show than I do in HBO, most of whose recent stuff has left me pretty cold.
Makes sense. 99% of what I know about container shipping comes from the movie Contraband and Season 2 of The Wire. ;)
There is a comic I remember from my childhood, "Tom the Dancing Bug" written by Ruben Bolling. He had a character called "Harvey Richard, Lawyer for Children". I linked a couple of examples [1], [2], [3], [4] but the satire, IMO, is incredible. It lampoons humanities proclivity to layer pseudo-rationality onto the irrational things that we do.
It also reminds me of the TV show "The Wire" when Stringer Bell, a senior member of a street drug distribution ring of urban thugs, forces them to conduct their meetings using Rules of Order. [5] If you watch to the end, you see that in those circumstances order means nothing, it is just a facade.
I guess you could say that I'm cynical about the prospects of such a court and I tend to see the underlying truth in the satires that point it out.
1. https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2015/02/26
2. https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2014/12/25
3. https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/545850417313484171/
4. https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/178807047675716661/
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO1zxPRRf4g
> Standardized tests are the best tool we have to ensure our schools are providing all children quality educations regardless of economic or racial background or disabilities.
It's a work of fiction but I'd like to refer to "The Wire Season 4" and how they portray standardised test taking to get you a fresh perspective outside of the utopian thought about curricula.
I first heard that in the 1990s. And the TV show "The Wire" (c2004?) made frequent use of the phrase "the game" to describe the process of street-dealing drugs, and the money, and the police, etc. As in "it's all in the game" - ie: all's fair in love and war.
All the stuff from before you were born is curated for you by society. It's pre-filtered, the cruft has been removed and for the first few years of your life you have no control over the filter.
Then, as agency is attained, you get increasing exposure to the great unfiltered, and you find hidden treasure and trash and you learn what you actually like and dislike - in preparation for the filter you apply to your own children - which helps to define you, to yourself.
Then you get a job, partner, mortgage / rent, kids, and, just the requirements to being able to afford all that goes with that, removes the time required for 'agency' and so you're locked in a fairly tight decade-era of culture for the rest of your life unless you actively choose otherwise; seeking out the alternative, following rabbit holes, opening yourself to the full spectrum of colour that is within surprisingly easy reach, following threads that your natural tendency for the easy path would be to drop.
Most of my favourite music that I listen to now is recent. My old favourites are from when I hadn't heard my new favourites. Some of my new favourites are contextual around life stages and activities I hadn't reached or participated in earlier.
I missed Mad Men, tried to start it a couple of years ago, realised it's 92 hour-long episodes, and worked out that I didn't have the enthusiasm for it after getting through a few episodes because the combination of my friend-base and entertainment value I was getting from it didn't add up to being worth 92 hours of my time.
Recently watched Berserk upon the recommendation of a work colleague. Worth it.
Squid game, worth it. For me anyway.
Live action Cowboy Bebop, enjoying it a couple of episodes in, will continue.
Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. But first, you gotta know yourself.
Listen to music you don't like to better calibrate what you do like. Watch the occasional blockbuster movie to help your appreciation for real film.
Can't see, hear, taste, or do it all, find your own channel but make sure to rub up against the edges regularly enough to determine if you need to change channels but didn't realise it yet.
Culture is about stories from which life lessons are learnt, and there are a lot more TV shows, movies, and songs than there are life lessons, so as long as you check those edges occasionally, you'll be pretty well covered.
The Wire destroyed and rebuilt my view of the world, and work, and government, and leadership and morality. The song King Kong as covered by Tom Waits recalibrated my musical brain (which was already uniquely calibrated by Mr. Bungle in the late 90's), The Mighty Boosh and Rick and Morty have been journeys into imagination like I never dreamed.
No. There's not too much culture.
I'm the same, except the YouTube.
I just love information, so I watch a lot of documentaries.
Outside of the top shelf of TV (Sopranos, Wire, Succession) it's all incredibly formulaic and boring.
It's a continuum. You want content to go from idea(chat), to discussion(forum), to documentation(wiki). Most people should only have to read the wiki, if they have already read the wiki, they can drop down to the forums, and if they have read the forums and have an idea of their own they can do so within the chat. The problem is that pretty much no service has all three. Discord does fairly well because they do chat, and with their pins feature do a really bad job of being a wiki. So 1.5 is better than most services 1. StackOverflow is the only service I know that has all 3(Answers are wikis, the discussion underneath is a forum, then if there's enough messages they kick you into a chat).
I kinda see this as what happened to TV after we got DVR's and Netflix, where we went from episodic stores to serialized stories. That magnified the amount of nuance that TV shows were able to work through. As a result you get shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, Squid Game - all shows that were fundamentally impossible before you knew that people who were watching episode 5 also watched episodes 1-4. Because no one can be sure that you have read all of the previous wiki content, forums are currently episodic in nature. They move very slowly. They need to repeat themselves many times. The bigger the forum, the slower it moves.
One of the worst features of Discord is that when you splinter conversations into different channels it becomes impossibly difficult to keep up with them. You need to click once for each channel you are tracking. Forums had this same issue. Reddit brilliantly solved this problem with their "an upvote pushes threads into the future, then we sort by most recent", but no other service(HN might? I'm not sure.) uses it to this day. I'm not sure why.
What I need on Discord is the ability to have multi-Discords like multi-Reddits where I see every message in a single interface, and clicking that message would allow me to send a message to that channel. So every message would look like this:
Server > Channel > Thread : Hi
AnotherServer > SomeChannel > GeneralThread : Some message
The big problem with chat is it quickly becomes useless as more people join the conversation, for example see Twitch chat, it scrolls so quickly you get an almost instant Eternal September effect of low quality content that reinforces itself. Even Reddit/HN falls over when you get over 1000 comments on a post. What you need is automatic sharding of users, an upvote system that would then push those certain users "up a level", and depending on the amount of users chatting in a channel there would be several levels of hierarchy involved. People who chat within your shard would then instantly reach you, but only high quality posts from other shards would reach you, but it would appear like a forum post, or be refined into a wiki.
I have a lot more thoughts on this topic, but I'll leave it here.
My other Four:
o Firefly - no brainer. Brilliant. o Battlestar Galactica - Has some issues mid-late course, but still pretty end-end enthralling. o Dark (I keep re-watching this over and over every few months. I have many notebook pages full of analysis. Seriously good SciFi for the most part.) o Altered Carbon (mostly Season 1 - but Season 2 was okay)
Big Recommendation:
Not really science fiction (even bigger themes explored) but far superior in terms of overall quality of work/screen writing, and has a similar "concept" that a lot of supposed science fiction shows have - "The Leftovers" - Which I put on my list of the 5 most brilliant things on Television (Sopranos/The Wire/Deadwood/Breaking Bad being the other 4).
I'll give a honorable mention to stuff I loved but I can't totally recommends:
o Travelers - I'm a sucker for a good Time Travel Show. o Foundation - Pretty - I watch it, but I totally would never recommend it. o Fringe - Wow - was totally into this. Definitely an acquired taste though. o Raised By Wolves - Interested in where it's going. Could entirely suck eventually I guess. o Black Mirror - Hit and miss, though hits often enough that I keep coming back to it. o WestWorld - I mean, we all watched it. Season 1 was *awesome* if you watched it in realtime and didn't read all the internet commentary when the aha moment hit you. Season 2 was pretty good as well IMHO. Season 3 was just dreck where the screen writing tanked *but* it paid an *awesome* homage to the very last of the Foundation Novels to bring it all home.
It depends on what aspect of it you're looking for.
If you're looking for Scifi that maybe resembles it I'd say possibly Battlestar Galactica. It's a bit higher production level, although does have slow stretches during some seasons (I think middle third of S2 was one of them), and falls apart a bit when trying to put together it's ending. Writing is about the same, maybe a bit better - and has a similarish feel although not grounded on earth. Covers some interesting topics of society.
If you're looking more of the in depth discussion of the state of society (specifically American). The Wire is really spectacular. But it's not "junkfood" watching, it takes paying attention and a lot of points are subtle. It also takes about 6-7 episodes of very slow ramp up to get good, but one of the best shows of the past two decades - and plenty have said one of the most complete TV shows ever made.
If you're looking for just the easy to consume action and political intrigue, the first half of Game of Thrones fits that bill, but is now notorious for how poorly it ended. High production, lots of characters / back story.
Maybe 24 or Homeland would match if you're looking for more of a straightforward "stop the terrorists" themed show.
It all depends on what aspect of Colony you're looking for / enjoyed.
Of course Paul Krugman is a fan of the Dune and Foundation books!
Very few shows or movies can pull off exploring how a system works, from top to bottom, to show how the world is shaped by rules, customs, etc. The Wire comes to mind as the best "real world" example. I was very impressed by how the Dune movie hinted at the underlying systems while translating the salient points and the "feel" of Dune to the language of film. While I feel it failed in some places, it's a hugely impressive achievement. I love Lynch and like his Dune, but really it's a totally different work from the books with surface level similarities. 2021 Dune feels like a true film adaptation, no easy feat.
Well at least I can take the Foundation TV show off my "to watch" list now
You've picked two films by a single Korean director who is outspoken about his views, which his hardly a good way to show it's a recurring theme across the media in general.
I could pick Atlanta and The Wire and say American media is commonly critical of police. Or turn around and pick CSI and Law & Order and say that American media is commonly supportive of police. It hardly says something about the overall landscape. And thats even picking shows with different directors!
16:9 reframes of Seinfeld have been around a long time. Did Netflix reframe anything or are they using these existing versions? For what it's worth the reframed version is not a simple crop, and in fact sometimes previously-unused parts of the film are used[1]. It's not just a crop/upscale of the original broadcasts, though perhaps the same effort didn't go into this reframing as The Wire, which as others have noted is excellent.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/17xn28/original_vs_todays_broadcast/
This is backwards.
And whatever this is, does not make sense to me.
1. You can just go to the show's subreddit and browse, or browse with filters such as top, hot, etc. And you can filter the time period.
2. You can use Google. This works great for me. Just type "the wire reddit" or "site:reddit.com the wire", and the first result will be the subreddit page, but if you scroll down, you will start to see threads from other subs as well. This way you can access more discussions outside of the dedicated subreddit.
____
In a more general note, you can find all sorts of different stuff by using Google to browse reddit this way.
I have watched quite a few really good movies by searching "your top 5 movies reddit", "your favorite movies reddit", or "best movies reddit". I just go through the past viral threads and find highly upvoted responses, or responses with some of movies I liked and some that I haven't watched.
I have discovered Clue, Primer, Hot Fuzz, Tropic Thunder, The Big Short, etc. this way.
That quote is by Omar Little in the TV show The Wire. That show was amazing. The actor (Michael?) recently died :(
I've noticed how quickly I become depressed when I have nothing to do. It's sort of like the properties of a gas- my lethargy expands to fill the volume of space I have. When I was on a sabbatical between jobs instead of going to museums and art shows and exploring new hikes and doing other things I'd think I would enjoy I laid around and binge-watched The Wire and the West Wing.
When I'm busy I actively block out time to do those activities and plan for them and look forward to them. It's a weird phenomena but I'd guess if I was wealthy enough not to have to work (which I'm not!) I would need to keep working anyways to keep some structure in my life and avoid depression.
As others said, The Wire takes a few episodes to really get going, but the payoffs are huge and well worth it. Slowly but surely, you get to know realistic, flawed characters intimately, and you see them struggle (or thrive) in the social mechanisms that trap them - that trap us. Characters go from "bad thugs and good cops" to "just a bunch of people trying to survive every day in a fucked-up system". And when you think you've finally settled into familiar surroundings-BANG! they take you to another little corner of Baltimore, overlooking another piece of the system, and force you to consider even more points of view, even more merciless dynamics, even more awful connections between the drug economy and the official one...
And of course, The Wire perfected the original "make you care about people, kill them, then keep going" trick well before GoT.
I had to give The Wire 3-4 episodes before I was hooked, and then binged watched the whole thing. I love it, one of my favorite shows for sure.
The first episode of The Wire didn't impress but I should look beyond, I guess. This same actor played Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire ... that was an awesome portrayal.
For this of you that never saw it, The Wire is truly worth watching. It’s also worth turning on the subtitles, as it will make it easier to pick up on s the slang.
Yet another place where work will be done like in the great TV show The Wire. The US is walking dead. It just doesn't know it yet.
The wire is a fictional TV show. It doesn't show anything about the real world.
You're probably right. I've just started watching The Wire and in season 2, the loading dock workers whistle to each other to let them know cops are around.
This reminds a scene from the TV show, the wire when one of the main criminal character hosts a meeting with other gang leaders and a member of his gang is recording minutes, the main character says "Are you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?".
Apparently none of the intelligent executives at Apple/Google figured this out.
I have no idea to what extent they actually get used for money laundering, but churches are still the only form of nonprofit in the US that automatically gets exempted from having to file a tax return. I'm sure the whole season five plot of The Wire where this was how drug lords were funneling money to the local politicians was not entirely fictional, given how everything else in the plot was based on the writers' real life experiences.
Of course, even on The Wire, this was small time compared to the money laundered through urban reclamation and seafront development projects.
What do you mean the HD version of Seinfeld is 16:9? That is a complete distortion of the intention of EVERYONE involved with making the show.
I hate when they do that. I can’t watch the HBO HD copy of The Wire for the same reason. The whole point of cinema is you choose what the f** is within the frame. That’s literally PART of the art form, and an integral one at that.
> The TV shows "The Wire" and especially "The Corner" capture the flavor of the rough parts of Baltimore more than residents would like to admit.
I think The Wire was pretty accurate and a lot of Baltimoreans aren't in denial about what kind of city it was/is. However, if you're only hanging out and working with folks who don't leave the White L[1], you'd think the rest of Baltimore is pretty awful and if it wasn't for work/family, they'd leave ASAP. Not to discredit the concerns folks have, just saying that the loudest voices also seem to be the most negative without being constructive (just check various FB "safety" groups, e.g., Mt Vernon Safety, or Nextdoor).
I recently moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia and in many ways it seems like a bigger version of Baltimore. Lots of white/black segregation, crime (it's already above 300 homicides for 2021), potholes and generally poor road maintenance, poorly run city gov't, etc. Yet somehow there doesn't seem to be the same level of negativity about the city here.
[1] https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcpnews-two-baltimores-the-white-l-vs-the-black-butterfly-20160628-htmlstory.html
Johns Hopkins APL is not far south on 95 from Baltimore. It does MIC stuff, but is also involved with various space programs. There are a bunch of small and large tech companies in and around Baltimore and Baltimore county. I've worked in Columbia, Linthicum, and Rockville MD. (Rockville commute was insane before the new highway, now it would doable for folks who don't mind driving a lot).
I lived there for 12 years. Generally speaking, Baltimore is good if you want relatively affordable housing. A number of neighborhoods are great for DINKS (dual-income, no kids). Public schooling is a hard no-go unless you really get involved and enroll your kids in a carefully selected charter or magnet school. There are some excellent private schools. Baltimore county has options too if you want something that's more suburban.
As far a crime goes, the city has some really profound problems that are the result of white flight and systematic disinvestment. It was hit hard by the crack epidemic and has not really recovered. The TV shows "The Wire" and especially "The Corner" capture the flavor of the rough parts of Baltimore more than residents would like to admit. As far as safety is concerned, like other big cities, it's not really a problem for folks that would read HN, unless you enjoy hanging out in bars at 2am and getting into arguments with armed drug-trade people. Don't leave anything in your car, get a security system for your house.
In The Wire, Season 2, automation & computerization threatening both dock jobs themselves (through greatly increased efficiency) and opportunities for relatively small fish to make a little extra on the side (though much better tracking), is a pretty big part of the plot.
WW was still quite formulaic. ER, NYPD Blue, etc were all shows that maybe pushed for more consistent storylines but they were still boxed in by old school network expectations, and they got their starts in the mid-90s.
Sopranos was a very clear break in writing style. People like to slot in The Wire next to it, but The Wire was more episodic/restricted and honestly felt like an R-rated network tv show to me.
HBO had been doing it for a few years, with shows like The Wire and Deadwood. But Breaking Bad helped bring it to a wider audience, since AMC is basic cable rather than premium. (AMC had launched into that a year before with Mad Men, which was similarly TV as good film.)
> Did they hire one of those TV show genius detectives to plan all this?
maybe lester freamon? this is essentially a more sophisticated version of what he did in season 3 of the wire. nothing new under the sun, I guess.
Imagine The Wire episode when Presbo tells McNulty, Daniels, and Lester that the C-level execs were printing out their instructions on burner printers
For some reason I always think of an episode from The Wire. Rawls is dressing down McNulty for his latest infraction and orders him to have a report to the deputy tomorrow morning, and the points should have "little dots next to them. The deputy likes dots."
Since then I always separate and mark specific items in a report, usually with bullet points. It turns out pretty often, the deputy does, in fact, like dots. But it's also important to avoid duplication.
Thank you. This makes it so much easier to understand more about the US public school system and how it is sometimes portrayed as piss poor (season four of The Wire pops to mind).
Is this something that is being discussed on a wider policy level? I believe it's a universally agreed upon fact that the quality of primary education is the single most important factor in helping people escape poverty. This should work equally well in rural Nigeria, suburban Oslo and West Baltimore.
I think you have to read a lot of books to understand what they mean. And i don't think this woke crowd is right btw.
If you're writing fantasy or fiction in anothertime book, be my guest and write about any character (although if it is supposed to be based on history and you're completely off about the culture at the time, i don't want to read your junk, really). If you're writing about a character in modern time, either you do some really good research, or you'll be off, and if your book/movie is bad, the woke crowd will drop on you. I mean, even if "The Wire" or "Treme" was ran today, nobody would drop on it.
And i will take another example for people in the US. Books about the so-called "white trash"/"trailer trash" or who depict people in this population are mostly wrong. Sometime its hilarious, sometime you just stop reading because the book is so bad. For me it was books about Appalachians hillbillies. Since its the american crowd i know the most, i was quite exited to read about them. I've found on good book, one. The rest is complete trash. Honestly if my grandfather or any of his friends found those books, those would burn.
Watch Season 4 of The Wire (and the previous three seasons as well, it's arguably the best show ever put on TV).
This is a multi-dimensional failure at all levels. It's a failure at the Federal level, where NCLB etc pervert education. It's a failure at the state level to provide and enforce educational standards, and to address systemic poverty. It's a failure at the municipal level where crime, corruption and bureaucracy failed. And it's a failure at the personal level where a mother and son aren't communicating, aren't taking care of themselves.
This failure didn't just happen in the last three years to this young man. His path to failure started in kindergarten, in a dysfunctional society that didn't care about him on any level.
I don't really see this season as going back to Earth.
The entire narrative arc of the series is the social dynamics of humans as they take their first steps beyond Earth; how the initial scarcity of land suitable for human life gives rise to animosity, how eventually the potential bounty causes a rush to exploit, and how space natives struggle for their independence.
The current season is an interesting exploration of the terrorist / freedom fighter duality. It demonstrates clearly, through narrative, how effective committing atrocities can be to forcibly unite a people, and forge a more solid sense of identity through shared suffering and a common enemy.
While I understand why many people didn't like season 4 as much, I found it interesting because it explored how people would try and export Earth-bound laws to new worlds and new contexts, and how that would conflict with the lawless nature of a frontier.
In some ways, it reminds me of The Wire. The Wire is an exploration of drug crime, how it is structured, and how politics and the media are ultimately complicit in perpetuating it - or failing to stop it. The Expanse is a study of how humanity is likely to react to opportunities beyond Earth, at various stages: when there's a single viable alternative; when there's lots of scattered people collectively forming a new nationalistic identity; and when there are new settlers to new lands in a scenario of unbounded potential, and how that remote potential may reduce the will of people to fight over scraps on overcrowded (Earth) or environmentally hostile (Mars) planets.
As a français, I second this. I'm extremely critical of most TV shows and I tend to quit very fast when get the impression I'm losing time. Engrenages is about the only TV shows I am able to watch in french, and it's a really good one. I'd would say, frankly, that it's our equivalent to The Wire.
> Someone needs to do a study on government waiting lists. I
I'll spare you the time and money with my best guess of the conclusion of said study:
In conclusion, Government tasks outweigh the potential output of Government employee expectations, therefore we the researchers recommend ever greater budget allotments and grants to further study why the adage 'more money' doesn't translate into more 'productive' outcomes in the Public Sector.
The very essence of the State as a bureaucratic system ensures that things move as slow as possible, which often illicit the occasional Kill-dozer [0] event, even if you have someone motivated to 'change it from within' they inevitably get burned out due to the amount of red-tape and general sense of apathy. I highly recommend you watch the Wire and maybe even Treme (same producer) as it outlines anything I say way better than I could ever articulate in a 10,000 page essay on the matter.
We really need to move past the nation-state model and limit its scope to as little as possible as that could at least allow for more viable solutions. I just heard you can print car tags at kiosks in grocery stores in CA, which is an example of simple and elegant solutions that were only made possible because the pandemic shut down so many government offices and thus allowed for these services to allotted to more sensible methods--they were not going to let such a massive amount of tax money slip through their hands so they moved fast before people simply disregarded it just as they did lock-down or stay at home orders, and sadly even mask wearing in certain cases.
I waited nearly 5 months for my tags prior to this for my motorcycle in CA, only to see this outcome, which normally would have driven me up the wall but at least produced a reasonable over all solution. No one needs to be paid to hand out something you can automate, it makes no sense. Put those people to more sensible tasks like addressing liens or title transfers that are more nuanced and require actual Human intelligence (and I use the word loosely) or zoning approvals, or solar tie in approvals etc... to solve as there is a massive back log of those right now that can't move forward until some bureaucrat signs off on it.
0: https://allthatsinteresting.com/marvin-heemeyer-killdozer
> But it makes sense, right? Real corruption and crime isn't always about drugs and shotguns.
I think the reaction is just that it's unexpected. Everyone expects there to be crime and corruption in unions, but they don't consider it to be as glamorous or interesting as the gangsters-and-cops tropes that they're used to, and that The Wire seemed to many to be about until season 2.
In the context of Simon's slowly-expanding lens of the American city, it makes complete sense, but most viewers aren't aware of that right at the beginning.
> Much like GOT, either it grabs you enough to continue in the first few episodes or it doesn't.
I stopped after the first episode. It seemed neat but it was just displaced by other stuff. Then around the third or fourth or so season was being aired, my coworkers were talking about it and I dove back in.
Now after reading this thread I'm thinking I should dive into The Wire next.
One thing is when The Wire and The Sopranos originally aired it was weekly and if there were any hanging plot threads the viewers would just have to stew in their own theories about what ifs, I remember lots of times wondering about the fate of characters and waiting weeks or years (Drea while the FBI was using her or that Russian in Jersey Pine Barrens? or who was the serial killer? in the projects in The Wire) for resolution and this was prior to when websites covered shows or when I was aware of internet groups/discussions dedicated to the shows, also on Sunday night before the Sopranos was Sex and the City and also airing on HBO was Six Feet Under (I think after The Sopranos when both were live) - so even just consuming one episode a week of these shows was compelling at the time to me for a weeks worth of scheduled TV viewing.
I don't think it's slow but it doesn't explain itself. When you see an event or character interaction without much context, it seems irrelevant and doesn't register so it might feel like nothing is happening. When I rewatch it now, I find it fast pace with no filler. I can watch McNulty play with tide tables gurgling with joy at the delicious payoff to come but if you don't know the payoff, it no doubt just feels like a dude with some paper.
As a Brit, I have no wish for subtitles. I found no difficulty with the slang or accent. There are many parts of the UK that are much more indecipherable!
I've been enjoying the podcast Way Down In The Hole as an episode by episode recap having already watched it through a few times. Stacked with extra trivia and the insight of two black hosts adds things I didn't see.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wire-way-down-in-the-hole/id1506676994
> Still, being equally honest here, there can be no denying that an ever-greater portion of the television audience has HD widescreen televisions staring at them from across the living room, and that they feel notably oppressed if all of their entertainments do not advantage themselves of the new hardware. It vexes them in the same way that many with color television sets were long ago bothered by the anachronism of black-and-white films, even carefully conceived black-and-white films. For them, The Wire seems frustrating or inaccessible – even more so than we intended it. And, hey, we are always in it to tell people a story, first and foremost. If a new format brings a few more thirsty critters to the water’s edge, then so be it.
It's too bad they don't offer a 4:3 HD version for those of us who care about high definition but want to respect the original composition. Same goes for Buffy, which is a complete mess in 16:9.
I watch many old movies on my 1080p projector to a 16:9 100" screen and don't mind side bars at all.
It's not like there's a lot of action going on most of the time--it's mostly people talking. Which is fine! But not everybody likes that kind of show. It also doesn't have the same addictive amount of leaving each episode on a cliffhanger the way more recent shows are written.
I never watched the Sopranos or West Wing, so I can't speak to them. I enjoyed The Wire (bought the box set!), but it's still a slow-paced drama. If that's your jam, it's fantastic. If it's not, it's still worth a shot (it's that good), but it's not "try it for 18 hours if you don't like the genre" good. All IMO of course. And full disclosure: I'm not a big fan of dramas, but The Wire still grabbed me. Hence my caution that it's somewhat slow compared to other fare.
I should watch it again, it's been a long time and it is worth it.
I think TV shows tend to be much more of a mixed bag. The Sopranos (1999), The Wire (2002), and Firefly (2002) were all shows at the forefront of the current renaissance in dramatic television— they were all shot on film, but it's interesting that Firefly for example was natively 16:9 and cropped to 4:3 for its original run, whereas The Wire's "conversion" to widescreen has been a matter of some more controversy, eg: https://www.techhive.com/article/2854439/hbo-remastered-the-wire-in-169-hd-and-it-was-a-lot-harder-than-youd-think.html
Another interesting aspect of Firefly is that the pure VFX scenes (eg spaceship exteriors) were rendered originally at 480p, so when you watch the Blu-ray version of the show, you can see a bit of an awkward transition where the shots of the actors are gloriously crisp, but the space scenes are clearly upscaled.
The wire absolutely blew my mind and raised the bar on how great television can be. I have trouble getting past the first few episodes of Game of Thrones, how does it stack up to The Wire in terms of sucking you into the storyline and committing, looking forward to each new episode and pondering over episodes during your day to day like I experienced with The Wire?
It’s easy to sound hyperbolic calling anything the “best” thing of its category, but no TV has even come close to The Wire for me.
Season four broke my heart with the adolescent kids. I can’t believe how good they all were in their roles, phenomenal performances.
The one minor scene that always wrecks me is where Bodie is talking to McNulty near the end of the series and says, “I feel old...”
The character is supposed to be a late teenager in that scene, and is already feeling worn out of life he has almost no chance of escaping.
That to me was the big takeaway. Too many things are stuck where they are: people, systems, etc.
As Marlo says, “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.”
Okay I’m done fan-boying. Yes, I’m this annoying when I tell my irl friends about the show as well.
The Wire: Way Down in the Hole is a podcast that talks about each episode of The Wire. The hosts are Jemele Hill and Van Lathan.
Some of the background they give is that the cast and crew didn't think there would be a Season 2, that David Simon wrote Season 5 without Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos, etc.
https://www.theringer.com/way-down-in-the-hole Now that The Ringer has been bought by Spotify you might have to be a subscriber to listen to it.
Real tv fans have come to accept that the last season of The Wire and the last episode of Breaking Bad are pretty blah. We just shake our head and move on.
People rightfully discuss the wonderful themes, the memorable characters, the tragic arcs in The Wire, but one area they underrate is the form. I recently watched some of the HD restoration and the use of sound and image is really wonderful.
I suspect a lot of it flies under the radar because The Wire purposefully used a style that wasn't overly pretty, was closer to verite than visually stunning. But there's some great ideas there. The utter commitment to diagetic sound (barring one scene in the first season). The use of complex camera movements and an Altman-esque zoom to provide a documentary or even voyeuristic perspective.
You could make an argument that The Wire is more innovative in filmmaking than a lot of the typical prestige TV, who simply mimicked Hollywood big budget artistry.
I get the argument that good tv/literature/whatever shouldn't need to be explained, but I think the Wire really benefits from reading a lot of serious criticism alongside watching. There were a ton of details and ideas and motifs that just flew over my head, but upon some reading and a second watching… well I started out loving The Wire, but the second time I loved The Wire. Even seasons 3 and 4. (not 5, at least I understand what they were trying to do)
I started watching The Wire recently expecting a very dry show that's difficult to understand but I found it gripping from the start. The characters felt real and the world very fucked up and interesting.
Season 2 was good, but I didn't understand why they kept the drug dealers plot on ice. It seemed like filler.
By season 3 it turned into every other TV show where characters are just tools used to express a story rather real people.
I stopped watching a few episodes into season 4 because I couldn't be bothered to care.
I would understand the heaps of praise The Wire gets if it were limited to season 1 (maybe 2 as well), but the reset doesn't seem that good.
We need to get better as a species at pretending certain seasons didn’t happen. Season 5 of The Wire, Season 3 of Homeland, anything after All Along the Watchtower in BSG etc
The Wire is the greatest show that has ever been made in my opinion. It features thoughtful examinations of schools, corruption, media bias, policing policy, labor, drug legalization, addiction, politics, drug organizations, what it is like to be poor, and much more. The Wire also features the single most accurate portrayal of what it is like to exist in a large organization and how individuals within those organizations drive organizational momentum, policy, and culture at all levels. People complain about it being a little slow because real life is slow and the Wire is emulating real life. The ending of the show is also perfect in that it's absolutely not spectacular in any way. Season 1 is my favorite season.
The Wire.
I'd tried to watch it a few times, but only a few months ago actually got past the first two episodes. I think it helped that I quite quickly saw it as a morally ambiguous discussion of the institutional ineptitude of conservative western cultures in mitigating the effects of crime, rather than a typical 'good vs bad' cop show.
With that mindset, the possibly-underwhelming finale of S1 is much more effective, and the sudden pace-change in S2 is more meaningful.
Because organizations like the CIA have almost complete impunity to do whatever they want outside of the borders of the United States.
Why worry about some guy who lives in a shitty apartment in the San Fernando Valley and works at 7/11 when you can use all the toys in the arsenal to disappear clerics in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan without anyone saying as much as a word.
They get to play with Predator Drones. JSOC drops kill/capture teams out of HH-60 Pave Hawks with satellite and drone overwatch in Afghanistan. They can run snatch-and-grabs on the streets of Italy. Nobody even knows all of the off-the-books operations they're running in the horn of Africa.
The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother? Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.
It's not because they can't. It's because they believe their own bullshit and get to do way too much cool Rambo/James Bond stuff outside of the United States.
Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people. Our relationship with the cops is sort of complicated in this country. It's more that they're an institution with a lot of freedom and discretion, relatively poor training, low entrance standards, they have guns (and we have a lot of guns too), and they're loosely operated by a checkerboard of local and state agencies, rather than being a monolithic state entity.
A lot of the calls our police go on are mental health-related, and it burns a lot of cops out. Add that to poor de-escalation procedures and training, historical emphasis on policing of drug-related crimes in a way that that disproportionately affects minority communities, and well, there's trouble brewing.
If you ever get a chance (I know it's a cliche), but watch 'The Wire.' It's an HBO TV show that is pretty entertaining and does sort of go into a lot of the subtleties and problems of institutional policing in America.
I got a little sidetracked there, but in answer to 'what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?' I say because it's more boring and congress would throw a fit. And I wouldn't say it's because they're benevolent per-se, but there is a LOT of believe-your-own-bullshit patriotic sentiment in this country that is hard to understate. We have an almost fetishistic worship of our military, and the notion that they 'fight for our freedom' and 'protect' us. That also carries over into the intelligence community to a great degree.
But, with the ongoing efforts to overturn the most recent presidential election, and the President's usage of federal resources in the summer protests, I have to say a lot of us are having to rethink a lot of stuff.
> No one wakes up first thing and thinks "Hmm, I think I'll try shooting heroin today".
I couldn't help but remember the story of SpontaniousH on reddit.
https://reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/68srty/spontaneoush_uses_heroin_gets_addicted_dies_gets/
> I've heard so much about it and how crazy addictive it is and seen it in the movies and TV (I'm thinking The Wire here, one of my favorite shows) and it really started to intrigue me. I've always wondered what it would be like to do Heroin. Out of no where I say I'll take the H and we do the deal there.
> I do think there is a kernel of truth to what you're saying, but I don't think it's right to dismiss entirely the fact that representation IS important.
This idea is insidious.
Firstly people have to remember fiction is fiction. The reason why the first few seasons of Game of Thrones was compelling was because the world they lived in didn't have any modern sensibilities in it. The more they threw in modern sensibilities the worse the show got (thought the action scenes for the most part got better).
There was some show recently where Black slaves in the USA had taken power over the whites and a white KKK member from another dimension somehow got transported there. Some decried the show and wanted it banned. I thought it sounded excellent, because it was soooo divorced from reality. Same with the "Man from the High Castle". The setting in which the enemy won WWII was compelling.
Secondly just randomly pushing people into roles for the sake of representation ends up cheapening any genuine effort. The Wire was brilliant because the huge number of black people being in the show made sense. At the time I didn't actually notice that most of the cast was black.
You know what the end result is. It made me notice skin colour when I didn't used to and made me start to resent any effort (no matter how genuine) because I know there is probably some quota involved somewhere to pander to a demographic.
> Historically, "rich white people" have been in control of the media, so it's great to see this group becoming more self aware.
It isn't self awareness though. They are projecting their prejudices onto the rest of us. This includes places where it just isn't relevant and makes almost no sense.
How dare they project their prejudices onto me in an effort to absolve themselves of guilt, then have the gall to tell me that I am the one with the problem when I object to it. Fuck them!
I clearly remember when I decided I wouldn't watch anymore broadcast television (this was about 8 years ago now).
There was a show hosted by Scottish Comedian Frankie Boyle that was infamous for his offensive comedy. On that show there was a rich Canadian woman on the TV telling people in the audience that all men had done through the centuries was raping and beating women.
Then there was a black musician called "Akala" telling me the British Empire institutions were guilty of perpetuating racism. He seemed to be obilvious to the fact that he was on a British Institution being broadcasted to every home in the country.
Other the gross oversimplification of history. I had nothing to do with it (nor did my family as they were all very poor). It would be like blaming today's Germans for what Hitler did. It is absolutely disgusting.
You know what the end result of this is? It made me hugely suspicious of any claim of sexual misconduct or racism. It is the classic story of the boy that cried wolf.
> We should let people with compelling stories tell their stories! Now that streaming is the norm, there's room for everyone, now that we're not limited to only the stories which are marketable for primetime.
Maybe I am getting old but I remember a lot of this already happening. I am not saying it was perfect and I don't disagree with it in principle.
Recently "Black Panther" was released. "The first black super hero" they said. People seemed to forget Wesley Snipes played Blade for 3 movies (starting in 1997) and they were the first Marvel Movies and made the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe viable as it showed that a comic book property could be successful.
Before that we had the "There are no female action heroes" they said. Forgetting all thrillers in the past with heroines, a whole movie franchise called Aliens, Cherry 2000, Nikita, Tank Girl, Buffy and a bunch of other movies I have probably forgotten about where the woman had taken charge of the situation and won the day.
People increasingly think that the world before they were born didn't exist.
Same. 29. I think it's just that we grew up with the internet, and although we haven't 'seen it all,' we've picked the low-hanging fruit.
When I was a kid, the first time I walked into a video store, it blew my mind. I spent every weekend for years binge-watching 3, 4, 5 rented movies. Now, I haven't actually watched a movie in years. I think that although there are new movies coming out, the patterns are fundamentally the same and so movies have gotten boring. After you've seen Apocalypse Now, Evil Dead, and Blade Runner, the Wire, Caddyshack, Oldboy, No Country, Night of the Living Dead, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and on-and-on-and-on, you've seen damn near most of the plot variations that can conceivably be constructed. So, new stuff just looks the same as the old stuff and it's not so exciting.
Same with the internet. I discovered 90% of what I still think is cool by the time I was 13. I picked the low-hanging fruit. So, now I'm at the point where I go deep on things. It's not sexy, but it is pretty rewarding. Used to think Magic-1 was awesome, well now Ben Eater's 8-bit-kit is half-assembled on a table in my living room. Used to think rock climbing was cool, but now I have to put in weekend after weekend at JTree moving over granite. Used to think Fravia was cool, well now it's time to construct my own web-crawlers. Used to think metalcasting and the Lindsay Catalog was fascinating, but now it's time to build actual internal combustion engines from scratch. Used to listen to the old Defcon DVDs on a pre-iPod mp3 player, but the time came to actually work through Erickson's AOE.
I think it's a natural evolution of life. When you're young you make a shallow pass and find what really resonates with you. When you get older, you spend more time digging down deep into those things and it's not as exciting as it once was, but there is a satisfaction from getting good at those things.
An alternate approach is to try viewing the internet through the lens of cannabis. I've had many nights in life where smoking some pot and watching YouTube has segued into a late-night coding session implementing something fun in Python that's been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. Pot has a way of helping you see things you've seen a million times in a completely new light. Some people love it, some people hate it. YMMV.
Most people seem to hit this point in life and just have kids to keep stuff interesting when things start to get boring. They take up a lot of time, teach you a lot of stuff, and suck up a ton of time.
Have you forgotten that we couldn't buy masks or other medical equipment for months because of China, and everyone, including WHO, Fauci, Obama, etc. were advising people against using masks due to shortage?
- January 14, WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳(https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152)
- January 31, Trump suspends travel from China: Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus(https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-suspension-entry-immigrants-nonimmigrants-persons-pose-risk-transmitting-2019-novel-coronavirus/). A move condemned by many, including WHO and Biden.
- February 1, Biden: We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.(https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370)
- Feburary 2, Health Commissioner of New York City: As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus.(https://mobile.twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/status/1224043155852537863)
- Feburary 24, Pelosi: You should come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken by our city, we know that there's concern about tourism, traveling all throughout the world, but we think it's very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAEfSHeH4Lc)
- Feburary 29, U.S. Surgeon General: Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!(https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160)
- Feburary 29, WHO: Travel bans to affected areas or denial of entry to passengers coming from affected areas are usually not effective in preventing the importation of cases but may have a significant economic and social impact.(https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-recommendations-for-international-traffic-in-relation-to-covid-19-outbreak)
- March 2, Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of WHO: Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy.(https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcripts/who-audio-emergencies-coronavirus-press-conference-final-02mar2020.pdf)
- March 2, U.S. Surgeon General: You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider(https://video.foxnews.com/v/6137596907001#sp=show-clips)
- March 3, Bill de Blasio (NYC Mayor): Since I’m encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would offer some suggestions. Here’s the first: thru Thurs 3/5 go see "The Traitor" @FilmLinc. If "The Wire" was a true story + set in Italy, it would be this film.(https://twitter.com/BilldeBlasio/status/1234648718714036229)
- March 4, Obama: Save the masks for health care workers. Let’s stay calm, listen to the experts, and follow the science.(https://twitter.com/barackobama/status/1235246706817630208)
- March 8, Fauci (Director of NIAID): People should not be walking around masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little better, but it's not providing the perfect protection people think it is, and often there are un-intentioned consequences(https://youtu.be/PRa6t_e7dgI)
- June 5, WHO: If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.(http://web.archive.org/web/20200605134037/https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masks)
- June 8, WHO: It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.(https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcripts/who-audio-emergencies-coronavirus-press-conference-08jun2020.pdf)
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China brought up medical equipment all over the world, which is why you couldn't buy any masks and other medical equipment for many months. This was not just a result of Daigo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3gNQ9JnJ90), but rather, China had its overseas companies send their employees all over the country to buy up all the medical equipment they could find:
- Chinese property developing group Greenland scoured Australia to purchase bulk medical supplies - including masks, gloves and thermometers - which were flown to China. "Basically all employees, the majority of whom are Chinese, were asked to source whatever medical supplies they could," one company insider told the Herald. This exercise went on for weeks through January and February, he said. The entire accounts department, contract managers, the human resources team and even receptionists were sent on a mission to find bulk supplies of surgical masks, thermometers, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitisers, gloves and Panadol. According to a company newsletter, the Greenland Group sourced 3 million protective masks, 700,000 hazmat suits and 500,000 pairs of protective gloves from "Australia, Canada, Turkey and other countries."(https://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-backed-company-s-mission-to-source-australian-medical-supplies-20200325-p54du8.html)
- Chinese-owned Risland Australia, boasted online last month that "90 tons (sic) of selective medical supplies" were sent "air transport direct from Sydney to Wuhan via corporate jet."(https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/second-company-sent-90-tonnes-of-australian-medical-supplies-to-china/news-story/be74b7679d7c8cb910d0f34713b2f008)
- Sydney-based Mr Kuang, former officer in the People's Liberation Army, imported 35,000 sets of protective medical suits, 200,000 pairs of gloves and 10 tonnes of disinfectant from Australia to China.(https://www.smh.com.au/national/former-chinese-military-man-behind-export-of-tonnes-of-medical-supplies-20200330-p54f8a.html)
- China stockpiled 2 billion face masks and 25m medical items.(https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/revealed-china-stockpiled-2-billion-face-masks-and-25m-medical-items/news-story/5304e5a5080bd4087e4a9be9de210b97)
Other related news:
- Beijing demanded praise in exchange for medical supplies(https://www.axios.com/beijing-demanded-praise-in-exchange-for-medical-supplies-16f5183e-589a-42e5-bc25-414eb13841b0.html).
- Chinese government rejects allegations that its face masks were defective, tells countries to 'double check' instructions(https://www.businessinsider.com/china-face-mask-defective-double-check-instructions-2020-4)
- Italy gave China PPE to help with coronavirus — then China made them buy it back(https://spectator.us/italy-china-ppe-sold-coronavirus/)
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If Biden/the democrats were interested in uniting the nation then perhaps they should’ve united with Trump against China instead of pushing CCP propaganda to attack Trump and blame him for everything. Perhaps they should’ve been honest about why they didn’t want people to wear masks for the first many months. Accept responsibility for the fact that USA is so heavily reliant on China, largely thanks to the likes of Biden. Perhaps they should acknowledge that they were wrong to encourage people to gather, wrong to attack Trump for limiting flights from China.
Season 5 was already becoming somewhat shaky on The Wire though (at least in my opinion, the serial killer plot was a bit too much). Still one of my favorite shows of all time.
Netflix's problem isn't cancelling shows too soon, it's an inability to make anything that endures. They've had loads of shows that won raves upon initially airing but haven't really stuck around much at all.
They haven't managed to make sticky shows like Friends, the Big Bang Theory or even something more recent like Brooklyn Nine Nine that people can mindlessly rewatch over and over and they haven't managed to make top tier prestige stuff (talking Sopranos/Wire level here, they've made plenty a couple of notches below). The whole platform depends on a certain kind of novelty of the algorithm being able to churn up totally new stuff that's okay.
As far as cancelling stuff goes, I get the impression Netflix moreso just doesn't renew? HBO seem to have a formula where a cancelled show will get a special to wrap things up (e.g. Looking, Hello Ladies), always thought that was pretty savvy as it probably costs quite a bit less, makes that one episode into a bit of an event for fans and leaves the overall series a lot more enticing to people in the future.
Reminds me of the journalist Scott Templeton in The Wire season 5. (Just watched that show again and it's top of mind). Incredibly ambitious reporter who sensationalizes stories, bends and breaks the rules, and is supported by upper management at every turn. All while his editor knows he's full of shit.
I would also show TV shows.
For example Rerun the wire or the sopranos one episode a week
One of my go-to examples of high-context is The Wire's "fuck" scene. Two professionals in perfect sync investigate a murder scene. The communications themselves are not very important because they are relying on a high level of context -- they already have familiarity with the case and with each other.
[nsfw] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lElf7D-An8
On the other side of the spectrum, think about any episode of CSI or NCIS where the characters narrate everything they do and think to each other. It's necessary exposition for the viewer, and perhaps in a real-life setting collaborating in this way keeps everybody on the same page. It isn't bad at all, it is just a lower context mode of communicating.
This is the opening scene of season 5 of The Wire.
Have you really read the entire Western Canon? Listened to the collective oeuvres of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart? Watched the AFI top 100 movies or IMDB’s top 1000? Watched all of The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad? Read the SF Masterworks Collection?
I personally don't believe Goodhart's Law overpowers the benefit of the metric, ever.
It's a quaint factoid, but just as the soviets would just execute a factory manage gaming the system for producing pins or spikes, people will see you at some level gaming the system and call you on it. (and make a TV show like The Wire)
Just like other factoids (ie Risk compensation), the effects will be real, but the factoid is so misused at extreme interpretations the factoids do more harm the good.
I've played New Angeles which is the replacement for Battlestar Galactica using the Android setting instead of a licensed setting.
I hate traitor mechanics, and I'm not a big fan of the Android setting (Android itself I find not much fun) - but I found the mechanism in New Angeles acceptable. One player did indeed screw everybody else over, and it wasn't the most fun I've had in that amount of time, but I'd do it again some weekend I think.
The popular game I refuse to play is "Firefly: The Game". The friend who owns it says "Well it's flawed but it really captures the TV show". I hadn't enjoyed our first game of Firefly and hadn't seen the TV show, though I had seen the movie, so I watched the TV show. The next time I explained to him that he'd been correct. It exactly captures the TV show, in that the TV show's writer clearly doesn't understand that he's writing a story about the bad guys. Stories about bad guys can be fun. There don't even need to be good guys, there arguably aren't any good guys in "The Wire" for example - but the writer does need to be aware they're telling a story about bad guys. Firefly thinks these people are heroes. And so does the terrible board game.
That author is all over the place. It's a general rant about the obvious.
At the beginning, he's on to something. Fiction has a plot shortage. "Across TV, movies, and novels it is increasingly difficult to find a compelling story that doesn’t rely on gimmicks." Movies are stuck in the Star [Wars|Trek|Gate] ditch, and the Marvel Overextended Universe. The 25th James Bond movie is supposed to come out this year, if anybody cares.
Some of this is simply the entertainment glut. Everyone has seen all the possible plot twists. Go back in history and read some of the Canterbury Tales from around 1400. Read a story half way through, then ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right. There are no plot twists. Back then, entertainment was so scarce that they weren't needed.
A more serious problem is that there's no shared vision of a better world. Fiction doesn't help us get to a better place. This hit science fiction first. Science fiction of the 1930s to the 1960s was quite upbeat, showing a picture of a marvelous future. It's been downhill since the 1970s. Today SF is mostly space opera. Dystopian visions used to be rare. Now most SF is dystopian. Even much non-SF is dystopian. From The Wire to Game of Thrones, the world sucks.
Anyone else read this with The Wire (TV show) theme in their head? https://youtu.be/K3rZgs3dudI
> I strongly disagree. This article has given me more insight into the process by which a cop "becomes evil" than literally any other piece I can recall. I hope it's authentic but who knows.
Then its clear you have been the fortunate few who have never had to be subjected to the perverse legal system in the US, or spent any time in low income areas where those tactics are 'business as usual' in what is referred to as policing. This is the norm, shows like The Wire or even Treme (both made by the same director) are just as much documentaries and exposes as they are entertainment. The latter skewing into some sort of misery porn.
And to be honest, given this is Hacker News, that doesn't surprise me. I just wonder if it ever occurred to you what the plight of those immense amount of homeless people is, and what happens to them when they're no longer in sight?
> I feel like I read an entirely different piece than you did... the author is not a police officer. He's a former police officer who seems to have genuinely come to hate the profession as much as anybody.
Again, proving the point that this is not something that has only just occurred out of no-where, but is seemingly systemic in the very system we're discussing. Again, no one involved with any activism is surprised by what just occurred with Police, we've all seen it up close and been subject to it, its what you understand going into them.
What was remarkable was how surprised the rest of you were towards them, and how often people are still quick to rationalize their behaviour. This is what authoritarian regimes do, they bolster the police to enforce political decree, not Law. Look at Hong Kong, its way more pervasive than you think and it stems from the same thing.
Excuse my ignorance, but is there an atheist form of AA and similar 12-steps programs?
My knowledge of them is very limited to pop culture (like its depiction in TV shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad and Grey's Anatomy), but their depictions always seemed annoying to me because they are all about god, submission to a "higher power", and "the original sin"/"flawed humans" in one way or the other. If you are actively atheist, you will find this approach off-putting and it won't help you.
What about the NYC Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot tweeting in February (https://twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/status/1224043155852537863):
As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus.
And then again in March (https://twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/status/1234298344329093121):
Despite this development, New Yorkers remain at low risk for contracting #COVID19. As we confront this emerging outbreak, we need to separate facts from fear, and guard against stigma and panic.
Or the NYC Chair of New York City Council Health Committee tweeting (https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1226566648729133056):
In powerful show of defiance of #coronavirus scare, huge crowds gathering in NYC's Chinatown for ceremony ahead of annual #LunarNewYear parade. Chants of "be strong Wuhan!"
If you are staying away, you are missing out
Or Bill de Blasio tweeting (https://twitter.com/BilldeBlasio/status/1234648718714036229):
Since I’m encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would offer some suggestions. Here’s the first: thru Thurs 3/5 go see “The Traitor” @FilmLinc . If “The Wire” was a true story + set in Italy, it would be this film.
Or does it only count when its Fox News?
you just need one corrupt guard, or somebody who is willing to close their eyes. guards are only people and being on shift talking with and being exposed to those confined will eventually make them empathic, as they realize many of the prisoners (majority but not all) are just people who never had a chance (grew up in orphanages or on the street, or often just homeless looking to escape the cold of the winter by doing a small crime to get there on purpose). There is one common theme among all of them: poverty and/or trauma. Once you see it (and being a guard exposed to them all the time you will see it unless you're a heartless or dumb sh!t) all the binary thinking and indoctrination starts cracking. This is where the bribe comes in since the person bribing also just fulfills a need (addiction, social interaction or whatever).
Instead of Prisons: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter1.shtml
Anyone looking for some Netflix/Chill which is also edutainment about prisons and that doesn't paint the problem as binary (good vs evil) I highly recommend Oz https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/ or (a more recent show about the streets and problems in LE) The Wire https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/ <-- needs at least 2 or 3 times watching because it's incredibly dense!
Edit: this is also an incredibly good read https://mises.org/library/defending-undefendable
> I don't like the idea of "understanding" a film. I don't believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art.
I think it depends on the work. Take the tv show The Wire. There is a lot to understand and learn from it. I found doing so really worthwhile (for multiple reasons).
This assumes the Disney back-catalog strategy makes sense in the digital age.
Pre-VHS, Disney would re-release movies in theaters. They could re-release Fantasia, or Cinderella, or whatever, and still make money in theaters in the 1970s.
But, there wasn't that much content to watch at that time. You had live TV or movies. That was it.
Today there is more on-demand content out there than I could watch if I lived a million years. Do you think "Bright" will keep subscribers 10 years from now for Netflix?
Just as an example: "Band of Brothers" and "The Wire" are two of the best things I've ever watched. Would I _keep_ an HBO subscription forever after I've watched them? No...
Keep in mind "extroverted" does not mean socially skilled.
My fiancee is a social ace. She knows how to make everyone feel good and always has a big smile. She connects deeply with people.
But when she's done she has to spent the next three days binge watching The Wire to recover.
A lot of introverts are very socially skilled, they just require time to get their energy back.
Maybe? Between the DVR and TV from non-ad sources, we rarely see any commercials at all -- and yet my wife and I both routinely have another screen up during SOME shows.
We find there are two kinds of movies/TV: stuff that's kinda just relaxing and during which you can browse twitter or whatever, and stuff that's more serious where you can't really multitask without missing important aspects of the show, either because of the filming style or the density of the material or the pace of events or whatever.
The canonical example of the latter is The Wire. More recently, I'd put The Crown or Watchmen in this category. For the former, well, pretty much any traditional network show counts.
However, even in high-attention programming, it's pretty common for one of us to pause the show and check a screen to verify where we saw a given actor before, or look up a related bit of information (e.g., during the Crown, we often check on historical context).
Does watching Netflix, HBO, or Hulu count as watching TV? That's how I usually watch television shows and none has commercials.
If I watch broadcast TV it's through my DVR and I skip commercials.
Pretty much the only live TV I watch is sports and there's a lot of advertising there.
I'd argue that TV isn't trash though. There's an unbelievable amount of stuff being made and it isn't hard to find something great to watch. My to-watch list still has Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mr Robot, Westworld S2, Game of Thrones, and about 20 other series on it.
Yeah from there and Hong Kong there's a lot of more western friendly content (see: translated). But I'm interested in mainland Chinese content that day-to-day people watch there. Like I want to know what their very of "Friends" or even serious stuff like "The Wire" would look like, even if the industry hasn't yet fully matured creatively.
Most of the most popular Chinese sitcoms I've read about seem to be a strange bunch as an outsider. Very much about boy-meeting girl following standard Chinese traditional get a job -> married + boy supporting girl and families. Which I find interesting from a cultural perspective of a maturing middle class economy. That plus a hundred awful period pieces about ancient China, which seems like 50% of their output, especially movie-wise - an easy way to ignore the tough realities of modern China.
But I don't know Chinese and only have a superficial grasp of what they are really like. So I've been interested in learning mandarin.
But of course it's HBO so it'll have plenty of softcore porn embedded within the plot.
Despite the jokes, HBO tend to do a decent job of this stuff. Ignoring the shitshow that was GoT after season 4. The Wire, The Sopranos, Westworld... probably better in their hands than, say, Netflix.
The tv show The Wire was a documentary after all.
This was covered in popular culture most famously by The Wire, written by retired police beat reporter David Simon, it's called "juking the stats", each police district is judged by different crime stats, and promotions are based on those stats, so naturally everything evolves to optimized for better stats. Not only that, on the judicial side in America over the past 50 years, funding has not kept up with the increase in population so there is an extreme pressure on prosecutors to not go to trial, add to this the political nature of the office and American prosecutors are under pressure to keep up their 95% conviction rate, this is done by going hard after those least able to afford an adequate defense and "laddering", adding on every single conceivable charge so that defendants will plead guilty to a smaller number of charges in exchange for some charges being dropped and not inconvenience the state with an expensive trial by jury. This is covered pretty well by season 3 of the Serial podcast.
Interesting. Sounds a lot like Season 2 of The Wire.
Just such a thing is done in Season 4 of HBO's The Wire. It profiles just such a class where the disruptive students are pulled out. Yes, it's fiction but you can see how it'd work and it's pretty interesting to see the changes in attitudes among the "gen pop" class and the special class.
Have you amortized the value of that time over 24 hours?
I'm probably not going to apply that MacOS update until the weekend, so I can download it at 3AM. I don't care if it takes 2 minutes or 20 minutes (or, heck, 200 minutes!) to download season three of The Wire as long as I can start episode one "quickly enough" because the rest will follow.
> GoT, Breaking Bad, Westworld
finished show with poorly received last couple of seasons, not a hbo show that's streaming on Netflix right now, 2-season old show with a silly 2nd season.
House of Cards was also kind of crap after 4 seasons (and even earlier if we're going to nitpick)
Breaking bad is now seen with rose tainted glasses, but I remember how some folks talked about it when the show was running (esp the fly episode).
Finally, if you're going to praise HBO, not mentioning The Wire is kind of ignorant.
I've said it before but I agree - Netflix sure adds a lot of original content, but I've yet to see a true masterpiece deserving its place among The Wie, The Sopranos or Mad Men and lately I'm starting to think that Netflxi is entirely fine with producing good enough content which adds and retains subscribers while never really stading out. Of course it's entirely reasonable to do so if it's a successful approach, but I can't say I like it and I don't think it leads to exceptional, high prestige content. If HBO produced their content mostly according to numbers while neglecting artistic considerations The Wire would have been done after Season 1.
Furthermroe, did you see the other discussion about Netfli/Hollywood recently here on HN? [0]
From the article:
> Netflix now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers.
> Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.
Propably a financially sound approach, but I doubt I'll stay a subscriber much longer if that's the direction they are heading.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403587
>> or get a special protected number?
That's an interesting point. Maybe an unlisted burner that you don't use for anything else could be your SMS backup number. At least that adds one small layer of security.
It's like being in an episode of The Wire just to stay semi-secure online ;-).
It is partly due to new media however lets consider some other things which are really important.
1) The problem is that a lot of the remakes/sequels and reboots are quite frankly crap. I don't care too much about Disney. But other remakes and sequels are generally awful.
So lets take some case studies:
* Robocop (2013). The movie except for on 2 minute scene was dire. It was a PG-13 remake of what was at the time a shockingly violent film (the effects look awful now, but they were quite convincing back in the mid-90s still) that completely missed the point of the original movie.
* Ghostbusters (2016) was another movie that not only looked completely awful in the trailer, it completely again misunderstood the original movie, added nothing much new and they outright attacked the fandom after they said to the studio "What the hell are you doing". The original Ghostbusters movie wasn't really a comedy movie, it was a Action Horror with some Jokes. The new movie was just a comedy movie, which looked like a Spoof along the lines of "Scary Movie". I have no idea who they were marketing it towards.
Lets take sequels:
* They have also totally squandered two solid Sci-fi Action Movie franchises (Alien and Predator) to the point where the previous low points of the franchises look good (Alien vs Predator and Alien 3 & Alien 4: Resurrection).
* Star Wars has been completely ruined from a fan's perspective. The prequels (in the 2000s) has some terrible acting, iffy CGI now but I can at least appreciate what they were attempting to do and it was an honest attempt by Lucas to flesh out Star Wars universe. However the new Sequels go from "This is Okay, but it is the 1977 movie retold essentially" to terrible (The Last Jedi).
The Last Jedi doesn't make any sense on quite a number of levels. It also ruins one of beloved characters on screen and it was probably intentionally written to not only upset the fans but also kill the franchise i.e. there is at least one scene where Kylo Ren says to audience pretty much "Let the past die, kill if you have to", which is the director pretty much sticking his middle finger up to the fans. Yes in the scene he was speaking to whoever the main character is that doesn't seem to have a personality, but it was really a message from the director to the fans.
They also attacked the fan base (not a good move) because they didn't like a terrible movie. While the movies made money, they have tarnished the brand in the long term.
Disney bought Lucas Film because of Star Wars and monetising the fan base. Lucas Film under Kathleen Kennedy have tried driving away their a dedicated fan base. This strategy is madness.
2) The Hollywood Elite (and they are Elite) have forgotten they are actors and actively show distain for the audience. I don't really want to get into a political commentary, but they literally had The Avengers do an online piece of activism where they told the Electoral college to defy the 2016 Presidential Election result. This doesn't go unnoticed by the average movie goer. Just under half of the Country voted for the current president and then they do an advert where they are pretty much putting a middle finger up at the people who voted for Trump. A lot of those people took their kids to see those movies or saw went to see them themselves.
Audiences will forgive actors for quite a lot of things, but if they continually keep on pushing this audiences will associate them with their politics and not what roles they played.
They are actors. I want them to pretend to be Black Widow, not lecture me about Politics. I will go and listen to a political commentator if I wanted that.
3) Bollywood and the rest of Asia are making their own movies which kick ass. Take "The Raid 2". It has plenty of brutal fight scenes, but it also has a top quality plot about gangs, undercover cops etc. It is amazing to watch. A lot of guys are looking at overseas cinema because Hollywood isn't catering to them.
4) User generated content. I think the only movie I've watched recently was John Wick 1, 2 and 3. I recently listened to a recorded lecture series of the History of Islam on Youtube made by some guy who lives in Azerbaijan. I can listen for effectively nothing 1000s of hours of interviews of Joe Rogan and a Guest just talking for 3 hours about sometimes absolute nonsense or talking about say Leaving a Cult (Megan Phelps interview). I recently watched a series of lectures about the database as a filesystem from some Linux conference. There is a guy who made loads of mini-documentaries about old defunct computers systems and the quality now is on par with the Discovery Channel shows of the late 1990s.
5) Longer stories. Game of Thrones, The Wire and other shows that have very long running stories, lots of characters and complicated plots with lots of Lore have proven that audiences want more complicated stories. There is a guy called Alt-Shift-X on Youtube and he has huge number of people watching him and he just explains the Game of Thrones Lore of the Book vs the TV-series. Most Hollywood movies are pretty simple affairs in comparison.
> You should throw out all the games.
This resonates a lot. I used to be a huge gamer, but as I moved along my career I had less time and less mental bandwidth to game.
In a pique of nostalgia I tried one last hurrah recently and built a gaming PC (documented here https://www.leonroy.com/blog/2018/10/teeny-tiny-workstation/ ) but even with a machine which 20 something me would’ve drooled over I find I no longer have the patience to play something like the new Assassin’s Creed, Breath of the Wild or Witcher 3. It leaves me a little sad because gaming brought past me a lot of joy but after sinking 80+ hours into a game you question whether that time would have been better spent doing an online course or heck spending an extra hour each evening exercising instead of twiddling thumbs on my controller.
Same goes for TV IMHO - I ask myself what was the last TV show which affected my outlook or moved me in some way and heck The Wire maybe, Battlestar Galactica perhaps? I’ve watched all of Dexter, Chuck, Game of Thrones, Greys Anatomy, Castle, the list goes on and not one of them feels like they had a measurable improvement on my life. I do wonder when we go too far the other way though.
Season 3 of The Wire is based around this premise.
This was a huge theme throughout the television series The Wire. Here is a clip that specifically shows Goodhart's law working in education.
https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM?t=62
There is absolutely pressure to go to college, but there is hardly pressure to follow passions. If there was, then the two would be in conflict. The pressure is: don't follow your passions, go to college, major in STEM or "something useful". What has that resulted in? An inflation of watered-down STEM-lite degrees not just from the standard degree factories but accredited state research universities, that provide none of the benefits of a liberal arts education and still leaving one poorly trained to produce.
I am willing to bet that given a population of philosophy majors and a population of engineering majors, if you gave them an equivalent year of quality mentorship in programming, the philosophy majors would perform better. Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Engineers learn how to do now the stuff that is relevant now. As a software engineer I am constantly battling with abstraction, and I constantly feel held back by my limited understanding of math, science, and philosophy.
The cost of college is an issue of its own and it's irrelevant to choice of major. School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole, which teach us how we got here, what we value, and how we ought to live. One episode of The Wire should be sufficient demonstration of the need for our understanding of sociology to improve, among other things. Discouraging any of the liberal arts due to the overwhelming cost of college exacerbates our problems and risks turning universities into trade schools, directionless and with all the volatility of economic cycle.
I'm not saying there is no value in fiction. Does Mad Men belong in the same conversation as 1984 though? I don't think so.
Does any TV show deserve to stand next to the greats of literature? I'm not convinced. The closest I can get to a TV show that felt it paid off the time investment with saying something worthwhile is probably The Wire. There's probably a handful of films that I can say the same for.
For any activity I think it can be useful to look back and ask if it was time well spent. For me personally I can answer yes for many ways I spend my time. That includes some fiction. It includes very little TV. Maybe there was actually some hidden value but I'd rather spend time on things I don't feel ambiguous about the value of.
While my primary wish would still be something that targets novels ("Learn enough Italian to read Eco"), something similar for TV shows wouldn't be that bad. Preferably not a dubbed version, so that it's clearer that you've already got a benefit from learning what little you did. Problem is that a lot of TV shows are very much in the vernacular. I wouldn't recommend e.g. the Wire for ESL studies.
I learned a lot of my early English from reading tabletop RPGs, so I've got no problem learning about twelve kinds of polearms before I learn the words you need to get by in a hotel…
> I'm surprised its not higher.
Likewise. There are many titles available through Netflix DVD that are not available through Netflix streaming. Just off the top of my head you have Game of Thrones (seasons 1-7), The Wire, True Detective, Fargo and The Expanse.
You're talking about the Creator of "The Wire", one of the most anointed TV series of all time.
> What is so adversarial about these corporations to the browser makers? What benefit, concretely, do Microsoft or Google or Apple get from being free of the shackles of Disney or CBS?
These companies make Xbox, Chromecast/Stadia, Apple TV, etc. Things that could plausibly be a media center, given some latitude and open standards. You could upload your movie collection onto it, give it your streaming account credentials and it gives you a single interface to all your media.
DRM kills that. You can't make an interface that allows the user to watch a Disney movie they've paid for and then have it show the YouTube commentary on it. You can't have something that recommends Orange Is The New Black after you watch The Wire because one is Netflix and the other is HBO.
Because DRM allows the studios to assert rights that copyright doesn't give them. That's all it does -- that's why they want it. It clearly doesn't prevent piracy.
> One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
The problem with this is that it can't simultaneously have such low privileges that it can't do anything harmful even if totally compromised by malicious actors, while also having such high privileges that it's immune to interference by even the owner of the system with physical access to it. They're diametrically opposed objectives. And the second one systematically fails regardless, but having to pretend that that isn't the case compromises the ability to do the first.
> GoT is a tentpole show with a rabid audience but it's not especially good (it's no The Wire). Deadwood and the Sopranos are from a different era of TV. Veep is great, but True Detective, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Enlightened, and The Newsroom would all be in the middle of the pack at Netflix.
As The Dude once said "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man"
Objectively speaking, there isn't a single Netflix-original TV show rated over 9 on IMDB: https://www.justwatch.com/us/provider/netflix/tv-shows?rating_imdb=9
Compared to 7 titles on HBO: https://www.justwatch.com/us/provider/hbo-now/tv-shows?rating_imdb=9
But I think your point is that when we're talking about "The Wire" level production, others have caught up (AMC, FX, etc) and Netflix can simply license those titles. But, there's notable downsides to that (you have to wait, there's a significant cost to purchase, etc). Also, AMC, FX, etc have yet to establish a long-term credibility for consistently creating high quality content...until they do, HBO as the "premium offering" in light of others is still there.
At the end of the day we're talking about whether HBO's content can sustain the justification of paying $15/month. You just need rabid audiences for that to happen, not "one dude on the internet thinks The Wire is greatest thing ever created".
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is, OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
"Don't blame the game, blame the player" seems an apt summary of the TV series, "The Wire", in which cops and drug dealers and teachers and politicians are seen as being cyclically screwed by systemic failure.
So "blaming the game" ostensibly says that we should focus on fixing the system, and not blaming its individual "players" who are incentivized or even forced to fail/act wrongly. I'm sure you're aware that every professional sport has had in its history a number of rule changes to make the game safer or more well-run, and these rule changes have had far more systemic effect than just penalizing players and coaches.
Season 2 of The Wire portrays the decline of the working class (longshoremen). It also paints what I perceive to be one of the most compelling and multidimensional depictions of an archetypal Trump supporter (along economic lines).
I watched it, and then I noticed how Trump talked.
He talked just like them.
I think more academically minded, "educated" folks should watch it. It's a different world from our own, and one we don't fully understand.
Just stop. If you need closure on what happens with some of your shows, read short synopses on Wikipedia. Don't pick up any new shows. After a while you will not miss it anymore.
The hardest thing will be that these days, TV viewing is at an all time high, and you will be out of the loop on a cultural touch point, just as if you stopped watching sports. You will also have to deal with people saying "oh, I know, I don't watch TV either, except for [Dexter/The Wire/Breaking Bad/etc]." Just smile and resist their advice. Make peace with the idea that yes, there is good content on TV, but there's also good content in books and in real life, like in your side business. Your life is not less fulfilling if you miss out on some of the good TV shows. You just chose to prioritize other things.
By the way, congratulations on trying to do this - I think this is one of the best things you can do to improve your life.
Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, Sex And the City and The Wire are currently "free" in Amazon Prime.
At some point those licenses will expire but this illustrates the "innovator's dilemma" as applied to HBO.
They have a good business of selling cable subscriptions for new stuff, licensing their past shows to Amazon, Hulu and other willing buyers and selling on-demand access via Apple, Amazon etc.
Now they need to compete with Netlifx, which has a large catalog of licensed, popular shows from all over and their own exclusive content.
To compete with that HBO would have to drop revenue from licensing (there's less reasons to pay for HBO if I can get a lot of their good stuff elsewhere)
Their cable subscriptions are probably going to decline no matter what. Cable subscriber count is on a steady, 6 year decline (http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-subscriber-losses-q2-chart-2017-6) despite being propped by internet + cable bundles.
That decline is accelerating i.e. every year more people are cancelling cable as a percentage. If that continues, it'll be a bloodbath. If the decline stops accelerating, it'll still be bloodbath, just later. I don't see a scenario in which cable starts growing again.
Netlifx model is easy to explain but almost impossible to replicate.
The model is: get so many subscribers from all over the world paying you relatively small amount that you'll be able to outspend any other company in quantity of TV/movie exclusive content, thus making it even more likely to get new subscribers.
This is "rich get richer" model and Netflix is already the richest.
People will be willing to buy 2-3 such subscriptions so that's how many winning slots there are.
So HBO better fight hard for that 2nd or 3rd position, but unfortunately just like BlockBuster or Borders had a good business until they didn't, HBO might not do enough to compete.
I don't think any of those shows are on the same level as the top tier HBO ones. The only show that I think reaches it is Breaking Bad (AMC). I actually think the best netflix ever did was with Bloodline (S1 only). House of Cards, while fun to watch, was quite one dimensional. And HBO deserves a lot of credit for supporting The Wire like it did (despite low viewer counts), and continuing to do so, more recently with Show Me A Hero. Shows that will not be popular for the general market but are good shows with a story worth telling. Quoting The Economist:
And second, because as drama “Show Me a Hero” excels. Younger viewers may find this hard to believe, but once upon a time American studios made films for adults, with nary a dinosaur, superhero or hunger game in sight. Directors such as Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet and Spike Lee dealt with serious moral questions, and made urban realism riveting. Messrs Simon and Zorzi are their successors, but their work is richer, more sophisticated—and better.
It's interesting that everyone is talking about the newly produced original series on HBO and competitors. I wasn't thinking of those; Netflix and Amazon between them have many of the great films ever made in any country, plus many 3rd party series that are great (nobody has mentioned Broad City, the best comedy TV in history, and there are shows like (EDIT: Man in the High Castle,) The Americans and Transparent, which many people love though I haven't watched them). It takes some digging to find them, but that's ok; my Netflix and Amazon queues are filled with films better than any HBO series IMHO, except The Wire, and are so large that I won't live long enough to watch them all.
OITNB is a Netflix show, which makes my point for me.
Season 5 of The Wire was just about a decade ago, and it was abbreviated because it didn't get great ratings.
Carnivale was cancelled for low ratings after its second season. I'm not saying it's bad (it was a mess, though). I'm saying that HBO has to do more things like Carnivale, on a much faster schedule, if it's going to keep up with Netflix.
...maybe it's just that storytelling is like a magic trick which requires the wholehearted participation of writer and reader to be successful. If you're not interested, you should quit and find something else to do.
I'm the same with television - cannot watch The Wire too many times, cannot watch most other things even once.
Wholeheartedly agree. I can't stand movies and most TV shows but there is a relatively small set of shows that I will binge rewatch at an interval of every 2-4 years. A few are the great ones like The Wire or the Star Treks that make me rethink my place in the universe as I get older, but when I say the rest out loud they all sound so... banal. And yet, I love rewatching them every time, especially when it's with friends or family - when they don't know what's going to happen and you get to experience that again vicariously.
Arrested Development, Archer, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Moral Orel, Xavier Renegade Angel... stupid stuff like that. It's especially great today with so many shows surviving for 5-10 seasons. I'll watch one or two seasons that are available and come back years later to something that combines elements of nostalgia with brand new never before seen seasons.
Edit: Also, to add, I have always been a voracious reader, especially of nonfiction. While I absorbed a lot of knowledge, I can't really remember any actual stories that I have read in my lifetime save for one. Some young adult book, House of the Scorpion, published in 2002 that was required reading for one of my kids so I read it to help them with their book report. For some reason, that book just resonated with me and it's still my favorite.
They even use one in an episode of the wire (circa 2003).
Season 1, episode 3 of "The Wire" has a pretty inciteful scene featuring Chess as a metaphor for the criminal life ("Pawns get capped early."):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztc7o0NzFrE
Man, this is literally my Plex library. <15 shows that I ever enjoy watching (ATHF, Mr Robot, The Wire, Sopranos, GoT, Squidbillies, House, King of the Hill, Silicon Valley, Buffy, Futurama to be exact.) They still take up a full 1.5TB because I like to get the highest quality rips possible.
Some shows like House I have edited personally to create 'binge versions,' with the intro and outro cut out, with only special episodes that have special endings or intros included. Saves a good chunk of time with House and The Wire when I rewatch them. I wish a lot of other people did this as well. Instead groups stick to following scene rules that leave us with ugly formats, poor management and naming schemes and more. They were created for a different era.
Maybe I'll try to put it out there.
Most of the time when you walk on the beach, you don't have an amazing encounter.
There's a long list of television shows I haven't started yet and wish I had. Game of Thrones, Sopranos, The Wire, Mr Robot, and lots of others. It's surprising how often conversations with friends and strangers revolve around our common culture.
I think a lot of people my age credit their love of sci fi while growing up in the 70's and 80's with putting them on their career path.
My advice would be to watch the TV you want to watch, then take your dog out for a walk after. Best of all worlds.
Being good is evidently boring...
I added a few examples in another comment. Even Rambo sacrificed his own safety and freedom to help rescue POWs.
Modern day heroes are all a bunch of whining self-centered children. Just go watch any super hero movie today for a good example of that.
It's almost a badge of honor to be morally ambiguous. Compare a list of protaganists, how many are anti-heros? Do we even have any real good guys in movies and tv these days? Even Superman has been turned into a murderer for this generation.
A few examples from popular TV:
Walking Dead: everyone is a murderer. Murder is justified consistently.
Billions: It's hard to know who to root for, they are all rotten. The righteous people are the "bad guys"
Scrubs: All the characters are morally bankrupt (compared to 30 years before it's time)
Ironman: A selfish rich asshole.
Batman: (ok, he was always an anti-hero from day 1)
Deadpool: Do I need to explain this one?
Wicked: A play about how the evil witch is misunderstood.
The Shield, The Wire, modern Star Trek vs old Star Trek, the list is too long...
There has always been corruptions, lack of morals. That's not my issue, it's that today, there simply isn't even close to a minority of actual real main protagonists that are selfless.
I think people find good people trying to do what is right just boring these days.
/rant
> "I don't know why so many people here are suggesting "The Wire", unless they don't understand what the concept of a child is."
Your parent isn't making the "for kids" a requirement, which explains many of the suggestions here, including "The Wire".
> *"I would love a popular movie (maybe even one for kids)"
Kids is also relative: you need to take the kids themselves into account to know what may be appropriate for them.
I don't know why so many people here are suggesting "The Wire", unless they don't understand what the concept of a child is.
For incredible kids TV shows that emphasize empathy for "the bad guys", demonstrate the flaws and weaknesses of the "the good guys", and does so in a way that encourages personal growth, integrity, and compassion over moral nihilism as a response, then you can't do better than
* Steven universe
* Avatar: the last Airbender
The TV series “The Wire” does this in an extraordinary way.
I'm a bit surprised by that comment. I actually find Prime to have pretty good content and typically better movies than Netflix (who's movie library has been shrinking pretty drastically over the years).
If you haven't already watched it, I'd highly recommend Season 1 and 2 of "The Expanse" on Prime. There are a lot of pretty great shows on there as long as you don't rely on DC/Marvel shows for all your entertainment. Other shows that are reasonably acclaimed are:
- The Man in the High Castle
- Avatar: The Last Airbender
- The Nightmanager
- Mr. Robot
- Boardwalk Empire
- Downton Abbey
- Sneaky Pete
- Orphan Black
- Dr. Who
- Veep
- The Good Wife
- Transparent
- Hannibal
- Deadwood
- Curb your Enthusiasm
- The Wire
- Six Feet Under
- The Sopranos
'The Wire', though not a movie, was implicitly about American poverty in a drug ecosystem, and predominantly black.
The post seems to make its point by dismissing just about everything. Bright is "just another Will Smith movie" and Stranger Things is "pistache by design." Game of Thrones is probably just another fantasy-book-to-TV translation and The Wire is probably yet another crime drama.
Through that lens, is anything going to impress you?
Or an episode of The Wire.
The situation sounds much more like The Shield. The Wire was focused on institutional problems. It was more interested in the tragedy that incentives in the police force and city government were such that barely an iota of thought was ever given as to how to actually fix the problems of the city. Instead most work was expended in public relations efforts, cooking the books and ass covering. There was one storyline in season 1 where Herc and Carver thought about pocketing some drug money instead of turning it in as evidence, but they ended up giving it back didn't they?
The Shield on the other hand..
So I guess "The Wire" was basically a documentary?
This is a massive delay of a reply, but I liked this response so much, I felt I needed to respond.
So, I think you've done a good job on listing modern narratives, but there are others, such as everything from the Sopranos and the Wire to Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy where those good/evil distinctions start to blur. You could possibly fit Walter White into the "good who is forever corrupted", but it's tough to say if he was ever good. He was already a somewhat petty, jealous man who was still bitter and jealous of his friends' success. And he was also the victim of some crap circumstances. Or you can look at a movie like Crash (2004 one) at the characters there. How do you fit Matt Dillon's atrocious and racist cop into also being the same guy who can be an amazing hero to even those he victimized? I mention that to say, depending on how you wish to view a narrative, modern or ancient, it can be either very binary or very nuanced.
Death, and Hades, are both judged and thrown in the lake of fire in Revelation 20:14, which seem to be the culmination of His punishments. I’m probably reading a lot into that, but it seems to be describing them as both concepts and individuals.
Ultimately, I would say that the binary definitions of good and evil go back into antiquity, but in some cases, I believe the haziness you see may be down to the ancient mind focusing on a different chunk of the spectrum of virtue than our modern minds. So perhaps, in the same way we emphasize compassion, love, kindness and bravery, etc. an ancient culture might have emphasized honor, fidelity, holiness, courage, etc. But in those cases, I’d say it’s just as binary, but we can haze it up because we hear some violation of modern tropes that the ancients would have ignored.
I'd be surprised if you could find a "Best TV Show of all Time" list that doesn't include The Wire in the top 5. Most them of them have it #1 or #2 depending on how the ranker feels about The Sopranos.
I agree the older crime statistics are a little suspect, but it's all we really have to go on. And, yeah, the US was a much bigger and much newer nation back then. The Apache Wars and other associated wars against the native Americans didn't wrap up until 1924! Crime statistics just weren't that important.
> as The Wire taught us, and we all know The Wire is all true... /s
I could never get in to The Wire.
The very first scene of the very first episode is a courtroom where a woman changes her testimony on the stand, and the prosecutor doesn't: a) show the woman her sworn deposition, b) request an immediate continuance (surprise testimony is one of the things that warrants one), and c) threaten and then carry out charges of perjury against the woman for refusing to testify according to her statement. Instead, the prosecutor keeps asking questions over and over, driving into the jury's mind the woman's changed testimony. I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like I know something of courtroom procedure. This was just so unbelievable that it made me angry that the writers expected me to believe it. It would be like someone hacking a System/360 Model 30 from their iPhone in 10 seconds.
I understand it was for dramatic purposes to lead to the other witness's murder, but it broke my suspension of disbelief so badly I had a hard time watching the rest of the episode. I don't remember if I ever watched the second episode.
Good content is evergreen and the more content they create, they increase the incentive fgor people to subscribe. You can also create content once and automate creating compatible devices for everything. Games come and go, but House of Cards Season 1 is still a reason to subscribe to Netflix today. Think how many people are still discovering The Wire for the first time on HBO Now.
I could never skip the ending credits of The Wire. And for some seasons the opening ones too.
If opening credits are done right, they can serve a function, e.g. The Wire.
An example from the cinema world would be Michael Mann's films.
I can also speak from experience that not all NYPD are eager to take in a report of violent crime, but the OP isn't just talking about felonies, but homicides. "The Wire" Season 4 aside, it's much harder for the police to fudge a body count.
An increase in reported sexual assaults isn't necessarily a signal of crime trends as it may reflect an increase in willingness of victims to report versus past years.
Speaking of Baltimore and its homicide rate, the Sun had a great investigation in 2010 that busted the department for having a sharp drop in reported rapes while having a steady/increasing homicide rate -- a great example of the use of (relatively simple) statistics -- such as how Baltimore was one of the few major cities to have more homicides than rapes -- that effected change:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-city-rapes-gallery-storygallery.html
A followup story reported the "good" news:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-md-ci-sex-offense-changes-20110630-story.html
> A major category of crime is up substantially in Baltimore, and police and city officials are pleased.
> A year after The Baltimore Sun revealed that the city led the country in the number of rape reports discarded by detectives — part of what women's advocates and victims said was a broader pattern of ignoring sexual assaults — the number of rapes being reported is up more than 50 percent.
DS9 is exceeded only by "The Wire" but The Wire is not Sci-Fi, but it is by far the most complex television show ever made. I'm afraid to say it eclipses The Sopranos.
Someday-- when we have Blu-rays of DS9, I have a dream of re-editing them into a miniseries that hits the high parts of the show and leaves a lot of the cruft out.
GP specifically mentioned movies, but I don't know that a good story would work with the pacing short-circuited like that (eg: comedic timing in a show like Archer, or the myriad pregnant pauses in Mad Men and the Wire). I'll give it a try, though.
I think part of the problem is I'm old now. All the plots are reruns of older plots. They were great when I was young and the plots were new to me.
I've read where television is overtaking movies as the place where you get good stories and character development. Breaking Bad, The Wire and Game of Thrones are better than any movie I've probably ever seen.
I saw Wonder Woman the other day and the only thing I liked about it was the WWI setting, and they managed to botch that too. I mean it was an OK movie, but just like every other super hero movie. Get of my lawn I guess.
We are more and more nostalgic about everything. But I don't see how people can think TV shows were better in the 70s, 80s or even 90s. Since 2000 we live in the golden age of TV shows. We got The Wire, the Sopranos, Mad Men, the Shield, (Game of thrones?, Westworld?) and a ton of original concepts. I tend to think that nowadays there is more originality and risk taking in TV shows than in the movie industry.
This summer, I watch Twin Peaks The Return, some episodes are the weirdest things I have seen on a mainstream TV channel. I am amazed it was allowed to air at prime time.
Plus closure of shipyards, factories etc.. The local economy is pretty depressed as compared to 50-100 years back but people have families and history and don't want to or can't move so are struggling to survive or can sqeeze by enough to not move..
Taking the amtrak from DC-NY at least a few years ago there were literally miles and miles of entire blocks of abandoned townhouses.. I imagine a google street view would be a good way to see this..
Also relateed - just finished binge watching HBO's 'The Wire' - though fiction and maybe jazzed up a little, it seems fairly accurate to get a picture of how messed up things are/can be based on what I absorbed 3rd hand from living in nearby DC for a good while..
"There are not many shows taht are better than the Wire; my favorite part about Omar is that he doesn't curse."
I loved the wire - truly.
However, I think I would rate the first season of true detective as being better than all of the seasons of the wire except for season 2, which was my favorite.
I was surprised to learn that s2 (dock workers, etc.) is not very well liked - I thought it was by far the most interesting.
EDIT: WIRE SPOILER: also, as long as we're talking about it ... the resolution of the omar character in the last seasons of the wire was incredibly anti-climactic and just downright weird. I understand they got the rug pulled out and had to quick wrap up the show but that was really just the worst and most useless bookend to his character arc...
A lot of the show was inspired by real events and real people, including the experiences and true character of some of the actors.
One of the most interesting to me was Melvin Williams who played The Deacon, and in real life was a big-time heroin kingpin who was renowned for his intelligence. There's a decent documentary about him floating around and a (short) Wikipedia page [0].
Another is Felicia Pearson who played Snoop. Listen to an interview with her and hear her backstory, and you know she's the real deal. Stephen King called her character "perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series". [1]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Williams_(actor)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snoop_(The_Wire)
In light of the "All Eyez on Me" movie recently released, there is an interesting, indirect relationship between Michael K Williams and Tupac Shakur.
Shakur was filming with Mickey Rourke for 1996 release Bullet (actually filmed in 1994), and Williams was specifically chosen for a role by Shakur because of his facial scar. William's manager at the time was James Rosemond who is currently incarcerated with several life terms. Rosemond was a childhood friend of Michael Williams, and grew up in the same area of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, near the Vandeveer housing projects (now called Flatbush Gardens), and became heavily involved in street crimes as a teenager, allegedly robbing drug dealers like in the Wire.
Fast forwarding to the early 90's, a number executives in the urban music industry had indirect/direct ties with street crime and gang culture, and Rosemond, who became Michael K William's manager, was believed to be one of them (he also managed several popular urban music groups at the time). It's widely believed by industry insiders that Rosemond wanted to become Shakur's manager as well, but Shakur wasn't interested. Also, much of Shakur's problems (the 1994 shooting and imprisonment) are believed by many to be of the doing of either Rosemond or his acquaintances.
It would be interesting to know how much Omar's character was influenced by his friendship with Rosemond and people from the neighborhood they both knew.
For me it's like a very long, very good movie :)
David Simon called it "a treatise on the end of the American empire, and who we are as a people, what we've come to, why we can no longer solve or even seriously address our own problems", and generally said and wrote a lot of insightful things since, very eloquently. I loved The Wire, but discovering that head and character behind it impressed me on top of even that.
Just take this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL6Jv2Jpnpg
If I had to put it in a nutshell I'd say The Wire "comes from a place of" paying attention, not from distraction or deriving entertainment from crime and other problems, and that (combined with genius and the right people getting together and having good chemistry, and a lot of things not going wrong that can easily kill a TV show) made it so good. Good art can be luck, but art this great is always the tip of an iceberg.
But that is exactly what is needed, more enlightenment with real stories like this. People aren't going to realize racism is a real problem if you just scream racist to them. I am white and used to think anti-racists were a bunch of idiots. Only by seeing the prevalence of racism in social media did I start realizing racism was a bigger problem than I had imagined. Reading "Gang leader for a day", was a major eye opener. I think I partly got into that because of the TV series the Wire and the book Freakonomics, which covered the economics and social structure of drug gangs.
But this requires some curiosity and interest in learning which biggest and racists might not have. And frankly it is hard to change people's mind when you are calling them names. People tend not to listen to people they don't like.
We also have to accept that racism goes both ways, it is just that white racism has much more severe consequences for black than the other way around. But I believe it helps maintain white racism to some degree.
I am not American, so I can comment on this as an outsider, and I can very clearly see that many American blacks have a big issue with whites. It is hard to win over whites if they only have bad experiences with blacks and also see no point in educating themselves on the issue.
I am not passing out blame. I am just saying, everybody can contribute to making racism a thing of the past. The ones who have to do the most are whites.
I was watching season 2 of “The Wire” (never saw it before) and a detective was consulting with a representative of the Maryland Bureau of Mines, who subtly whipped out a slide rule to produce some result. What was nice was that it wasn’t “look whose got a slide rule!” As much as “hey, he figured that out quickly!”
So was it like the cop turned math teacher in season 4 of The Wire?
10 years since The Wire season 4, the situation is still the same.
One of my favorite moments in that scene is hearing Avon say "You'd need a day of the jackal motherfucker for that" and Googling that phrase and discovering and watching the amazing movie of the same name. Thus realizing even more just how perfect that line was in context.
The Wire definitely took attention to detail seriously.
I actually didn't have a huge problem with McNulty's arc or twist. It was outlandish but it feels organic not just from a character perspective, but from the rift between homicide detectives and the medical examiners office. In Simon's book, "Homicide", there's a chapter focusing on a death that the coroner declines to classify as a homicide. The detective, however, keeps pursuing the case, which is problematic because there are plenty of active homicide cases to spend time on. He eventually cracks the case but it's presented as the detective going above and beyond given the politics/concerns of the department.
So a "good guy" detective like McNulty fabricating evidence seems like an extreme twist, but not so much the idea that a good guy detective feels that some homicides aren't given enough attention. And McNulty, by this point in the show, feels like a character who is tired of all this shit but also has seen how he's gotten away with being a self-righteous dick who bucks the bureaucracy (from the very first episode). And the difference in opinion between the medical examiner and the police can be very problematic, since the former's designation is what ultimately makes a case a homicide or not.
IMO, the 5th season is the worst because of the newspaper setting. As a journalist, it wasn't particularly compelling to me. I mean, it may be the most realistic depiction of a newspaper on TV, and maybe familiarity breeds contempt, but the core problem is that it's not well-developed. The key flaw is that the "villains" of the newspaper setting, Scott Templeton (the reporter) and his enabling editors, are given no qualities beyond being caricatures of bad/evil journalists. This is the same reason why I feel Lieutenant Marimow (named after a Baltimore Sun whom Simon despised) is also a very weak character.
Compare the shallowness of the 5th season bad-guy journalists to the 3rd-season bad guy politicians, like Clay Davis. Davis is most definitely a corrupt character, but besides having an amazing catchphrase ("Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiit!"), he's still got some moral complexity behind him. I think this is best shown in the hilarious scene in the 5th season in which he takes the stand in his corruption trial with such dramatic finesse that he gets acquitted. Davis may be corrupt, but you can see why his community loves him. [0]
I'm not sure how you could make the 5th season journalists interesting, and I'm not sure Simon could either. His rants against the real-life Marimow and the Sun are lengthy and legendary [1], and this was after he was famous for The Wire. Simon is a die-hard defender of the sanctity of journalism and I think he let that overtake his sensibilities when writing the 5th season.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAQv6KTfQow
[1] http://jimromenesko.com/2012/04/05/david-simon-bill-marimow-feud-revisited/
Apparently Sports Illustrated ran a retrospective on this very same episode a month ago (h/t r/thewire):
https://www.si.com/nba/2017/04/17/the-wire-oral-history-baltimore-basketball-nba
This bit made me laugh:
> It seemed kind of strange to me, but David Simon said he had heard about something like that before when he was [at] The Baltimore Sun. I mostly was excited that I was having an episode that I had more than two scenes in. Me and Domenick Lombardozzi referred to it as my Taxi Driver episode, because it’s my favorite movie.
I've read just about every book excerpt/oral history/etc I've been able to find about The Wire, and I've read about Gilliam's and Lombardozzi's and others' recollections on how they were frustrated at times about their scene/line counts. No matter how much I read these behind-the-scenes anecdotes I still have a moment of fourth-wall-breaking-wtf, because the thought of The Wire having the characteristics common to any other kind of entertainment, with writers' rooms and cut scenes and actors demanding more minutes, feels so alien. Of course it's that way, but my mild confusion/shock is a testament to how seamless and real the show and its content and its pacing feel.
I've been putting off watching "The Wire" -- I stopped shortly into season 1 -- because I just couldn't take any more depressing scenarios in my life.
Yes, this is a personal comment, and probably as such, OT.
But, it's time. As another commenter says, "the cycle repeats."
I got on the wrong side of that cycle. As a quippy quote on Facebook just reminded me again, yesterday, "The fears we don't face become our limits."
When Trump was elected, I started rewatching "The West Wing."
(By the way, many of the issues we currently face -- issues, not personalities -- the writers of that show addressed in interesting and informative fashion.)
It's time for the counter-point.
Not quite out there, yet. Still watching a show. But, closer to the world we live in.
Sorry for the personal comment, here, in a way.
Today's little quote from the same source, on FB: "Be very careful what you think. Your thoughts run your life."
A reason I held off on watching "The Wire."
But it's time, now.
I'd encourage you to view the show through a less ideological lens. One of the compelling aspects of the show for me is that the characters are written as human, rather than some tropes. While you may not always agree with the actions they take, you can understand their motivations. And for the most part, they're not simple, by-the-book, characters.
The Season 2 example you provide I think is a good example of this: McNulty is a flawed human (just as we—and all the characters on the Wire—are) and is fully capable of wanting to do right and sometimes not behaving perfectly, just as the people at the station. I think these reactions were quite realistic. Would McNulty have stopped the prostitutes? Would people hearing of the station had other reactions? I'm interested to know how you would have had it play out differently.
Good art can allow us to reflect on the state of our humanity, just as you have here. Some art can be inspirational, but not all of it needs to be. I think the Wire does an exceptional job of illustrating how difficult it can be to fix real problems in some American cities.
I think The Wire was okay, and that Game of Thrones is really bad, so I'm just gonna weigh in and emphatically disagree with your assessment that "they are the two best television shows made".
> I guess depending on how game of thrones ends, it may be a high contender.
I don't think you can really compare the two. The wire was literary and so authentic, Game of Thrones cinematic and epic. They are the two best television shows made - but in different spaces.
Breaking bad was good but sat in the middle and not as good as either.
But usually the literary honest film holds up better over time than the epic special effects one.
Excellent read. Still arguably the greatest tv show ever made. The Wire is essentialy a classic Russian novel but in the television medium.
This has probably been beaten to death, but I've found the tv series The Wire to be one of the best portrayals of the actual costs, both acute and diffuse, of waging war against your own people.
You are right in your hunch that it makes treatment a much less taboo subject. The real difference in outcomes comes from treating it as a health issue and not a criminal violation.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. If I may, I think that you have taken U.S. sensational news stories and popular movies as your entire context of the U.S. Since nobody else is respecting your point of view, I'll share.
1. Smoking tobacco is seen as a mild taboo, but many people still do it. As long as the smoking is done outside and away from a main entrance, it's unlikely anyone will comment.
2. A large amount of people are addicted to prescription opiates, but if you go to New Mexico or Ohio, it's not going to look like a scene out of The Walking Dead. The total amount of addicted people is estimated to be 2 million [1]. Out of 300 million people, it means that this tragedy is hidden unless you personally know an affected person. By the way, many in California are affected by this issue.
3. Tobacco isn't considered a "gateway" to cannabis use by experts or credible laypeople. Tobacco users and Cannabis users have little relation or overlap.
4. Cannabis is usually introduced in the same manner as alcohol (at parties or small gatherings of friends), though alcohol is far more socially acceptable. Cannabis has never been primarily considered a "trippy" drug in the U.S. ---though there are many people who do use it that way--- it's more of a recreational substance. Cannabis use has declined among the under 18-year-olds over the past decade, but has increased among adults.
4. There are many methamphetamine and heroin addicts in absolute numbers, but again, they do not dominate any metropolitan area. Sure, it is easy to find addicts among homeless populations, but it isn't like Crash, Breaking Bad, or The Wire in terms of pervasiveness and intensity.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html
I really hope they don't lose focus on the quality of their original content.
I understand that not everything Netflix does is tailored to me, particularly due to Netflix' growing, increasingly mainstream audience, diverse and varying preferences, more ground to cover, etc.
However lately Netflix' content simply seems to lack substance to me. It feels as if it's just the superficial result of throwing a promising combination of those very specific tags/categories the services is famous for onto the assembly line and ending up with a show or film that, while ticking all the boxes and not being bad at all, is still pretty far off the masterpieces of the medium. I'm not sure if classics like The Wire, The Sopranos or Mad Men could have been created with such a formulaic approach and I'm missing shows of that caliber on Netflix. Maybe the service should offer brillant content creators the freedom and opportunity to do the shows they want to do, instead of dictating the theme and framework.
> Are there really shows that aren't good enough to warrant your undivided attention, yet good enough to watch in the first place?
As someone with ADHD: that's going to be most of the shows I ever watch. Unless it's really one of the best shows or movies I've ever seen (like The Wire or something from IMDB's top 50), it's really hard to give it complete undivided attention and probably not worth it anyway.
Having watched season 2 of The Wire last week, that brings up some interesting ideas...
If you haven't seen it, season 2 of The Wire is mostly concerned with this. Although the show is fictional so I can't vouch for its accuracy on this, but it goes into a good deal of detail.
Stories like this make me think of Season 2 of the Wire
After the November election, I started rewatching "The West Wing."
Yes, as a "cast" show it is somewhat unrealistic with respect to the scope/number of people involved in daily West Wing activity, policy, administration, etc. And it is purposely idealistic. Nonetheless, it summarizes and states well many principle and practicalities of the Executive, Administration, the other two branches of government, and provides a not insignificant education to the general viewer of how all that works and why.
As well, it portrays the idea of good -- but imperfect -- people doing their best within an imperfect system.
Next up, perhaps: "The Wire." I started it about a year ago, but I was not in a place at that time, myself, where I could easily/reasonably take its message as I've heard/read it described.
"Mr. Robot" I've found excellent at describing a contemporary technical but also a social milieu, and thoughts on same, with which I'm all too familiar.
Recently, I've been revisiting old/classic movies starring Bogart. There is an essence of the American character in them, perhaps both reflected and thereby instantiated down the succeeding years and decades. A taciturn but thorough awareness and expectation of self-reliance.
Viewing such as this seems to inform me, to some degree. Hopefully not in too distorted nor misleading a fashion.
A lot of contemporary viewing reflects some contemporary thinking and news items, but comes with a lot of bulk. There's only so much Marvel content I can take, for example. It becomes distracting, consuming, rather than informing.
What concerns me in good part now, with the direction paid streaming is going, is that while production values are increasing, with limited libraries and historical content, it may be trending towards a contemporary consuming as opposed to informing.
Yes, we're living in Hell's Kitchen. (Well, I feel that way, more than infrequently.) But I don't really think we are going to punch our way out of it.
I come from a working class background in St. Louis. Laborers and factory workers absolutely do drink and smoke on and before the job. They don't necessarily show up wasted -- as you say, how could they? -- but they drink. It's less tolerated than in the past, but it still goes on, and it used to be much worse in recent memory, so I have no trouble believing it was even worse before that.
There's a pretty great scene in Season 2 of The Wire where the dock workers are subject to a checkpoint early in the morning on their way to the docks because of a political battle that has nothing to do with them. They've all just come from the bar, of course. One of the guys says to the cop stopping them, "Oh come on! It's 8 AM! Who would be drunk this early!"
I assure you that's meant to be funny.
> Viewers today expect incredible production value.
Not really, no. I expect interesting movies, and I'd say being an interesting movie doesn't have anything to do with CGI. I'm a film buff through and through and it almost literally pains me when I see that people involved in the movie industry don't seem to understand what their problem is: they don't make films for grown-ups anymore.
The only outlet that has provided interesting movie-like content in the last 10-15 years was television. There's almost no CGI in shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Black Mirror (to just name a few), shows that have made me casually think about them while I was riding the tramway and the like years after I had last seen them.
I miss great movies.
Other OECD countries do not have Gen Y that is as big as US, looking at other countries may not help that much beyond a point.
>>>If we can fix schools and crime, like other civilized nations, then there is no reason to believe people will move out of cities once they reach a certain age.
If it was an easy prop, it would have been achieved, may be you should see "The Wire Season 4" to get an idea!
>TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash.
>TV had it's heyday
I can tell you don't watch much TV. It's never been better. We're in a golden age of TV, it's just not on ESPN. There have recently been a lot of extremely high quality, hour long dramas, which basically amount to a movie every week. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Wire, arguably Westworld, to name a few.
"I interpret as .. doing things that might piss off people on the committee."
Sounds like obedience to me.
There's a great HBO tv show, "The Wire". It's all about how an institution can consume personalities of those who belong to it. I'm pretty sure tenure is the same way. I see this happening to people who work in corporations for a long time. Their personalities change as they become the sort of person who can succeed in such environments.
That being said, I suspect standout researchers get tenure and get to be themselves, just as talented people can succeed in corporations and still be themselves.
They are generally the exception rather than the norm, however.
No, this isn't unique. If you know English (and I assume everyone here does), that'll likely be one of the highest barriers to clear when trying to learn a foreign language. People will either want to be helpful and speak English, or they'll want to practice English - or both.
Volunteering with exchange students in Norway[1], those that generally learn Norwegian the best in a year here, living in a Norwegian family, going to Norwegian school - are those that either speak little or no English, or those that manage to insist on speaking Norwegian (to the point of pretending not to understand English, even if that's their native language).
A suitable trade-off might be to make a deal with your friends/co-workers - only <native language> on Fridays, or (as you progress) English only allowed after hours Monday through Thursday etc.
For exchange students in the age group 16-18, those that speak a related native language (ie: indo-european), will generally start speak the language after 3 months, reaching fluency after 6 (a little faster for German, Dutch, a little slower for Spanish, French - about in-between for English). For those that don't (eg: Japanese), the bars are moved: starting to speak the language after 6, and fluency after a little less than 9 (slower start, but they tend to catch up).
It's quite refreshing to learn a language by immersion, rather than by tedious school lessons - the same way we all learn as children.
Another tip is to avoid jumping between languages as much as possible - or at least only jump between your native tongue, and the foreign language you're studying. Your brain seem to work better with immersion.
As for my personal experience, I learned English in school, from reading books and magazines, and watching movies and tv programs. While I agree that tv/film production often have overly clear dialogue - watching films first with subtitles, and later without, is great practice (for those that want a challenge in American English, I recommend trying to watch all of HBO's "The Wire" without subtitles).
After years of French in school, I also speak and understand some French, but I would probably have to go live some months in France (or some other place people speak French) in order to attain what I'd call proper fluency.
After spending a year as an exchange student in Japan, I'd say I speak fluent Japanese, but not quite at native level - I'm also somewhat stuck at "high-school" level, so I'm not quite comfortable in a "grown up" work setting. After my year there, it felt like I'd forgotten all my French - but as I've gradually improved my Japanese, my French as "come back".
Finally, I haven't seen singing mentioned here. Singing is a great way to improve pronunciation.
For what it's worth, I've heard people say that learning languages get easier after the fifth one. If I'm not counting Danish and Swedish (which one really shouldn't, as a Norwegian) I guess that means I have one more to go after I manage to brush off my French.
[1] http://www.afs.org/
Its a decent and sometimes good show but certainly not one of the greats, and has more than a few major flaws. I'll try to minimize spoilers.
1. The plotline is pretty much Fight Club with computers and telegraphs this early on. This is clearly not on purpose as we see hints dropped all the time and the reveal is given with such a flourish. Lets stop defending Esmail here. The reveal is really hamfisted and the show borrows VERY generously from Fight Club, for better or worse.
2. The twists are largely unpredictable. Sure you can argue that some clues were dropped beforehand, but they're so ambiguous as to be meaningless. Anything can happen on that show and to me, that's lazy writing. The universe that show lives in should have a rational set of rules that govern it. Its basic world-building. If the finale involves aliens or time travel, it woudn't surprise anyone, in fact /r/mrrobot is full of people expecting this. Anything should not be possible, especially when you're 30+ hours in.
3. The pacing isn't very good and gets especially bad in season 2. I don't think we needed several episodes dedicated to Elliot being in [spoilers] or other events that look stretched out to fill episodes. This is a common issue in TV, and I'll let it slide, but the first few episodes of S2 are like pulling teeth and turns off viewers. I know people that quit watching during this period. Its a hard sell to say "Look there's about 10 hours of nothing, but it kinda picks up after an experimental episode where the characters are bizarrely on a 90s sitcom for artsy fartsy cred."
4. The content is lacking. My understanding is that Esmail and his team originally wrote a movie and pretty much retrofitted that into one season of television. Once the [big event] happens in season one, the show lost its footing. I would have loved to spend more time at Allsafe instead of jumping straight into [big event].
5. The politics and hacktivism are pretty naive, if not just stupid. Its a lot of alt-left/far-left politics and having the characters act dumbfounded and guilty when regular people lost their homes and jobs seems ridiculous. What exactly did they think would happen after [big event]? We never really get to see anyone's moviation for this, other than some throwaway comments about "evil bankers" and "evil ceos." We know Elliot has a secret motivation and master plan (of course we have no details of it), but what about Trent and Mobley and Darlene? Why are they doing this? None of them remotely seem to have the zeal of a revolutionary and very soon regret all their actions. Its like some middle class hipster kids decided to overthrow society on a whim.
6. The show has a lot geek fan service where it can alienate non-geeks. I think its possible to show hacking without getting into the weeds of it and have it be semi-authentic. I can go either way here, but it would be nice if the show was more accessible to people like my wife and her friends.
7. The exploration of mental illness seems hackneyed and, well, boring. Season 2's long strange cinematography focusing on Elliot's tortured face just doesn't make for good TV. I think this stuff works best in small doses and has been done better by almost everyone else, including season 1 of this very show! Thankfully, Esmail has moved away from this kind of thing about mid-way through S2.
8. Whiterose as an unstoppable mastermind is a cliche and she's tiresome to watch on the show. Writers please stop using the mastermind cliche and start making your characters have flaws and screw-ups. For a show that's suppose to be complex, most of the characters aren't terribly deep or anti-cliche. Its almost distasteful to play up "the Chinese are inscrutable" cliche and have almost all the Chinese characters be unstoppable, unpredictable, and near perfect robots, constantly toying with the dumb and emotional westerners. We see the Dark Army, Chinese state hackers, the CCP, etc win pretty much every engagement but the FBI is clueless and there's no NSA or CIA at work at all here.
9. Less so than Whiterose, but Price is written to be stereotypically evil. He's only missing a mustache to twirl. I wish he was a more complex character, not just a sociopathic CEO who cares about nothing but himself. This doesn't necessarily upset me considering the general low complexity of secondary characters on this show, but the actor playing Price is so good, it seems like a waste of talent for him to play a two dimensional character. Price has a lot of potential that has so far been ignored and perhaps anything humanizing him would upset the far-left politics of the show, which I find disappointing.
10. The show has slowly degenerated into Lost, where meaningless clues lead to a surprise. Fans argue on /r/mrrobot but no one is ever right because its all so damn ambigious. Or someone is right, but only by dumb luck or perhaps marketing plants. I wish the show had less of a mysterious air about it. I also don't like the marketing led approach of "Check out the finale to get the real answers you've been waiting for all season!"
I feel this show is a bit like Halt and Catch Fire. Its decent, but not very good and is constantly trying to find its footing. Like Halt, I suspect it will never really find its proper footing and will be passable geek popcorn fare with moments of brilliance. It doesn't seem to be reaching out past modest ratings. I've heard comparisons to Breaking Bad, but BB had a general appeal that Mr Robot doesn't.
That said, this is destined to live in geek fandom, which frankly has a low barrier to entry. I just wish it was a better and more accessible show. I do look forward to the shows that will be made after being inspired by this. Mr Robot 2.0 will be good. 1.0 is just too uneven and unfocused. Compare how tight Walter White's world was or the world of The Wire compared to the manic world of Mr Robot or how complex and flawed the secondary characters were on that show compared to Mr Robots'. Those are mature and very good shows. Mr Robot? Not so much.
I love this show. Haven't been excited about a show like this since The Wire. Not because it is "real" in the same way that The Wire is, but because it is so fresh and challenging. There are points where things go wildly left-field, but it's not predictable. Even the first season twist, which is fairly predictable depending on what movies you've seen, is preceded and followed by other twists.
The second season has veered quite dramatically from the first season, and part of me misses the hacking-focused plots (particularly the realistic handling of social engineering). But I can't fault the creator for avoiding expectations, even if the show's pace feels slower (apparently he had both seasons planned out before he started).
The Shield and The Wire may be two of the finest television shows ever, and both portrayed corrupt cops without glorifying them. Well, mostly.
> Yep. TV's are not great at conveying radio plays. But, that's all people could think of to do with them initially. Turns out they are better for content like Game of Thrones.
I get what you're saying, but I think that's a rather terrible way to contrast radioplays and content made for TV. The experience of watching "Game of Thrones" isn't that different from listening to the BBC radioplay of "Lord of the Rings"[r]. I think "The Wire" or "Generation Kill" might be better examples of things that I think work better on TV, than I can imagine them doing on the radio. Or maybe "The Expanse" or even "Firefly".
Doesn't mean I don't like "Game of Thrones", I love the adaptation - but with its many characters and demanding storyline (even for those of us that have read the books) - I don't know. Somehow, while it is a beautiful production, I think it could've worked with a similar script for radio.
[l] Apparently the original series, in its 13 episode format isn't available to download/buy - if I understand it correctly the following Amazon link is to the remaster: https://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-Fellowship-Ring-Dramatised/dp/B000VTQAVS/ See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_%281981_radio_series%29#Re-release_in_2002
A search did turn up this: https://soundcloud.com/inkmore/sets/lord-of-the-rings-radio
Which I assume should probably be taken down due to copyright infringement.
Source: The Wire Season 2.
Many episodes of The Wire were headlines. Or ought have been.
See David Simon's "Audacity of Hope" speech. One version of it at UC Berkeley on YouTube.
(Simon's a great writer and has wonderful ideas to express. He's an abysmal public speaker. I actually edited out all the "ums" and "ers" from that, and cut it by 10 minutes (70 minute preso).
It's awesome to see an episode of 'The Wire' become an actual headline.
“Cheers,” which ran for 11 seasons on NBC, starting in 1982, was the first great hangout show: neutralizing the depiction of class and removing the pressures of work. Life is hard enough, “Cheers” said; let’s just make TV. Ever since, television started taking it easier on us. Bill Clinton was in the White House, and the economy had improved. On “Seinfeld,” “Living Single,” “Friends,” “Ellen,” “It’s Like, You Know,” “Sex and the City,” “Girlfriends” and, much later, “Happy Endings” and “New Girl,” the commingling, childless men and women might have had jobs, but almost none had consequential careers. How many jobs did Elaine and George have on “Seinfeld”? And in how many fields? And Kramer — how was he paying to live across the hall from Jerry? Hangout shows placed friendship above family, obviating the typical economic ecosystem. Belonging to a family of friends probably means you only have to support yourself.
TV became — and still is — a medium struggling to understand “average,” “ordinary,” “normal.”
Why would you go into any of these shows expecting anything resembling reality. They are all clearly entertainment in the form of light drama and inconsequential, whitewashed sexual tension. To expect anything else is to set yourself up for failure.
Deeper shows exist - The Wire, Breaking Bad, House of Cards - but headlining TV shows are not created to address issues anymore. The shows reflect the main demographics of TV watchers, because that's what keeps them watching, and that's what generates ad revenue. So I'm not too concerned with the state of TV - it's an echo chamber for older, more conservative folk.
I'm currently watching The Wire (Season 2). One thing I'm learning is that the common citizen really does not matter at all - the three different branches of the government keep each other in check by alternatively trying to fuck each other over/brownnose each other as much as they can.
That's the genius of checks and balances. As long as no one branch (legislative, judicial, executive) gets the upper hand, we can ensure that the power-hungry people who rise up through the ranks will hold each other accountable, if only for selfish and corrupt reasons.
I'm not sure what to consider corporations though. They seem to have piled up enough legal protection to be considered a fourth, private wing of government. Some of their incentives align (no taxes, bailouts, less regulation) but many more do not. Google and Apple control enough cash and information that they are de facto more powerful than 95% of world governments, and they play a major role in ours. Eric Schmidt taking on a role at the Pentagon is one recent example [1].
As Dostoevsky put it, viper will eat viper. We are all a little Karamazovian - of the black root. It's what keeps the world balanced.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head-pentagon-innovation-board/
A la season 2 of the wire.
Sounds like season 5 of The Wire...
The show is everything Big Bang Theory isn't.
BBT makes fun of stereotypes, in the way only outsiders can make fun of stereotypes: The jokes don't make sense, the writing seems to have no real compassion for the group that they are lampooning at all, and I've never actually seen people behave like the characters do.
Instead, SV makes sense for people in startups: It doesn't really spend most of its time making fun of how maladjusted startup workers are, like BBT does, but instead makes fun of the theater we all are surrounded by. By just turning the tech into star trek style technobabble, the show can focus on things that are relatable and real.
Take, for instance, a conversation they have, in an early episode of this year, about the problems of high valuations and down rounds. There were articles written about it that hit the very top of HN, because the conversation was so very real. The craziness you see in the GPs video? It seems deranged, but it's said by a character more than loosely based on Mark Cuban, and it's reflecting the values of the time when Cuban made his money! And his story covers a huge issue in entrepreneurship: Does the fact that you managed to get an amazing exit in one company really mean you will be any good later as a venture capitalist? Were you lucky or good?
If you take away all the laughs, the series tackles realistic problems all the time. So the series is not about easy laughs at the expense of people: It's a story about a culture, that happens to have laughs to make sure people that aren't interested in the culture are still entertained by it. Just like The Wire, it's not a documentary, but it sure seems to rhyme with reality.
I didn't say that the majority rules, just that the majority defines what is mainstream. If you want to run an open-source project that promotes misogynistic values, be our guest -- just don't do it on GitHub.
I don't understand what the problem is. In anything -- from TV to theater, music, architecture and social clubs -- there is the mainstream and the fringe. Maybe one day, fringe ideas will become mainstream and maybe not, but as long as the fringe is fringe, it is usually not part of the mainstream. It's pretty much a tautology. The Wire was a superb TV show -- possibly the best -- but it just didn't belong on the broadcast channels. It wasn't censorship (not that I'm suggesting that sophomoric misogynistic jokes are anything like The Wire, but they have no place on GitHub).
It reminded me of the "The Wire"'s Season 5 (I think), where Marlo Stanfield's guys were communicating with each other by sending photos of street maps, which would indicate meetup locations. It now seems easy to catch, but at that time (2008) it was still kind of a new thing to send data (like photos) instead of plain texts.
go watch season 4 of the The Wire...And given what we're willing to spend...
Ironically, Baltimore spends quite a lot ($15k/student) on schools. Apparently only NYC (among the top 100 districts) spends more.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-05-21/news/bs-md-ci-census-schools-20130521_1_school-system-per-pupil-spending-districts
"In spite of what we're willing to spend..." would be a better phrasing.
I feel like everyone in this thread should go watch season 4 of the The Wire. There is a lot of relevant work there, including the various pressures on, and requirements of the educational system.
tl:dr; Teacher's can only ever be a part of a solution to the complicated educational needs of our society. And given what we're willing to spend, they can't even be a particularly effective part in poorer parts of the country.
The Wire (season 2) gives an excellent insight into how docks are run (Baltimore). There's even a scene where some Dutch company wants to bring Rotterdam's automation to Baltimore.
I usually watch shows in a similar way, which is also why I try to wait until all of the first season is available on-demand before starting a show. I'm also fairly cautious with shows and waiting until the full season has run allows a lot of critical opinion to have already surfaced.
Regarding the Wire, I've watched the series three times now and I'm still not sure the first episode is a good hook, or I even started to get hooked. What was a big surprise to me the third time through is how I still get transfixed on season 4.
One case where I was hooked by the third episode but ultimately gave up on is Orange is the New Black. I found most of the first season fairly compelling, but by the end, it was apparent the show was going down a road that I wasn't interested in. I would have preferred to keep the series relatively realistic, run a season or two in prison and then focus the end on the transition back. Instead, they kept the main character in prison, seemingly indefinitely, and started putting a lot more focus on the other characters. I skipped around season three a little bit and was deeply disappointed at how it treated meaty topics like private prison profiteering so flippantly. I suppose The Wire did set the bar unreasonably high for dealing with those sorts of topics.
Without (hopefully) detracting from your excellent points, a couple of points on tv series: 1) The Corner is also worked into a tv mini series[1] by the author -- and in case people are not aware - he also wrote "The Wire" -- which is a more dramatic treatment of the same material.
Your point about WWI and WWII are interesting -- I'd come to a similar realization, partly jolted by the (entirely fictional, as far as I know -- more so than The Corner, and probably The Wire too) tv series "The Peaky Blinders"[2].
It does seem entirely reasonable that combining unemployment with a number of young men with great skills at war, coupled with severe PTSD and no treatment or well-fare to speak of is likely to lead to violent gangs forming. I can't imagine the situation is helped by ready access to firearms.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0224853/
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2442560/
The timeline is a well-understood series of events that developed pockets of economic depression, lack of education and above-average crime rates. Take Baltimore for example. Okay, it's probably far too extreme to be an average case, but it's the one I know the best.
After WWII, white southerners moved north in search of jobs, and were not happy to find a sizeable population of black people who were not normalized to the invisible and constant discrimination against black people in the south.
In the 1950s, desegregation and school integration was the final straw in a long discomfort with the growing black population in urban Baltimore, and white people began moving to the suburbs, speeding up their flight even more through the 1960s.
At the same time, heroin use in the city rose dramatically through the 1960s. A new class of violent drug dealers began to control the sale of drugs in the city. Burglaries rose tenfold and robberies rose thirtyfold from 1950 to 1970.
By 1968, the city was seriously deteriorating, with increase in crime and drug abuse, increased racial tension, and a total lack of support for the education or employment of the city's increasingly disadvantaged black citizens. When it was announced that MLK was assassinated, riots enveloped the city. Politicians blamed the people and not the conditions, white voters agreed, and a white exodus to the suburbs ensued. Over a period of 40 years the population in the city decreased by 200,000.
Drug use increased, jobs decreased, and the local economy basically tanked. Throughout this time, prison gangs were beginning to spring up and infiltrate vulnerable populations such as these. Kids grew up in predominately black, poor neighborhoods with high unemployment and high crime, and were stymied by a lack of easy access to a good education.
---
The drug war's primary negative effect on the population isn't that they're putting people in jail for drugs. It's that it effectively increased the price of drugs. This not only made competition more fierce, it developed a new class of criminal, and made it that much more necessary for addicts to commit crime in order to score drugs. Drug dealing was then able to supplant other low-income work (where it was available) as a more reliable source of income. Increased violence is a subsequent side-effect of all this, and thus the increase in incarceration.
---
To understand how deeply drugs (and the war on them) intersects with violent crime, gangs, impoverished black communities and the prison system, I highly recommend reading The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. It was written in 1997 but I can tell you it is still completely relevant today. The Wire (especially season 3) is basically a meditation on how the drug war has completely destroyed black communities like those in Baltimore, and how it perpetuates the cycle of an eventual life in and out of prison for many (if not most) of the city's black males.
You want to talk violent crime? There's fewer places in this country more violent than Baltimore. You can't talk about the prison system or violent crime in Baltimore without talking about the drug trade. As recently as 2013, over half of the 650 officers of the Baltimore City Detention Center were found to be smuggling contraband for the Black Guerrilla Family, a prison gang founded in 1966 in California. Reports from gang members show that even by 1996, they had essentially total control over the facility. They, along with the Crips, used the illegal drug trade in order to achieve power and influence enough to control officers working at the facility.
Finally, there's the more recent evidence that really puts things into perspective. In 2013, the city's chief of police noted how for "everyday people", crime had dropped, even though the murder rate was at an all-time high. What did he mean by that? Approximately 80 to 85 percent of the victims of violent crime were african-american males involved in the drug trade.
And homicide rates have skyrocketed every month since the most recent riots in Baltimore. The reason? So many pharmacies got robbed during the riots that it flooded the market with prescription drugs at prices up to ten times lower than they used to be, and rival gangs are fighting a war to dominate this new market while there's still excess supply.
For an excellent review of the nature of policing and wiretaps in particular, watch the TV show The Wire. On HBO now and Amazon Prime. (and I think the best TV show ever made.)
It's fictionalized but written by an ex-cop and covers the drug trade in Baltimore.
Baltimore has very serious and endemic issues with crime, drugs, poverty and government -- all of which combine to result in an extremely high murder rate. The numbers have improved since the historic peak in 1993 (353 murders), and Baltimore is no longer the #1 city in murders per capita in the US, but it's still not good.
If you're interested, there are several excellent explorations of the particulars of Baltimore's problems (which are present, usually to a lesser extent, in many other cities) from David Simon:
- Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (book) - Homicide: Life on the Streets (TV series) - The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (book) - The Corner (TV miniseries) - The Wire (TV series)
I liked The Wire, particularly Season 4, but I too like a lot of things more than it. What are your favorite shows? I'm always looking for recommendations.
Okay. I never "got" The Wire or The Sopranos, either.
Adequate, sure! Best TV series ever? Strange.
It wasn't by a long shot. This very practice was a major plot point of season two of The Wire, which was aired in 2003.
I think the academics are well aware of that - but the alternative is to never study groups in this way.
Also consider that such people are typically integrated with the community they are studying for months, even close to a year. We are certainly different when observed, but we also get used to a new presence, eventually consider them "one of us", and will resume (mostly) normal behavior.
They're not technically academic works, but I consider David Simon's books "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" and "The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood" (co-written with Edward Burns) to be in the category of such studies. The first book was the inspiration of the television series of the same name, and both were inspiration for The Wire.
"The Corner", by the way, is one of the most emotionally devastating books I've read, and I tend to pick very unhappy topics.
This reminds me of Season 4 of The Wire where Colvin runs a special classroom for the "corner kids" and sees promising results.
One of the big differences is that in The Wire they mentioned that high school kids weren't going to be impacted as much as the middle school kids they ended up doing the program with. This program seems to focus on high school, which is interesting (and exciting).
May I recommend the interested reader to watch La Haine[0] ("hatred") by Mathieu Kassovitz. This movie really sets the mood, and things barely changed since '95.
To be fair, such "ghetto" (la cité) people† mostly don't speak "verlan"[1] ("l'envers" with reversed phonetic syllables) anymore, but both the people and slang is usually referred to as "wesh"[2], from an arabic informal salute interjection. It's mainly poorly syntactically and grammatically worded French combined with limited vocabulary and heavy hand gestures and exaggerated arabic accent borrowings (e.g Rs are more pronounced) with various word borrowings from English or Arab.
Interestingly enough, I watched it recently in close proximity with The Wire[3], which provided great contrast yet striking similarities, and brings an interesting light into how we used to consider surveillance. In that regard, things have changed a lot. An awful lot, and certainly not for the better.
† It should be noted that many people and families that live there have adequate education levels and just live there because the rent is cheap and they can't afford anything else.
[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan
[2]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wesh
[3]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/
Agreed.
The author also seems to assume that everyone reads like he does, pausing to think about each word, "walking through another's thoughts." This is something I've given a bit of thought to recently, interestingly triggered by an episode of King of the Hill. I don't read in this manner and never really have.
I read fiction for the story. I want to know what happens next. I don't linger on a sentence trying to decipher the subtext. It was a great struggle for me to learn to read in that manner for English courses, and I never really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile today there are great TV shows with interesting things to say. The Wire, The Sopranos, and Black Mirror all have gotten me thinking, trying to see from another perspective much more easily than any book ever has.
I believe that our brains don't all work the same way. What the author gets out of reading, I get out of TV and movies and cannot get naturally out of books.
I've enjoyed my fair share of anime, and there are some criminally underrated TV series and movies that should be mandatory viewing for American audiences.
That being said, once the new car smell wore off, I saw that Japanese animation has its highs and lows, just like American productions. Many shows suffer from the same horrible cliches and stale, one-dimensional characters that appear to be copy-pasted from story to story, and eventually you start to notice the same formulas behind some of those intricate plots.
Ultimately, I'm saying that one shouldn't confuse originality with unfamiliarity. As a Westerner, Japanese animation was unfamiliar and amazing. Once it became familiar, much of it became less than amazing, but the good stuff was still just as good.
One final thought is to point out the obvious target audience age difference. Probably due in large part to Disney's influence, Westerners have long associated animation with children, and this makes it an apples-oranges debate. If you challenge me to find an American cartoon with as much depth as Cowboy Bebop, I probably can't. On the flip side, you probably can't find a live-action Japanese show with as much depth as The Wire.
No doubt, though there's also a fair degree of hubris in that statement. HBO is already going strong from a 15-year streak of unprecedented critical success, having birthed genuine cultural touchstones such as The Sopranos and The Wire.
Netflix is making an incredible effort to catch up: They're giving great creative talent a lot of creative freedom, and they've certainly put out some fine prestige content in their first three years, but even House of Cards isn't really batting at the same level as HBO's landmark achievements.
I think when Hastings says "I predict HBO will do the best creative work of their lives in the next 10 years," there's a tiny bit of projection there – he knows HBO will have to continue to put out landmark content because sooner or later, Netflix will indeed have its own, bona-fide Sopranos.
As a fan of long-form episodic cinema, no other rivalry could make me more excited.
> Entertainment, in such a busy world, should be available at the leisure of the viewer, not some game rigged to keep interest over a time.
Well, it can't be. It has to be made first. No matter what, there will always be some kind of a delay in when you can watch the next X of Y, simply because we haven't invented time travel yet.
And I absolutely agree that the broadcast model -- where you see the thing only if you're at your TV at the right time -- is a thing of the past, but there's no reason that means serialization (which is what I think you mean by linear) should go away.
> I think because of binging, better quality content is being created that is more complete and movie like.
I won't argue, by any stretch, that scripted serialized storytelling (non-film) hasn't gotten markedly better over the last few years, but this kicked off long before Netflix dumped an entire season of HoC into your lap and can largely be credited to the shows that really raised the bar, like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. All of those were serialized. Netflix is a johnny come lately to this trend.
And there is actually value in having time to digest what you just watched. You're more likely to think critically about it and less likely to just swallow it as some giant mass of stuff. The social aspect of being in sync with other people -- even people you just met -- can mean finding new ways to think about the story that you didn't have before.
All the netflix model does is make it so our episodes of TV are impossibly long, and their impact on popular culture much much less. People absolutely talk more about shows they're actively watching during a season.
nah, that's from season 1 of the Wire
I agree. I've watched a bunch of 4:3 aspect stuff over the holidays on my 40" HD telly (old war movies, The Invaders etc). Once you settle into a film/programme you barely notice those black bars down the sides of the screen.
In fact I remember watching The Wire on the same TV on DVD back around 2007'ish and hadn't noticed it wasn't widescreen/HD.
ps: "couldn't care less" ;)
I watched The Wire about 3 years ago and I nearly stopped after the first few episodes because it did look 'cheap' or 'old' to me. I'm glad I persisted, it really is brilliant. Definitely watch it in HD if you can.
> It vexes them in the same way that many with color television sets were long ago bothered by the anachronism of black-and-white films, even carefully conceived black-and-white films.
Is he obliquely saying that the 16:9 version of the wire is going to be like colorized black and white films?
I binge listened to Serial the same way I binge-watched The Wire and Breaking Bad. But I don't watch TV shows on a consistent basis. I rarely watch shows even by download. This might not be an important factor, but identifying non-traditional consumers being attracted to the content, consuming it and moving on might be a useful cohort or metric.
Second, I'd be cautious to say the format is the reason why it's popular. Such as saying that the TV-show like structure, and made it easy to consume, are the reason for binging. It is certainly why it is popular - for a podcast - but I doubt it's why it's popular in general. Content is king.
Not being a typical TV-show fan I only consume TV/podcasts that I hear (and turn out to be) exceptionally good from friends and reviews. Although I do listen to podcasts while I work (on a day to day basis).
Regarding the question of binging, well I think it could easily be 90% about quality of content. Quality such as Serial and The Wire are rare. So given the opportunity and access to all the media at once (thx to the internet) nothing stops us from consuming it all at once.
Anyone who wants to repeat this model, more quality content please. Which means content creators should focus most on good storytelling.. and less about the format and delivery. Hollywood should take note of this since they also seem to be obsessed with format over good storytelling. They seem to think CGI is an adequate replacement for good characters and drama.
For Prime members I think it makes sense. I have a Chromecast, and use it regularly - mainly youtube and MLS games. I don't think I've ever bought a movie from the Play Store and casted it. I would like to cast 'The Wire' and with the new Fire Stick, I can do that.
The storyline involving the young, ambitious, and I'd say mostly 'well-intentioned' politician Tommy Carcetti in season 3 of The Wire gives an interesting insight in how difficult it (probably) is to join the government apparatus without turning into the thing you meant to fight.
Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues.
While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me.
They have their moments of rogue colleagues or corrupt departments, but for the most part, what I see is a small team backed up by a larger institution fighting Evil (criminals, terrorists, etc).
I'm talking about the mass market, mind you, not The Wire but NCIS, CSI, Law & Order, Hawai Five-o, Criminal Minds and all that crap.
And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass trying to kill you.
Which movies? I had to admit I haven't watched recent zombie flicks, but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.
Actually, nowhere near "everyone working for Big Pharma" needs to be a sociopath for the industry to act sociopathically. In fact, it can happen with as few as one or even zero sociopaths, since the organization has properties of its own independent of the constituent humans. My favorite exploration of this idea is the TV show "The Wire."
People who don't want to get caught doing something change their communication behaviour all the time. If anybody is interested in that kind of stuff I'd recommend watching the surprisingly good TV show "The Wire".
Even if the press would loudly be agreeing over the "fact" that "SNOWDEN PUT US ALL IN DANGER" it would be an instructive lesson in terms of freedom having value by it having a price.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
-- Litany against fear by the Bene Gesserit (Frank Herbert's Dune)
Journo here. Very, very true. PR runs most of the stories you see. They don't usually run the hard news, like disasters and such, but they often glom onto those things so after a day or two, it's hard to tell who's actually reporting, and who's just regurgitating, and who's being spoon fed bullshit.
We could debate the many reasons for this fact, but suffice to say that there is A: a lot of money riding on getting such stories printed, and B: not enough time in the day or money to pay journalists to do the real work.
This plays out in a couple ways. The most common form is where the PR firm is also representing a company that advertises in the outlet. The New York Times writing about suits was probably printed on a page next to an ad for Macy's. The editorial guys are not complicit, but it's become common for sales to make "intros" to editors at parties and such. It's gross, but common.
Another way it plays out is that we get some amazing, long article with in-depth journalism that's just the best thing you've ever read. Then no one reads it because it's really long and doesn't have pretty pictures, so compared to the story linked next to it on the front page, it's basically a one or two day blip in the system, then it's forgotten. Meanwhile, that other story with a title like "Docker will revolutionize datacenters," or "Google Glass User Assaulted," are getting the same number of hits, and they took about 10 seconds to write, so as a journalist, it can be a bit frustrating to be beholden to "hits," rather than to "quality."
Which, frankly, is what most journos are dealing with. Most outlets want quantity over quality. That means the writers tend not to understand what they're writing about, but rather, they're just flying over and giving a scouting report in a vain attempt to be first.
The Wire got this soooo right in season 5. Beat reporters need to cover their beats. The smaller the beat, the better they should be able to cover it. If you have one reporter on programming only, you can really get the pulse of the industry, rather than just having your tech reporter check in every 3 months.
Journalism remains broken, with many examples of great work being ignored in favor of "10 reasons Beiber is made of plastic, and what types of plastic those would be if he were made of them," stuff. How are we going to write about people places and events when those people places and events are writing about themselves for free.
I didn't make it past the first episode because I thought the first episode was one of the cheesiest ridiculous plots with the most comical over the top stereotypical acting I've ever seen. There are very few shows that I have been excited to start yet couldn't make it past one episode, but The Wire is one of them.
As soon as I run out of television shows that don't have horrible first episodes, I'll give The Wire another chance.
Why does "character driven" have to imply "starts slow"?
Maybe we have different ideas of what that phrase mean, but for example, I'd say that Firefly was "character driven" and yet was able to hook me (and lots of other people) within about ten minutes.
Anyway, the discussion here isn't so much about why people like or dislike The Wire, but more of a meta-discussion about how you can determine whether a show is worth watching, and how much of something you have to see before you're allowed to say you didn't like it. dublinben seems to imply that you can't declare dislike unless you've literally watched the entire thing from beginning to end. The question is then raised as to why you'd spend that much time watching a series if you didn't like what you saw of it to start with, and responses which talk about how great The Wire is once you put a lot of time into it are then entirely missing the point.
Because The Wire is not about instant gratification. It's layers on layers that pay off in multiples by the time you're into the later seasons. Even season two, by far the weakest season, is a total treat the second time you watch it and know what you're looking for.
As the old adage goes...there are two types of people in the world: those who think The Wire is the greatest TV show ever made and those who have never seen The Wire.
It is available only now, I think. The wire was pay per episode a month back (even for me, a prime user).
This is a nice take on the reality of the middle to upper middle class drug economy.
It's not all episodes of the Wire. If you're picking up ecstasy or high-grade cannabis, chances are you're doing it like this.
I have to admit that I miss MDMA. I haven't touched the stuff in over 10 years, but it was awesome to use once a year or so. I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that I overcame some issues with trusting people and forming human connections as an accidental side effect of wanting to have a good time.
This is great!
Here's a few interesting ones I've come across:
* The Wire (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0306414)
Known for being a slow starting show, this is visible with the season trend lines.
* The Shield (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0286486)
Season 4 is such a massive outlier.
* Seinfeld (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0098904)
Held very steady until the last season.
Inertia. It seems fairly established that privatized prisons pour lobbying money into political pockets to push for arbitrarily harsher sentencing. You can't just reverse this or you are painted as "soft on crime". Even when the actual social impact of these policies are tremendously negative and only benefit a small number of private investors.
I thought The Wire's "Hamsterdam" episode was a great parable on what would happen in America if an influential politician fought inertia and tried to implement socially responsible drug policies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsterdam
That's /The/ Bunk, thank you very much, :p.
As for not everyone looking at series like the Wire the same way, that's just natural. I'm sure a lot of people think Papers, Please is a shit game too. Can't argue with taste, can't steer people's priorities when it comes to TV shows either. The Wire for example needs a lot of attention and concentration to watch; a lot of people have some TV show on in the background, and only pay attention when something (or someone) draws attention to them.
This is the first that comes to mind:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/the-game-never-ends-david-simon-on-wearying-wire-love-and-the-surprising-usefulness-of-twitter/?comments#permid=2
> But actually, the comments I made that seem to critique viewers who found The Wire late were not so intended. I thought, when I made that remark, that I was speaking to the reporter not about viewers in general, but specifically about folks pursuing the recent bracket-tourneys about best characters, shows, scenes, etc.
It was to that silliness -- and nothing more -- that I tried to say simply this: The folk sponsoring such belated silliness were not there when the show aired. Now, years removed, they parse it piecemeal and to meaningless effect. And rarely in the debate of Omar v. Stringer or Season Two vs. Four does anyone argue, say, the drug war, or the role of public education or the vagaries of market capitalism. That's the wearying part for me.
That people find the show when they do, or that people like or dislike what they will -- who can take offense at that? But is it okay to admit the Omar-is-so-cool bracket tourneys don't interest people who made the show? That debate about what we got right or wrong about urban America would be, to us, more purposeful and validating?
Apparently, no such context conveyed, either through my fault or in the edit of the Q&A, or both. Sorry if anyone thinks I was actually complaining about people liking The Wire, or when they got there. I wasn't. My critique went to how certain media folk assess the story, and how empty that stuff seems to our real purpose.
I agree with David Simon...because every real fan knows that Bunk is the real star ;)
To keep your users engaged, search results need to show up instantly and be relevant to them, even when they do typos.
To try this out, I went to the demo page for searching TV episodes (http://www.algolia.com/demo) and searched for "The Wire Season 2". Here are the four results given, with the highlighted portions bracketed:
[The Wire] Gag Reel [Season 2]
[The] Simple Life [Season 2] - Special - The Stuff We [Were]n't Allowed To Show You
[The] Farmer Wants a [Wife] (Australia) [Season] 6, Episode [2]
[The] Cosby Show [Season 2] DVD Extra: New Interview with [Dire]ctor Jay Sandrich
Rather than seeking "engagement", I'd put more emphasis on having high quality search results. Having 3 of the 4 results ignore the properly typed title of the show is a terrible interface. Correcting "Wire" to match "Director" is absurd.
The sad part is that these results might make you think that the episodes for season 2 of the "The Wire" aren't in the database, but they are. But they are, just not indexed in a way that they are found using the exact phrase "Season 2".
Trying to be more constructive, there is a typo in the first sentence of your Intro, where the name of your company is spelled wrong. Also, "Real-Time Search" usually means search against a database that is being constantly updated. Anyway, I need to get back to screaming at the kids on my lawn.
It's like the episode of The Wire where Herc and Carver plant a remote microphone inside a tennis ball to listen in on some drug dealers and attribute their evidence to a non-existent confidential informant named 'Fuzzy Dunlop'. They need to invent a CI because they hadn't previously convinced a court of the need to surveil those persons and so they had nothing they could use in a trial. I'm not a lawyer so I can't say if the legal issues depicted were depicted accurately, but I recommend the show to anyone interested in the topic of surveillance for the purposes of law enforcement (as opposed to intelligence gathering) and how things can potentially go wrong despite their good intentions.
I have to admit that I think I understand where this idea comes from. I watched The Wire a while back. In the series, the ability to tap phone lines is vital to uncovering the criminal activities they seek to end. So vital, in fact, that they named the whole show after it. It proved to be an important tool.
The problem is that it is fiction, so I don't worry all that much about privacy of characters, because they don't exist. It is also absolute, in terms of us knowing who the bad guys are, and why. So while it might be a realistic enough view on events that happen in real life, it's still bound by it being a TV show and therefor I'm not too sure if we could ever use it to illustrate, let alone prove anything this important (our privacy).
I should hope that the prime minister of the UK makes this distinction, too, before basing any actual decision on it.
Whenever I watch a movie or TV show more than a decade old, I can't help but think: that would never happen now, they'd be too busy tweeting/facebooking/instagramming it
Like, "Hamsterdam" in "The Wire"...as if a drug free zone could last two minutes before someone uploaded footage to YouTube and Buzzfeed got a hold of it.
Much of this is true, but I think it's important not to look at the differences just through a lens of production values. Even worse to equation production values with merit or quality of the end product.
There have been several low budget films and tv shows that have become highly successful and well regarded, the same is and will be true in the online realm. Look at Mad Max, which was made for around a third of a million dollars, Primer, or Napoleon Dynamite.
But also it's not just production value or even quality but fundamental differences in character. TV was a different sort of beast than film, and even over the last decade commercial TV has changed a lot. Look at all of the independent content that sprang up on non-network TV channels, especially from HBO. A show like The Wire, or even more so The Corner, was very unlikely to ever be made within the confines of traditional network TV. TV has a different sort of character than film in terms of the sorts of productions that are suited for TV, and online video is different as well, but we haven't seen all of the ways that's so.
One example I'd highlight is the Lizzie Bennet diaries, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in vlog form of over 100 "episodes" of typical youtube length (~3-5 minutes).
Another example would be Periodic Videos (and related projects). These are educational videos about chemistry but because they don't have the length limits or requirements of traditional TV they can be focused on a single subject without being forced to add in unrelated filler.
Or, there's Lindybeige, who's likes to talk about medieval, classical, and bronze age technology and weapons. It's just a guy expressing his opinions and trying to back them up with experience or logic but it's frequently just as informative and interesting as watching a typical historical tv show.
If this has not been posted before, its good to see that all the worries about the tor protocol can be laid to rest.
They did not identify the server by some advanced technical hacks against tor. They used simple basic police methods and arrested an administrator with the use of an undercover agent posing as a drug seller. The administrator purchased a kilo of cocaine, and by doing so, gave his home address to the undercover agent. After interrogation, they gained user credentials that even included DPR's private messages.
This could have easily been a episode script for the wire.
Nate Silver wouldn't have a job without advertisement. Neither would Glenn Greenwald, Walter Cronchite, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings.
TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and M.A.S.H. would not exist without ads.
Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Peyton Manning, Michael Phelps, Michael Jordan, Michael Tyson, Tiger Woods, and Larry Byrd would not have done the things they did without ads - no one would have paid them to.
Ads pay for people who are good at what they do to do what they're good at what they do as a means to pay for the other things they have to do. You couldn't possibly be more wrong about advertisements - without ads, there would be no US as you know it today.
This looks like an awesome service. And the image on the site reminds me of Season 2 of The Wire - even better!
Wanted to recommend this as well. Really interesting documentary, it features (among others) David Simon, creator of The Wire.
Here's a quick review from the Guardian to get you a taste: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryCfjX7DRqM
By what measure?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index
Also, a single number will be misleading. France has fewer immigrants and thus a different cultural structure. It also has very different neighbors and trade partners.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-born_population
"I think you need a lot of context to seriously examine anything." -- The Wire, Season 5
Reminds me of The Wire episode "The Pager" (Season 1, Episode 5) where the dealers were using a code to send numbers to pagers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQBlq45c1T4 (clip shows the reveal of how the code works)
Could you prepay your attorney(s) / legal team in the form of retainers like they (seem to) do in the television show "The Wire"?
The cost of any future trial could be anticipated ahead of time and paid upfront by the perpetrating party. Right?
That way there is no burden on the accused, to prove how the cost of the trial will be borne. Right?
The state (DA) must know that there is certainly no way "Stringer Bell" or "Avon Barksdale" can afford a high priced lawyer (Maurice Levy) from the proceeds of a legitimate yet small-time printing business - an obvious front operation for their drug dealing syndicate, which constituted the lion-share of their earnings.
Right?
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stringer_Bell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_Barksdale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Levy_(The_Wire)
Well, what about fun? Both for games and television I'd argue that they're fine in moderation, and that it depends on what particular game or film/show.
The Wire? Awesome and very educational. Planescape Torment (or other RPG's)? Better, in some ways, than a great book.
Also, chess is a game too, so really just a subset of 'games'. I don't really see what you're trying to point out with that comparison.
> as he has seen firsthand the effect of the War of Drugs on minorities through his work on The Wire
Or rather through his 16 years as journalist on the police beat at the Baltimore Sun, from which he got enough material to write 3 books and 3 TV series, including The Wire.
It's really weird how TV just outshines everything else as soon as it gets in the picture. Simon will forever be "the guy who wrote The Wire", like he was a barista in Hollywood who just sat down at the kitchen table one day and made up all of it in his head and then proceeded to film it for TV.
(And no, I don't agree with him on the subject: the fact that evils come in different forms and shapes doesn't mean we should ignore one or the other.)
> Most of the crime movies I like are based on real events.
Tell you what. Provide some examples so that I can actually work through one and explain how it could have been adequately feminist without detracting from your entertainment. It would be helpful if it has a Wikipedia article detailing the original real life inspiration, since I don't know anything about this subject.
> Do you really suggest that authors should be obliged to cast at least 50% of roles as females even when it does not reflect the reality being portrayed?
Nope. As long as any females present in the movie are portrayed with equal realism, it's fine. This is virtually never the case. I recently read a 2009 feminist critique of The Wire which noted that despite Snoop and Kima, females were depicted fairly poorly overall. I love The Wire. But they were right.
One of the biggest hurdles with feminism in entertainment is that the problem isn't with particular movies. It's that the crushingly overwhelming majority of the movies are sexist. So you find that no one is willing to be the first person to decide to not be sexist, because you're breaking the mold. It wouldn't be terrible if only, say, 20% of movies were sexist. But the percentage is closer to 90, 95.
Just like video games are only for boys, so of course they're all male fantasies. Or comic books are only for boys, so of course they're all male fantasies.
'COULD' is a complicated concept. It's something I struggle with too, when I watch movies like 'City of God', where mostly I ask myself 'why the hell don't these kids leave the city. or the country.'
Or The Wire where a kid who 'got out' decides to come back.
There are many factors that play a role in the options we have, and the strongest factors have nothing to do with what's objectively best.
Psychologically speaking, it's a bit dangerous (and too easy) to say that poor people should just stop living their poor lifestyles and leave their poor friends and poor family for a world totally unknown to them. This is also true for addicts, or homeless people. I've come to know quite a few of both, and if anything I've started to respect the difficulty of their situation.
Culture war plus culture of entertainment.
I note the above digression in this thread -- which incidentally is higher upvoted than the present thread -- wherein people marvel at how similar the recent abuses are to the plot of the TV show "The Wire".
Tune in next week! Until then, tune out.
Watch The Wire. Specifically, Season 5.
After hearing all of this stuff, I feel like the television show The Wire was either way ahead of its time or had really great law enforcement consultants. I'm leaning toward the latter.
I'm re-watching The Wire at the moment, which I'm enjoying greatly, and one of the best things about it is watching the lengths that the characters go to in order to avoid being personally linked with criminal operations under their control. They benefit when the organization benefits, but aim to avoid the downsides when their staff's activities are exposed.
As long as there are areas with very high reward (investment banking, drug dealing, human trafficking, startups), and enterprising individuals with the connections to organize them (either through experience and leadership progression, or by using opportunities to undermine former leaders / acquire resources), people will rise to these opportunities.
Once an operation reaches a certain size however, many leaders become disconnected - intentionally or otherwise - from the day-to-day business of their organization.
Given the typical attitudes on HN, I'd expect that most founders here would be genuinely mortified to find out if their software had caused real-life problems - most would take a lot of care to ensure good user experience and correct results; these make good business sense too. However I think many would eventually aim to become distanced from the business too - the dream of reliable passive income.
Meanwhile, we imagine - and it's not hard to imagine - that many bank executives, criminal leaders, and others - actively enjoy their life in distance and immunity while feeling little remorse for the damage they do, and certainly not taking any intrinsic risk for it.
We expect that the rule of law will deal with these problems when they occur - that's what optimistic films and positive fiction tell us - but the reality is that a good-enough combination of wealth, influence, leverage over others, and wits can let people stay at arms-length from (but in control of) nefarious affairs even if they are aware that they are causing harm.
In some ways I think this expresses itself even in the trend for honest businesses to avoid liability where possible -- if we take liability for what we do, we also have to do the best we can and take genuine care of our customers.
Somehow a fear of litigation, genuine exploitation of litigation (c.f. ambulance-chasers), and fear of decreased business efficiency have reached the level where companies do prefer to distance themselves. Often it is via lacklustre or even laughable attempts, such as using oft-ignored in-store signage, disclaimers, or automated customer interactions.
Retreating from each other for fear of risk isn't healthy as a general trend, and neither is our inability to reach and re-integrate those who expressly intend to maintain their distance to avoid risk to themselves.
Netflix has some of the best recommendation algorithms, but what do you want to watch right now?
We built Televisor to help you discover new shows based on an existing show you like.
E.g. find me something to watch like The Wire!
Tech: using an item-to-item collaborative filtering approach, whereas most sites like netflix use a user-to-user approach.
Two advantages of item-to-item are that it can start making recommendations right away without you having to input a lot of ratings, and it enables us to give focused recommendations. You might well like Downton Abbey, but perhaps you don't care to watch something like that right now?
In your iTunes model for AMC, producing high-quality shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men suddenly takes on movie-like risk.
Undoubtedly. But sports are rarely going to be purchased after their live broadcast date, wheras high quality dramas will have a huge longtail of purchases- I just started watching The Wire, for example.
I think the reason that anyone has a bee in their bonnet about sports is that it commands far more money than other channels do. We are all subsidising sports fans far more than most other categories.
David Simon and Ed Burns wrote the following passage for the TV show, "The Wire" spoken by Bunny Colvin:
<<<< I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon the neighborhood that you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory. >>>>
This was written in 2004. With the passage of time, it seems more and more prescient.
If the citizens of the US lose jobs, income, heck, blockbuster movies because the international market dries up, they will change the way they act.
You can't guess how, unfortunately. The largest response will be anger at the rest of the world, which could lead to a Weimar Republic situation.
I think that's a real danger. From my perspective, most everything in the US is kinda right of center, but the last thing I would want to contribute anything to is to empower the hard right elements in it.
Collective punishment just doesn't sit right with me.. I think it tends to hit the wrong people and leave the intended targets mostly unaffected. I mean, US citizens who travel, to see the world and learn about it, and meet people and learn about them, are exactly the ones that should be welcomed and encouraged, no? And if the US economy takes a hit across the board of the high-tech sector, it would also mostly hurt the "small fish", I'm sure. Whatever would make Facebook or Google loose even 1% would also completely shutter a lot of mom and pop shops. (not that people working at Facebook and Google wouldn't also loose jobs, and it would NOT be the people responsible for anything Google or Facebook got punished for)
Not that I don't find your attidude impressive, or that you don't have a point. If more would feel so directly responsible for what is done in their name, we wouldn't be here talking about this. So ignore what I say when it comes to your attitude, I just want to explain why I won't be part of putting all Americans into one bag and hitting it.
If the rest of the world starts to punish anything American, starts judging people and companies by region code instead of by what they're doing or saying, then it's just "they hate us for being American" for a lot of people, and downhill from there. We've been there quite recently.. as someone who did a lot of stupid battle with Bush followers, that stuff is burned into my retina forever.
Generally speaking, you guys have people in your country you could use help with, or at least moral support for, instead of being shunned for them. This can be said about any country, but also about the US. So have a nice 4th of July, and enjoy it.
There is this line from "The Wire" that the character played by Steve Earle says to the heroin junkie: "Sorry Bubs... shame ain't worth as much as you think. Let it go." And he's talking about personal shame, not even on behalf of others. If you're embarrassed, use that, and shout from the rooftops; but don't let it actually get inside you. The ones who should be embarrassed aren't, yet the ones who should keep their chins up are feeling down? Nah!
I just read his recap, which seems to mirror season 1 of "The Wire" fairly closely. What I remember distinctly from that season (which I've seen in total at least three times) is the great degree of difficulty they had in obtaining the warrants, in meeting the burden of proof, and in convincing a judge that the burden was met to a high enough level to allow the kind of carte blanche access to such a broad tap.
Further, they were constantly in fear of running into the expiration date, and the battle was waged on whether they could get data of enough substance before the tap's expiry that they would be able to extend it.
The problem in reconciling the two situations is that in the Baltimore case, assuming the show faithfully retold that portion, it was hard, but in the case of the NSA, their approvals come from the FISC, which numerically is reduced down to a rubber stamp agency. Since their inception in 1979, up to 2012 or so, they have approved over 30,000 requests, and rejected only 11. Further, it seems that they're somewhat unique in a warrant-issuing agency in that they've provided assistance on those 11 such that requests were amended, reissued, and in many cases, granted. So of those 11 denials, I am led to believe that the majority of those proved to be slightly delayed approvals in reality.
Beyond that, I think that Mr. Simon overlooks the capacity of metadata at that scale, and how effective it could be in painting a picture in a way that smaller scale, Baltimore-wide data could never do. If, for example, the British had been able to capture 'only the metadata' of our founding father's meetings in Philadelphia, it wouldn't have taken much analysis at all to have proven what was happening (famous statesmen gathering in Philadelphia court house for overnight meetings, etc.) Just knowing the attendee list alone would have likely been enough to condemn them all for treason or assassination, and the United States might never have existed.
I don't know if David Simon's (creator of "The Wire" and "Treme") defense of the Verizon phone records request ever made it onto HN's page:
Here it is, if you hadn't seen it: http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/
Apparently it was so controversial that his site crashed from the traffic, and he had to tell everyone to chill out: http://davidsimon.com/nsa-and-fisa-commentary-calling-it/
Anyway, why I thought of that in relation to the OP was, that I think some defenders of the NSA and general government surveillance policies are just unaware of how technology can fundamentally change things...As Google leaders have been known to say, "Speed is a feature"...and so it's not the finding of information that makes the establishment of Google time in human civilization, but how fast Google allows us to do it.
So that said, Simon is one of the journalists I have the absolute highest regard for...I'll be one of the many who think "The Wire" is the best TV drama ever, both for its artistic take and for its illustration of how institutions -- the police, the schools, the drug trade -- corrupt even the best of individuals. "The Wire" is heavily based off of the year that Simon embedded himself in the Baltimore homicide department...the book (which spawned a network TV show) is the best book about the practice of journalism I've ever read. After a year following the detectives, you'd think Simon would be pretty much in cahoots with the police...but he followed up "Homicide" with "The Corner", in which he spent a year embedded with drug dealers and their customers...apparently most of the friendsships he made in the Baltimore Police department evaporated after he published a book bringing sympathy to Baltimore's downtrodden.
Anyway, I don't think Simon has a love for government or authority. But I do think he's a little naive when it comes to advances in technology and their consequences. When "The Wire" started, the police were focused mostly on tapping pay phones. By the time "The Wire" ended, the police were surprised at the advent of camera phones. So when Simon says he thinks the NSA and other law agencies won't abuse their wiretap authority, I believe him...because in much of his experience, the practical obstacles (such as, having to have an officer watch a payphone all day) made it basically impossible for blanket surveillance.
But technology is different...I think Simon's -- and others who I respect -- mistake is to think that the game is being played the same as it always is. It may be the case that the NSA is staffed with as people as good and conscientious as anywhere else...but it's naive to think (as was the primary lesson in "The Wire") that the power they have will lead them astray...and to those of us affected by it, it makes no difference if the violations were intentional or accidental.
Anyway, back to Paul Revere and the OP...I think it's a great example. But of course, what makes that educational scenario feasible is technology and the ability to record information (metadata or whatever you want to call it) in an organized way.
Frankly, I kind of thought anyone who read 1984 would understand how technology changes everything. But yeah, I do think there are some well-meaning people don't grasp the technology, and if they did, they'd have a different opinion about the dangers of unchecked surveillance.
* edit: misspelled conscientious as 'contentious'
* edit: as an example of how much Simon continues to challenge the police as a citizen, here's an essay he wrote after the success of the Wire, in which he tried, as a citizen, to get the basic details of a cop-involved shooting, something that has always been public record. He eventually succeeded, and the revelations about the officer involved ended up jeopardizing the prosecution: http://davidsimon.com/in-baltimore-no-one-left-to-press-the-police/
But as you can see if you read the piece, Simon is not to thrilled with how the Internet has displaced newspaper journalism
"It's not a war on drugs, don't ever think it's a war on drugs. It's a war on the blacks, it started as a war on the blacks," says Ed Burns, the co-creator of the television show The Wire. "It's now spread [to] the Hispanics and poor whites, but initially it was a war on blacks. And it was designed, basically, to take that energy that was coming out of the civil rights movement and destroy it."
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryus2012/2012/08/2012823103039675592.html
I know it's only movies and TV but these were still interesting to watch on all things data retention and surveillance state and are related to the topic:
The Listening - 2006 (specifically on Echelon) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427461/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlVK906Xzr8
The Conversation (1974) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrhRsZ56b4g
The Lives of Others (2006) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
Spying on the Home Front (PBS, 2007) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/
The Enemy Within (PBS, 2006) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/
The Wire, Season 1 (HBO, 2002) Brazil (1985) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
I was in a bank yesterday and there were all these animals in cages shuffling paper around, worried that their customers would yell at them if they were off by a single digit, (because doing so would be tantamount to robbing the customer of their hard work) and it struck me that all that the shuffling accomplishes is moving tokens of value around, mere accounting entries.
And it doesn't even do that well! It's breathtakingly inefficient.
For instance, one can't tell how many shoes are sold in a country.. that would require a totally different, feet-on-the-ground statistical survey, or an industry association (voluntary reporting). We can't tell who's doing what at all. We're like the suckers in The Wire Season 1 (which seems so quaint by today's standards) trying to reverse-engineer IRL networks.
The hacker solution would be so much more elegant, so much less messy (no meatspace!). It's like your example of hackers in dorms doing voip way before Skype. No self-respecting hacker could (even on the wildest bender) have come up with pushing pieces of paper around as value-tokens. What a hacker cooks up today is what the world will use in the next decade.
With bitcoin, unravelling a network is trivial. Bust one node (a snitch or an undercover sting op) and the rest unravel.
The combination of government and hackers sits somewhat oddly in my mind. So I shall refrain from pursuing that line of thought.
However, in this spirit of prognostication, I like possibility #4. But you understate the case. It's not about USD vs RMB, it's about fractional-banking vs fixed-quantity money.
If #4 is the case, some might argue that USG must have pre-mined a bunch of coins (and conversely, that if they didn't, #4 is not the right answer). This need not hold, of course. One can make some predictions if #4 is indeed the case: with bitcoin, taxation is easy and automatic. Smaller governments would result (State, Local & Federal), deficit spending would end, the free-market would still work, but command-and-control would be much easier.
edit: I see I'm largely of the same opinion as user guylhem.
The Wire? umm no need to turn to racist generalizations. Not really sure what a tv show about heroin trafficking has to do with this, but keep your stereotypes at bay.
And you didn't address any point other than the diction in my delivery, so way to stay relevant, with your ad hominem, non sequitur, fallacious remark.
For your info, I wasn't referring to the author with the interjection. Get some culture.
Watch The Wire, through at least Season 1. Those guys ain't dumb. Most of the AAVE speakers are villains, though.
I think "perverse incentives" covers it pretty well. Reporters who care more about truth than narrative are filtered out of most media outlets due to the basic economic forces involved. Season 5 of The Wire elucidates it better than I ever could (and of course, the series was crafted by a former journalist).
I've been haunted by moments in television as well, though.
The two final episodes of The Wire left me sleeplessly sitting in the garden, because of the events that transpired and the adrenaline involved.
The Body, one of the best Buffy episodes I can recall, left an impression on my young self that can still give me goosebumps when I think about it.
And the final episode of last season's Breaking Bad comes to mind, as well as the last episode so far.
I can't think of other occasions right away, but there are many more like it.
That said, on average books seem to have that effect more. Few things really topped how I felt after reading 'The Red Wedding' in A Song of Ice and Fire, for example. I think the main reason is that for television shows, the writers have to make many more concessions, because of producers, Nielsen ratings, and so on.
Only to a limited degree. Yes, there were soaps and other serials that had long-running narrative arcs, but not with the kind of sophistication contemporary writers are using.
Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels.
This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia.
What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.
Point of clarification: While many US television shows glamorize police work, "The Wire" is definitely not one of them.
"The Wire" shows a lot more of the police/political system trying to sweep things under the rug than anything else. There is even a large portion of one season dedicated to an officer falsifying evidence for his own personal obsession with a completely different case.
Season 2 of The Wire has to deal with the Docks. 3 and 5 deal with Politics
Watch The Wire. Especially Season 2, which is the weakest season of the five, but speaks most directly to your issue.
I realize this sounds flippant, but it's not.
I know there will be a lot of people feeling extremely vindicated in their suspicions that if HBO offered Game of Thrones for legal download they would rake the money in. Let's take a second to work through the counter-argument though.
Instead of asking why they don't cash in on the clear demand, why not ask yourself how HBO & Co would operate if they did sell shows by the episode and direct to consumers. If you're looking for a proxy, the outcome probably wouldn't be a million miles from the networks, where audience levels translate into ad revenue, which means shows live or die very quickly. Look at Fox's 2010 series Lone Star. Despite having the best-rated pilot of any of that season's debuts, it was cancelled after two low-rated episodes.
Have you ever asked yourself why HBO, Showtime and AMC have the track record they do in producing great TV of movie-rivalling production value and movie-topping narrative chops? The simple answer is that they run a subscription model and that gives you a lot of freedom. In the first instance, a significant part of HBO's subscriber base is there for boxing first and foremost: money in the bank for the programming arm. In the second instance, once you're paying for something monthly, you're actually quite unlikely to cancel it even if you don't extract the full value from your subscription (see cinema all-you-can-eat memberships). Above all, it allows you to operate from a stable base of yearly income and that completely flips the consideration of which programs stay and which programs go. It's simply a consideration of opportunity cost; is there a better series that could fill this slot?
The subscription model is precisely the reason that HBO is able to swing for the fences on things like Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, which are both enormously expensive undertakings. It's entirely because the shows are able to prove themselves over seasons, and not episodes, that subscription-driven channels are able to make them. And even then the judgment of whether to continue is usually based on creative satisfaction and not cold, hard audience figures - both the Wire and Treme kept their places on the roster despite comparatively lousy viewing figures.
The problem with a subscription model is that it has to be all or nothing. If you start giving people a way not to subscribe, they won't. They'll just pay to watch episodes as they become available. That's not even to get into the practicalities of carrier relations and all the added considerations that throws into the mix.
tl;dr: Game of Thrones might be a no-brainer for selling legal downloads, but things like Game of Thrones don't get made by companies that use that business model for very good reasons.
And The Wire ranks below The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in "Law" themed tv shows? huh?
I think there is a place for high frame-rate: stories that are aiming for fly-on-the-wall realism (I'm thinking particularly of The Wire, or Paranormal Activity). I could also see new film-making styles built around the tech. Unfortunately, epic fantasy is exactly the wrong type of film for the HFR effect.
In addition to looking lifeless and flat, everything seemed to move too quickly, and human movement looked cartoonishly fluid (curiously, CGI creatures looked more real, and people looked like CGI creatures). I found the scenes that looked best were the ones in slow-motion, and I can't help but feel the whole movie would have been improved through using effects to slow down everything.
Pretty great documentary called Page One on Netflix about the NYTimes that has some running commentary on modern journalism.
There's a clip with David Simon (The Wire creator, former editor of the Baltimore Sun) arguing with Ariana Huffington about the legitimacy of HuffPo's encroaching empire.
>watch a few episodes of CSI if you want to get a rough idea how it works.
Please don't watch CSI if you want to see how anything works. CSI is bullshit from top to bottom. If you want to see reality, watch "The Wire".
If you haven't seen the movie Traffic (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/), I highly recommend it. There's a scene where Michael Douglas' character, who plays the role of US Drug Czar, is in a room full of politicians and lobbyists. He is told by one of them that basically this is a war that will never be won nor end. The only success would be vaguely getting usage down. There will always be a demand that creates the supply.
edit: this scene from The Wire also has a great perspective on the war on drugs -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5za4VsskM
I am sure this is very irrelevant, but anybody else thinks season 5 of The Wire was that bad? I think it was outstanding.
The problems you describe are purely a result of editorial policies that can be changed. There is no natural law that dictates that access or narrative (editorialization) be a fundamental aspect of news publishing. Season 5 of "The Wire" goes into this with some detail.
I think of buying a videogame as most comparable to buying a season of a TV show in a DVD box set: both are ~10-20 hour experiences to have on your TV set at home. The price of a videogame is basically on par in that comparison:
Video game = $50 / 20 hours = $2.50/hour
A season of The Wire = $30 / 13 hours = $2.25/hour
I base it on the fact that I genuinely like bands as they are small, and then as they make their stuff more "accessible" after signing a big deal, in order to expand their user base, it loses a lot of appeal for me. I prefer music to be pure and not be changed in order to cater for people who aren't prepared to spend time enjoying it. Each to their own, and if you like mass-appeal stuff, but that's not for me. Similarly, TV shows. Stuff like The Wire, which doesn't patronise the viewer and expects you to pay enough attention to draw your own conclusions, I find much more satisfying than stuff that hands things to you on a plate.
Just because I'm that annoying guy who loves to reference it at every possible chance... Season 4 of The Wire. Teaching to tests is boring as shit for everyone.
This is illustrated at length in The Wire season 1.
You know the greatest lesson I learned from the tv show The Wire? When your brand lacks credibility you make a change to the brand.[1][2] Good move by Microsoft.
On other hand, I'm still trying to grok why Twitter changed it's logo recently[3]? Was something inherently being tarnished about the Twitter brand? As far as I know, the answer is NO.
I'm going to make a major assumption here, but I think it had to do with it being driven by a Creative Director and not by a Marketing (i.e. Business) person. The blog post and title at least reads that way.
[1]- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undertow_(The_Wire)#Barksdale_trade
[2]- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbbZc2pab9k
[3]- http://blog.twitter.com/2012/06/taking-flight-twitterbird.html
Breaking bad is great. However, The Wire is definitely the best TV show ever.
I wouldn't say The Wire is 'much better' but they are definitely 1,2 all time TV shows. Debatable which is first.
The best part about Breaking Bad is that each season just gets better and better. Season 4 was hands down the best single season of TV ever.
So yes, you should definitely try to get through season 2. You haven't even met Gus yet. I hate to use so much hyperbole in one post but he is the biggest badass in TV history. Far ahead of number 2: Marlo Stanfield.
As I say in another comment, it really picks up in season three. It goes from being a merely decent series to a mindblowingly well-made one that deserves a place alongside The Sopranos and The Wire. You may want to give it another shot.
Walt is portrayed as a good (if deeply flawed) guy whose path to crime corrupts his good character and has (despite his initially good intentions) unintended and violent consequences for the people around him. In the later seasons he starts making some morally pretty indefensible decisions.
If we've learned anything about how the writers' minds work, it's that they like having characters realize the long-ranging and tragic repercussions of their own selfish actions. So if anyone dies at the end, it won't be Walter, it will be his family, and it will be his own fault.
Personally I like Walt, for all his flaws. Watching the series certainly is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, but it's a really well done train wreck. Note that it really picks up (in my opinion) in season three -- it goes from being a merely decent series to a mindblowingly well-made one that deserves a place alongside The Sopranos and The Wire. You may want to give it another chance.
"Ever since the middle of season one where he was given the out (the rich couple offered to pay) I just couldn't stand him"
No offense, but I think you're largely missing the point of the show - this is about a man who never got to 'drive' in his life despite having tremendous promise early on. He didn't take the money because he didn't think he had a life to save and even if he did it would be more of the same... this was his chance to do something for once in his life.
Just like The Wire, there are no clear-cut good/bad guys. It's about choices made, having to live with the consequences of those choices, and exploring the resulting character transformations. Yes, the main character is moving closer to the dark, but he's believable as a person who could rise from a fairly ho-hum existence to becoming a drug lord. Of course it's going to be uncomfortable and grisly to watch due to the subject matter.
This is why I love the show. It isn't some silly two dimensional hollywood'ish heist thing where the good guys and the bad guys are clearly delineated. It actually has a soul.
The Wire is still down as my favorite show, but Breaking Bad is pretty close.
The great thing about Breaking Bad is it just keeps getting better and better. The plot and character development gets esp. intricate as season 3 unfolds, and is just nuts in season 4. Season 1 and 2 had quite a few incidences that I felt played more into shock value and were cartoonish... that vibe is pretty much lost where things stand now.
I'd say yes it is. I had some annoyance with the characters around season 2, but you do come to see this is intentional and not, what I first feared, was lazy writing. It gets better, and quite good.
EDIT: I agree, The Wire is better.
Obligatory reply about The Wire being much better...
I'm the only person I know that really dislikes Breaking Bad. I watched the first season in a single marathon session and loved it, but somehow everything fell apart in the second season. I've tried to get through the second season several times, but the plots keep getting dumber and dumber, in my opinion.
Is it worth powering through season two, or are season two style of plots consistent with the rest of the series?
Edit:
A minimal spoiler example of the type of writing that really got on my nerves: Walt sneaking out of a hospital and breaking into his own house in 2.3.
Thanks for pointing that out. As i was reading the article i was having flashbacks to Bunny Colvin attempting to 'socialize' his students in Season 4 of The Wire. It's reassuring to know that the study and science probably inspired the television show, and not the other way around.
In the tv show The Wire, third season, a Police Captain tried to 'legalise' drugs sale. He put all the dealers, the little soldiers, and said "If you deal in the streets, we will arrest you. If you deal in the free zone, you are free to go". At first, the dealers were very distrustful, but after some days, all the dealers were in the same place. And the addicteds learned that they could only buy drugs in that zone. They even have the cops in the place, to prevent any thing from happen.
The streets became a better place, no more criminals in the corners. No more shots and dead bodies in the communities. The kids were playing again in the streets. And the cops wouldn't have to arrest minors selling drugs, they were able to focus in the big fishes, the head of the operation. The problem is, after some time, the town hall and the police chief started to not believe in the crime rates the captain was giving to them. They were TOO DAMN LOW. They tough he was manipulating, faking or someway, not giving the actual rates. But they were true, he just couldn't say that he legalized the drugs. After some time, he had to tall, and of course he was fired.
I think the series made a great simulation of what it will happen that we had in our city an area were drugs selling were legal. Everyone in HN should watch the show.
PS. I'm sorry for typos and bad grammmar. Not native speaker. I'll get better.
It's hard to encapsulate the entirety of a TV show season in a comment, so I'm going to use a quotation instead. This is from The Wire, Season 4, Major Bunny Colvin:
"This drug thing, this ain't police work. No, it ain't. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun up on them corners and jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon the neighborhood that you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory."
The Wire has been acclaimed specifically for its close representation (still obviously dramatized) with the reality of Baltimore. If you haven't watched all five seasons, you should do so.
> Some may believe that the ethical choice is just to not watch that TV show.
Here's my dilemma: I don't own a TV, I can't be bothered to even try to download, let alone watch. I tried with The Wire, it became a suffering labor to t trough it, no matter how interesting. Mad Men? Good luck. I have no time.
Regarding #1, I've found that it's best not to usurp higher management or do anything that exposes questionable decision-making in front of their peers. Never do it in email chains or meetings.
Whenever I've had a situation like this I do it in strict confidence and don't put it in their face, almost always say to the effect "hey I think I found something, can we grab a room" and go straight to the whiteboard and begin drawing, and use language like "so check this out... I'm a bit worried about this, what do you think?" I let them arrive at the same conclusion I did, or at least start a healthy debate. The great thing about doing this is sometimes you are wrong, maybe not technically, but there are other considerations that went into the decision that you're not aware of.
Also I've learned to not overstep my own bounds, when I have issues with another dept I don't go rogue and knock heads, but go to my own supervisor and ask if they can talk to the sup in that dept and get back down to their respective staff. The only exception to this is for time critical issues, I'll send an email blast to all involved parties first, then walk around and talk to people - ask them if they have time in their schedule to look at something, if not who else they might be able to introduce me to, etc.
Basically everything I learned about dealing in a corporate environment was through making tons of my own mistakes and watching the tv show The Wire and following the "Chain of Command" and seeing quite a bit of Jimmy McNulty in myself :).
All this said, the biggest blowup I ever had was only a year ago, it cost me a relationship with a director a couple levels above me, and it was the result of actually doing something that probably saved the company a cost in the 6 figures for only 3 days of work... it was a combo message of "great job... and you made me look like a fool". I totally get it, I would feel the same way if I were him. But it was still the right thing to do, and sort of a signal that perhaps the corporate world is not for me - or at least that one particular environment. YMMV.
The thing that bothers me most about this is I credit HBO for leading the charge with innovative content that as a whole brought TV to a much higher level. They took big chances even when it wasn't profitable to do so.
I've had a serious love affair with the network beginning with Dream On, The Larry Sanders Show, then moving on to Oz (yeah it was a 'male' soap opera I guess :), Sopranos, 6 Feet Under, Deadwood - which I didn't particularly _love_, but highly respected, and most of all The Wire (best thing to ever grace the screen IMO - they lost $$ on it throughout its run)... and then I killed my cable sub and haven't seen anything of their's since.
Now Mad Men and Breaking Bad are my two favorite shows, they're both on AMC, and I can easily purchase each season on iTunes HD for just north of $30. Every episode is available hours after they originally air. I'd pay twice that much.
Of course, the problem is HBO is just too tightly coupled to big cable. They're one of the main attractions, and as such the kickbacks they get are tied to contracts that prevent them from wresting their content to any great degree. Until this model changes, their A content won't see the light of day, and more draconian measures are likely to be put in place to thwart piracy. It's not HBO itself per-see, but HBO as a proxy for big cable; as a defense mechanism to prop up a flailing business model.
The analogy between band and math is problematic. Band has various payoffs that math doesn't: getting attention from peers, the inherent joy in playing music, peer bonding via football games, band trips and whatnot. (Not that math doesn't have "inherent joy" -- it just seems more solitary, more cerebral, and less socially glorified than music.)
There's no doubt that our math education destroys curiousity, and if we could teach math in a non-utilitarian way, as a sort of artistic endeavor, that would be amazing, but... is it even possible? Has it ever been tried? Whenever I think about this, I think about season 4 of The Wire.
Even producers spend time consuming content. I'd expect that we all consume far more content than we produce. It's worth optimising that experience as well.
If nobody consumed these media, what would be the point of producing them?
I am more interested in what are you consuming - news.ycombinator.com or news.fox.com? "Twilight" movies or "The Wire" TV series?
Here's why HBO requires you to subscribe to their channel to watch Game of Thrones.
If you watch Game of Thrones, maybe you'll also watch Veep or Girls or Eastbound & Down or Life's Too Short. You might notice that HBO staggers their series so they overlap for roughly half their run. The Sopranos and The Wire never ran in lockstep, The Wire would start roughly halfway through The Sopranos run. They're trying to get you to continuously subscribe, rather than just subscribe for the 13 weeks Game of Thrones is on.
I know, you're too smart to fall for that, you're just gonna PVR Game of Thrones and stop recording exactly when the episode ends. You're never going to see anything except Game of Thrones no matter what HBO does. You, however, are still atypical. Maybe the day will come where HBO's trick doesn't work and their subscribers routinely cancel and resubscribe so it's most advantageous for them, but for now it works well enough that offering Game of Thrones a la carte is a money losing proposition for them. The sales they'll get from MG Siegler and yourself will not offset the subscribers they'll lose who would rather just pay for HBO continuously than go without Game of Thrones.
HBO (and other content producers) may be stubborn and short sighted, but they are not stupid. They've run the numbers. If you want to change their minds, you have to change the numbers and, regrettably, that means you have to boycott them completely. Pirating their content just signals it's valuable and HBO is right to keep availability costly (whether through direct pricing or obnoxious distribution terms).
It's funny that you mention "The Wire". Did you miss the episodes where a captain made a section of Baltimore a drug-free-for-all zone and crime dropped to almost nothing?
I also like how you judge people you don't know to be "worthless".
I'm sorry to hear what happened to your family, that's really awful. Still, I wonder what your reaction would have been if that "worthless thug" had been wearing a police uniform.
Yes.
And the interesting thing is, all of that violence is directly related to overly harsh laws relating to narcotics. The problem comes down to economics:
There is an immense demand for narcotics. Since narcotics are illegal, they are risky to trade, which pushes up prices. Through a combination of the preceding two points, trading in narcotics is extremely profitable. Since the different trade groups engaging in the trade of narcotics have no legal means through which they can resolve their differences, they will instead turn to violence.
The gang member's real offense is being born in a crappy part of town lacking in institutions and resources, and where engaging in the drug trade is a normative experience and one of the few sources of jobs. That at least The Wire really goes on about.
By eliminating mandatory sentencing, you will significantly reduce the amount of years people serve in prisons because the mandatory sentence lengths were established capriciously in an attempt to out grandstand political opponents (see http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/sentencing ).
The world isn't quite as black and white. Eliminate the War on Drugs and overnight all of these problems will disappear as the underlying incentives vanish.
Well in terms of economics what you're talking about is more specialization and niche audiences being served. HBO made itself into the network to watch smart television during the last decade. Right now that's less true as other networks figured out that people like smart things.
I'd say if you were not watching "The Wire" or "Six Feet Under" that you're missing out on something rather interesting. "The Wire" was unique partially because it was like a very long, very good movie in terms of quality and respect for the audience.
There's so much good television now that I don't have patience for the argument that TV is worthless. I don't turn on the television except to watch something specific but when I do I find the quality seems to get better year after year even with my favorite shows ending. More shows are willing to experiment and try to reach new audiences.
I won't speak to the shows on Discovery or whatever since they sound dumb to me but the shows with actual plot and characters are better than ever.
Watch The Wire. Most realistic portrayal of police work I've ever seen. Lots of watching suspects and gathering string, putting the pieces of the puzzle together slowly over a season of television, dealing with disfunctional organizations and a realistically low number of gunfights.
One of the best TV shows ever made IMO.
A recent personal anecdote:
I wanted to watch the first season of The Wire, but didn't want to leave the house. I logged on to Netflix, saw that DVDs were the only available format, and closed the tab. Next I went to Amazon. I searched, and saw that that the complete box set of DVDs was priced at roughly $115. It was also available for streaming, so I was in business. Wait a moment. The price for "buying" access to the digital version was comparable to that of the DVDs (~$96 for all five seasons streamed, vs. ~$115 for the DVDs). That seems expensive for something that may not work in five years, but I decided to be a good citizen and pay to watch the first episode. As a bonus, I wouldn't have to sit through FBI warnings, unskippable previews, or a DVD menu. After paying $2, I looked for a way to download the episode to my (Mac) computer so that I could watch it without intermittent buffering delays. My connection is slow sometimes, and I can delay gratification to wait for a whole episode to download. Small problem. There is no download link. I suspect that this is because the episode could not be properly restricted with DRM. Sigh. Frustrated, I decided to risk buffer issues, and started playing the episode. No problems for five minutes, then wham, the video player crashed the Flash browser plugin. That's ok, I can copy the URI, restart the browser, and get back to watching. After hitting play a second time, wham it crashed again. Oh well, maybe Amazon does not test for Chrome. Let's try from Safari. Same problem. At this point I have paid $2, but cannot watch the episode I "purchased." What option do I have left? A torrent file for the series would be a few clicks away, and almost guaranteed to play on my computer--without buffering, DRM, browser plugins, FBI warnings, DVD menus, or unskippable previews. Why am I paying again?
In the end, Amazon apologized for the technical problem and kindly refunded my $2. As a consumer, I am willing to pay for something that works and is as convenient as pirated content. The industry isn't listening.
Will consumers really hazard pirate websites, when they can pay a fair price to download a DRM-free file from a fast server? Some may, but many more will pay.
The message from studios has to be about trust. "We trust you as consumers. You can download DRM-free content from us at fair prices. You can trust that there won't be porno sidebar ads or phishing links. You can trust that we will have the fastest servers, offer the best quality content, and the most intuitive interface. We won't get in your way."
Part of the problem of piracy is due to the release schedules of hollywood content. Perhaps movies should be released concurrently in theaters and online. Why download a recent movie when it is available online, legally? Many people will still visit theaters for the experience, and due to the short-term availability. Those who watch at home will pay if the prices are fair.
Edit: I now realize that the particular content I was looking for is available via iTunes, for the same price per episode as Amazon. I don't associate iTunes with video. Not sure why that is, but perhaps it is because of the lesser inventory.
It's worth keeping in mind that The Wire is a product of HBO, and cable TV. They are now well established, but they were once upstarts in their own way.
HBO got its start showing rewarmed mainstream Hollywood movies, months or more after their theatrical releasee. This though was enough to make them one of the few bright spots on the vast wasteland of Gilligan's Island and Bewitched reruns that was cable TV. For that, cable operators were able to extract a premium. From there, they branched out into various bits of original programming.
Then came original programming like Oz, Sopranos, the Wire. This was TV that people regarded as art, and as art, superior to anything on network television and hollywood movies.
Other examples to consider, early Miramax and Merchant/Ivory.
In the risk of being down voted to hell, this whole thing seems completely misguided to me. I love the product that hollywood produces. I love great movies and great TV. I frankly think "The Wire" is the best example of story telling I know of. I can think of nothing that silicon valley has produced that even comes close. If Zynga disappeared tomorrow, I could care less, and Hollywood and Zynga are both selling entertainment. Zynga's entertainment value is less than worthless to me. I hope hollywood continues to be a massively successful industry in the hope that the next David Simon is created.
Firefly (as some-one mentioned underneath) are perfect examples of shows that would thrive under Netflix.
I have to disagree with this, Firefly is not the type of show Netflix should be focusing on. They need shows with low production costs with broad - lowest common denominator appeal. Expensive shows catering to a niche market (which they pretty much already have captured) is not what they're trying to do here.
There's a few ways they can go, sitcoms and short form comedies are going to be much more profitable for them at this point so Better off Ted is a much better fit.
Then there's the Showtime/HBO premium market (which folks are already paying for as a premium service). But even here I think they'd play it safe short term - more Sopranos and True Blood type mass appeal then Boardwalk Empire and The Wire (both are great, but much more focused market).
I like Chuck Klosterman's take on this show: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions
tl;dr: "Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn't seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" - his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television - because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most - the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who's no longer good."
I've only seen the first few episodes, but am hoping to find some time to go through it now. I get plenty of morality from shows like "Mad Men" and "The Wire" in which we feel conflicted because the characters we love are doing bad things (in fact you could say that this is the main theme of serious, dramatic TV shows now), but I think the appeal of "Breaking Bad" is watching a desperate man make the conscious decision to become "evil."
Yes, also The Wire, and The Corner, all quite excellent. But they are narratives, typically fictionalized. They are not non-fiction documentaries. They do not take on the issue head on, they do not discuss the statistics of the problem, etc. They come close, but a full head-on confrontation of the issue is still too taboo to be done by the mainstream press or entertainment industry.
They may spend less per child on education, but they probably spend more on social services.
Read the paragraph in the article that starts with "it's almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless."
Many American students face huge barriers to learning that originate outside of school. They are hungry, chronically ill, don't have a home, don't have a quiet space to study, don't have supportive parents, etc. No amount of school reform will fix those problems.
Check out season 4 of The Wire for a very grim account of a school in a very poor area.
My girlfriend and I went AppleTV + Netflix about a year ago, and we haven't missed cable at all (I don't watch sports). The Netflix catalog is sub-optimal and lacking some important content (HBO shows like The Wire, for example) but it's also great if you have certain niche interests and like to watch an entire TV series (Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the X-Files, for example. And now Star Trek!).
We also tend to spend less overall time watching TV. There's something about the ease and pull of flipping cable channels that keeps you watching, whereas with Netflix, you have to actively commit to another episode/movie. That requires a certain cognitive effort and in most cases, we'll find that after one or two 30 minute (well, more like 22 minute) episodes, we're done for the evening.
The show is really for people who have read the books. It is accurate to the first novel and even contains a significant amount of dialog from it, but it doesn't frame things as well as George Martin's writing can. I especially noticed this watching the show with my wife (who has not read the books) and having to continually explain things to her that were obviously lacking in the show. Many of the characters actions and some events only seem aligned with the characters if you understand them from the novels.
In short, it lacks the depth that the books provide. This is probably true of most adaptations, but because they appear to be keeping as closely to the book as possible; it is much more noticeable.
As an aside, the Wire is my all time favorite television show.
You ruined The Wire for me. I just started watching season 1.
>I would refuse to work anywhere that I was expected to stand aside and ignore fraud, or where I was punished for doing what everyone would agree is the right thing (...)
You don't always have that much choice, do you?
>I would rail against it every day and try to change the system by doing the right thing and calling out other faculty for not doing so, publicly.
Yeah.
You will not simply fail, you'll get screwed by the system at the first opportunity. If you really want to "buck the system", cool down and watch some episodes of "The Wire". This series portays exactly and reallisticaly the inner workings of corrupt institutions and what happens to "lone wolves" trying to beat or change the system (spoiler - they get screwed by superiors and peers alike and achieve absolutely nothing).
I'm not saying it's impossible to transform the system from within. But trying to do it single-handedly is fighting a losing battle that is doomed to alienate your coworkers.
I was hooked after the first ten minutes of the first episode. Also, best opening credits and theme music probably since the X-Files.
That said, I find the show distasteful at times (the use of 'sexposition'), and sometimes it mishandles morality, making it hard to sympathize with any of the characters if you evaluate their decisions objectively. I suspect that like The Wire (and it's probably in that sort of league) it's weakest point will be unrelenting naturalism - constantly trying to show us how terrible and pointless life is, not offering much to aspire to.
But heck, it's mostly just outrageous fun.
European who loves watching USA TV shows: it can literally take YEARS before very successful US shows make it to (non-pay) TV over here and quite often they are not being shown at all.
I was honestly surprised "Dexter" was on regular German TV here rather soon - I was on season three when they started season one here. I cannot say "Breaking Bad" is being aired yet nor "The Shield", "The Wire" or any other of my favorite shows. Not even "Battlestar Galactica" or "South Park" made it to non-pay TV.
Well, at least "Two and a Half Men" is on if you are so inclined.
A very good test. I find that even TV can fit this requirement if it's the right kind of TV: A 60-minute episode of The Wire, for example, leaves my mind in a vastly more engaged state than the same amount of time spent watching a few minutes of one show, changing channels, watching a few minutes of another, channel surfing, and finally concluding there's nothing on.
Wasn't that in an episode of the The Wire? :)
It probably hasn't helped that TV can now feature long-running complex shows (Lost, the Sopranos, the Wire, Dexter, Mad Men, the Office, etc) that 2 hour movies can't beat in terms of character exploration and plot depth.
I partially agree with you. You're definitely right about the industrial revolution, and I hope you're right about the information revolution.
However, I think there's a real possibility that, in the near future, automation will lead to a permanent increase in unemployment. Even if general AI proves to be a long way away (which I think it is), a lot of service jobs are algorithmic enough that they could became automated in the next few decades. If true, you end up with a small elite business/management class which finds themselves far wealthier than before; a few people who managed to hold onto their old jobs (domestic cleaners, plumbers, etc) or find new 'creative' jobs; and a vast unemployed underclass.
In theory with all our new machine-created wealth the entire underclass could live very comfortably on welfare. However, the way most societies are set up, that's unlikely to happen. The economic pie gets bigger but the people at the top suddenly find themselves with even more power and get an even bigger slice, and the people at the bottom get screwed.
I think this guy makes a fairly convincing argument: http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
If you have the time, his scifi novella about the social impacts of mass job loss due to automation is also OK (like a lot of amateur scifi, some of the writing and characterisation is pretty bad, but the ideas are interesting). Worth a read if you have the time. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Season 2 of the Wire also touches on similar themes. (It's obviously not sci-fi, but it made me rethink my belief that "automation is fine, people just need to not be so picky about finding new jobs").
Came here just to chime in about Season 4 of The Wire. For those who haven't seen it, a large portion of it focuses on a new school initiative where disruptive students are removed from their classes and isolated in a smaller, more focused setting to work out their issues (if at all possible). The controversy is the perception it gives of putting the troubled kids through a lesser education, which is ironic considering the sort of education they could get would be qualitatively different and better for them overall.
If you want a more visceral account, "The Corner" by David Simon is a non-fiction chronicle of the Baltimore drug culture's effect on the people who live in it. Simon spent about year (~1993) following and interviewing the people who lived on a specific drug corner in Baltimore; one of those he followed was a high-school-age kid whose description is much like this teacher's description of M.W.
There's also an HBO miniseries based on it (which I haven't watched, so I can't vouch), and Season 4 of The Wire is partially about a Baltimore inner-city school (The Wire is fantastic). Simon also spent a year embedded with the Baltimore police homicide division, which became a book, a TV serial (called Homicide), and informed much of The Wire.
Some people are commenting that the solution to the problems at these schools is to completely give up on the troublemakers; I don't think it would be that clear-cut for you after you read or watch these. The kids you give up on are the ones lost to the hardcore drug culture forever. Those same kids are the ones that perpetuate the problem- there's a terrible feedback loop going on.
Ha. The pickle here is that we (the government, the bleeding hearts, those capable of compassion) have to acknowledge that these kids were dealt a pretty bad hand, and that they are, after all, still kids. So we owe them a fair shot and some patience -- it's not acceptable to give up on them as products of the system. Because in one way or another we're part of the system. And they're kids.
My sister participated in the New York Teaching Fellows program (similar to TFA) and worked in Spanish Harlem and her experience was much the same as the author's. So I'm not saying the current situation and the current programs are ideal or well managed, but there are interesting hope-inducing projects and people out there.
p.s. Go watch season 4 of The Wire and see if it tugs at your heartstrings a bit. It also paints a good picture of how screwed up the school system itself is in poor urban communities. Not to mention how pedogogical innovation is treated in the academic setting...
p.p.s. If you're curious about the role of academic philanthropy and the Broad Foundation which the author mentions, have a read: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 . I haven't read a counterpoint to that piece yet, so I'm not sure how well the criticisms stand up.
Rather than "TV makes people feel lonely", that's more like "Sitcoms make people feel lonely".
Could you not turn the argument around, and say that watching shows like Oz, The Wire or Dexter where the other people definitely aren't having fun makes people feel better?
* Life is beautiful
* Last Train Home
* Brokeback mountain
* Slumdog Millionare
* Aftershocks (Tangshan dadizhen)
* Bus 174
* Moon
* The Wire (TV series)
* Zorba the greek
* City of God
Not directly related to the speed of news but interesting reading is "Don't believe it! How lies become news" by Kitty Alexander, who was also involved with the fantastic documentary "Outfoxed".
It's my impression that people lump news and doctors into the same bunch: they are somehow infallible. Somehow they are always doing the right thing.
Well "Grey's Anatomy" and "Scrubs" pretty much ruined the medical industry for me :) I guess maybe Season 5 of "The Wire" does the same for mass media?
One thing that can be both a quality and a problem, is that The Wire is very demanding. A lot of what happens is implicit or not directly seen on camera. Also, episodes are not as self-contained as, for instance Mad Men, where you can watch one stand-alone, without needing too much background on who's who, and what happened before.
You mean except for The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Dexter, BSG (gak), Friday Night Lights, Lost, Sons of Anarchy, Deadwood, Extras, Damages, Weeds (gak), House...
What's tricky about this comparison is that there's so much North American TV. A lot of it is ABC sitcoms, yes.
Reminds me of an episode of The Wire with Herk trying to recover his camera.
You aren't alone. Paying to take a class where you study The Wire (which is an awesome TV show btw) is definitely a waste of time and money.
One thing every historian learns early on is that there are no perfect sources, no single narrative. (Go watch the film Memento if you want to see some fantastic philosophical musing on this topic: we can’t ever completely trust things written in the past, especially after we’ve lost the full context of an author’s motivation) The real world is big and complicated and messy. One thing a show like The Wire gets to do that would be nearly impossible for an academic paper is follow dozens of characters, their relationships, their private lives, their motivations, their interactions with public institutions.
So, there was an amsterdam experiment in Baltimore? A cop inventing a serial killer? No? It belongs in a literature class, not a sociology class. It's like learning physics by watching Star Trek.
Yes, The Wire was a great TV show. I enjoyed watching it. But let's not pretend it is a documentary.
He left off a couple of important points. Because The Wire is drama, you get to know the characters as people. There is a huge difference between looking at "urban, ethnic and impoverished" on paper and getting to know and appreciate the characters as individuals.
<insert spoiler alert here>
Season 4 follows the youngest generation and ends by showing you how each character steps into the place vacated by a character from the older generation. This was the most painful season for me to watch, seeing young people being trapped and molded into another wave of failure. This cycle is a topic dear to my heart, and one I believe would not require mountains to break. The cycle perpetuates because we're all afraid to touch it... myself included. The subset of our society that is undereducated and economically, socially and emotionally depressed is a component of the whole. And if we own the whole, we own all of the problems, including those of the subset.
This is a course I would love to take, if only because I have some very, very strong opinions on the phenomenon. But I'll spare HN the details.
From the article: "Of course, our undergraduate students will read rigorous academic studies of the urban job market, education and the drug war. But the HBO series does what these texts can't. ... With the freedom of artistic expression, 'The Wire' can be more creative. It can weave together the range of forces that shape the lives of the urban poor."
It's not simply commentary on a TV show. The show illustrates points from a wider academic course.
Disclaimer: I believe 'The Wire' is the greatest TV series I have ever seen
Well it seems to be a class on urban inequality that uses characters from The Wire as examples. The show was critically acclaimed and many of the characters are based off people known by the creators (a Balitmore Police Officer/School Teacher & Baltimore Sun Reporter)
"Our seminar was designed for 30 students; four times that many showed up for the first class last week." Using the show to promote a class discussing a real sociological problem seems like a good idea.
First: it is a single course, and it does not appear to be a required one. No one is being made to study it. Students are being given the option of studying it.
Second: All manner of art is studied in college, from novels, to sculpture, to film. TV is but another genre, and while it an unfortunate history of being a "low art", a lot of recent tv definitely rises to level of a lot of the films that are studied in college today.
That being said, I'm a little leery of the context in which the show is being studied. The course is on urban inequality. Even though the wire is very well researched, it's still fiction. If you want to talk about the realities on which the wire is based, why not study those realities directly? Why let an intricately plotted work of fiction serve as your primary window into that world? I'd be fine with showing some scenes from the Wire in a course on urban inequality, but I'd really hate to give students the impression that the Wire is the final authority on what life in Baltimore is like.
Why shouldn't universities study TV shows?
Lets make an analogy with books. Most books are, in the end, "just meant to entertain", but it would be ridiculous to argue that universities shouldn't study them. Why? Well, some books go beyond just entertainment into a further realm: commentary on the human situation, raising and questioning of philosophic questions, etc.
I think that the Wire fits into the same mold as an excellent book. Saying that it's just to entertain misses the bigger goals that it's trying to accomplish. It has brilliant script writing and direction, and it really raises questions into the areas that it portrays (the drug war, corruption in legal areas, etc) that I had never considered before.
(And yes, you should watch it. :) )
Disclaimer: I have never seen a single episode of The Wire.
Am I alone in thinking that this is a complete waste of time? Why would I go to Harvard to hear learned commentary on a TV show? Granted, this is a critically acclaimed TV show, but it's still just meant to entertain.
If I paid the exorbitant Harvard tuition, I would be incensed to be made to study a TV show.
Maybe others wouldn't? Does anyone here feel like it's a positive instead of a negative?
EDIT: I see that I have apparently angered some people by asking this question, judging by the downvotes. I didn't mean to offend - I just wanted to see what made this show different from other TV, which several of you have explained. Again, my apologies.
That's because he's so passionate about the subject matter.
I gave up studying physics in secondary school because my teacher was a disaster. Instead of trying to impart a deeper understanding of the subject matter in question, he would focus on getting student to learn off scientific definitions word for word (i.e. having all the "ands", "ats", "is'", "the's" in the correct place). So you would have a textbook answer memorized for the test (perhaps), but sweet fuck all actual knowledge of physics.
To see this kind of passion is refreshing, and the way things should be. (If you've ever seen 'The Wire', seasons 4 & 5 have 'Mr. Prezbo' teaching maths. He struggles to connect with his student until he teaches them how to apply probability theory to dice games, allowing them to gamble more effectively. Unfortunately for him, he also has to 'teach to the test' so that the school can say standardised test scores are going up).
It's a kiss-simple, cheap, innocuous (until recently) timing, team coordination, and secondary intelligence gathering mechanism (via time-indexed observation logs of potential target activities).
These models are probably available for cash (at or below cost) through a plethora of street-side vendors, pawn shops, and cheap electronics retailers in any metropolitan area.
In principle, this is no different than "burner" cell phones historically used by drug dealers (and featured prominently in season 3 of The Wire).
I can envision more well-funded groups using Flip cameras.
I can't recommend enough that people watch The Wire. It is especially illuminating on the subject of why politicians and bureaucrats do what they do.
I'd argue that there was more interesting video content being produced for TV in the last ten years than movies. (Maybe you don't consider movies art either...) I'll put The Wire up against any movie in the last ten years.
> What exactly makes watching a thoughtful, well-crafted drama (for instance, The Wire) on television any less worthy than reading a good back or going to watch a play?
Great question. A few points:
1. A play or movie has a start and end time that is reasonably compressed - you watch Memento or Gattaca, it takes you two hours, you sit and think about it afterwards for a while, and it's done. A high quality program will run for many seasons, taking 30 minutes to an hour of your life times X weeks for however long. Also, being not as compressed, the average quality tends to be lower (with some exceptions of very good programming, though it's rare).
2. Very easy to just keep watching after the high quality program ends, watching the next thing that comes on. Very, very easy to do that. My housemate last year had a TV hooked to a DVD player and Nintendo Wii for parties, but no channels. I did buy him a box set of Planet Earth for his birthday after seeing some of it at a friend's house. But it's like, put on the DVD, watch it, put it away, done. No getting sucked in.
3. Garbage books are no good either - I tend to read books that give me a perspective on another culture (Koda Rohan, Eiji Yoshikawa, or Genji for Japan, for instance), or read business books, technical books, history, economics, finance, etc. I'd classify a lot of fiction as similarly mindlessly-distracting-without-growth too. That's fine for what it is, but I'd rather get the enjoyment while also developing as a person, asking myself tough questions, getting more in touch with another culture, gaining expertise, and so on.
But sure, there's some good TV. I used to go do cardio at the gym whenever a sports match was on that I wanted to watch, for instance, because they had a bunch of TVs, and I'd go during the fifth inning or halftime and watch the end of the game. I might buy a boxed set of DVDs and have a weekend marathon at my place sometime if a show is really good, insightful, and develops the character.
Still, I don't watch television regularly because I think I'll have a healthier, happier, more productive life where I reach more of my goals if it's not part of my life. Perhaps some people have knee jerk anti-TV reactions as a signaling mechanism that they're "unplugged", but that's not it in my case. Some TV is really cool. I watched some Top Gear at one of my English friend's flats in London, and it's just really enjoyable. The question was still - wait, is this what I should be doing with my time? Couldn't I be enjoying myself while also learning, or producing something, or connecting more deeply with someone I like? It's a keenly thought out thing that I made a conscious decision about a long time, but I'm not one of those horrible anti-TV preachy people. If it serves a role in a person's life and they're happy with its effect, then it's a good thing for them.
I haven't had a TV for three years. The hardest part was giving up Lost in Season Two. I feel lost when friends talk about "The Wire", "Weeds", "24" but I'd rather live vicariously through my own life. I don't even Hulu. I almost feel like TV is a treadmill - just keeping up with show plot trajectories.
Getting rid of a TV isn't a magic solution for life's problems. It doesn't make you more social. It doesn't make you focus on your big projects though. You can easily whittle away free time surfing on your iPhone on your couch (as I do).
I recently saw a two-year old boy whose parents had been raising without TV. They've succumbed. Thomas the Train. Previously, without TV, he would literally cry on the floor for 20 min. straight - because what the heck do small kids do if the parents can't distract them with the real opiate of the masses, in Karl Marx parlance.
Thanks for the comment and sorry if my writing style's not to your liking. My post was not written to hurt anyone, quite the opposite. I have my own writing style, yes. It's not for everyone, yes. But you don't need to come here and try to organize a mob against, to try to force me to conform to your joy-sucking rules.
It's your choice and your right not to accept people who are different from yourself. God knows half of America is full of rabid, Jesus-loving attack dogs who try to force their beliefs on the rest of us. If you don't mind, however, could you please try to suffer in silence and keep your crying, bitching, and trolling to yourself. Thanks :)
BTW, if you don't like words like "ass" and "fuck" and all the rest of those naughty words that cause you cry out and try to rally a mob for a witch hunt, you might want to avoid blogs such as "500 Hats" by Dave McClure. Here's Dave's bio: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/about-dave-mcclure.html here's one of his posts: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2006/11/why_you_want_yo.html and here's every post he's written with the words "ass" or "fuck" in it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=ass+or+fuck+site%3A500hats.typepad.com&aq=f&aqi=&oq= Can you still see, or did all those naughty words blind you?
Better stay away from TechCrunch, too. That Arrington has a mouth on him! Of course, it's nothing like that Zed Shaw. Hehe, I love those guys. You know, what really burns me up, though, is little people who use words like "shit" and "fuck." Who do they think they are! We gotta teach them a lesson, don't we. We gotta stomp them back down where they belong. After all, only "important" people are allowed to use "bad" words.
Oh shit, better not read any William Shakespeare, either: http://socyberty.com/education/evolution-of-profanity-how-swear-words-came-to-be/
Damn, or watch award-winning movies, such as "Pulp Fiction," "Mystic River," "The Departed," etc. Or any of those award-winning HBO shows, such as "Sopranos," "Deadwood," "Entourage," "The Wire," etc.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, what's left for you?! Well, at least you've still got your Fox news, church, and tea party friends, right? Speaking of which, where you at the rally? I heard Palin's speech was great! She's so smart and wholesome and funny and right. I love her! She's got my vote in 2012, I've had about all the "hopey changey" stuff I can handle outta that Obama guy!
Do you now see how ridiculous your attack was, Brett? And do your employers and university (Amazon.com, Trilogy, LiquidPlanner, and Yale, if this is you: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brettbender) know you're harassing people on Hacker News when you should be working and making them look good? In both cases, probably not, but I'm not going to argue. Life's too short to waste time with miserable people. Good luck. Seriously.
Cheers!
PS: I took out the asterisks and did some polishing and now the post is making the rounds all over again. Thks.
If you want to get particular, I'll abide.
How do we know that it took five years for these gang collaborations to happen? Maybe it took 5 years for it to progress to them high-fiving and hugging in public.
My original point was that it may have helped the criminals become comfortable with the idea. Of course it didn't instantly end decades long feuds after an afternoon of watching season 3 of The Wire.
The Wire premiered in 2002, and the New Day Coop (what you refer to with the hotel conference rooms) really started around Seasons 2 and 3 (2003 and 2004).
So why did this idea take five years to reach the streets then?
I think this theory is a little too cute to be true.
I watch about 1-4hrs per day depending on what's showing. Mostly sports but I like NatGeo, History, Travel, Discovery etc. I don't watch any sitcoms but there are a few well written shows like Mad Men, Wire etc. I also enjoy stuff like Top Gear and Ultimate Factories. But it's mostly sports for me.
Yes "Lost", a little "The Wire", yes "The Sopranos".
If the info is essential to "keep up" -- that is, it wasn't completely predicted by the earlier trajectory of the show, and it's not easily ignorable as subsidiary to the main plot -- then it is a "twist", in my meaning.
The shows you mention use multiple overlapping story arcs -- some for just the current show, some for several episodes, some for the season, some for the entire run -- in order to fight short attention spans. There's something for everyone, including lots of short cuts between simultaneous (or flashback) story lines, to keep the pace of "reveals" sufficient for even fidgety, clicker-happy viewers.
I haven't had Cable/Satellite since 2002. I started watching all my TV on DVDs that I bought from Amazon, but then switched to iTunes around 2006.
Now it's mostly a combination of iTunes/DVD - I'm pretty certain it's less expensive than subscribing to TV.
The good part of this (and it should be emphasized) - is that you now watch for a _purpose_ - Latest episode of Lost, BSG, Dexter, Weeds, South Park, Doll House, BtVS, Angel, The Wire, DeadWood, Heroes, The Office, Dr. Horrible, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, Castle, Californication, Dr. Who, Kings, Sarah Connor Chronicles, True Blood, Torchwood.
Any time that might have been lost to just passively watching television, news, is now, of course, lost to passively reading ycombinator, nyt, wsj, groklaw... :-)
I'm with you on video games, anime, and sci-fi/fantasy; for some reason, things targeted at geeks always rub me the wrong way. For instance, I can for the life of me not figure out why people enjoy Battlestar Galactica.
I'm not with you on TV. The best films I've seen in the past 5 years are nowhere nearly as good as The Wire or the first 4 seasons of The West Wing.
Again, a canard. Notability is far less subjective than it's made out to be. What episode of The Wire hasn't been written about in a reliable source somewhere? Zero, is how many.
Further, WP accomodates a myriad of non-notable facts. They're simply attached to notable subjects. The idea that every single sentence in WP must be notable is a straw-man argument. Once you accept that The Wire is notable enough for inclusion in WP, by nature of being the single best piece of long-form televisual drama ever created, then the question of how its articles are organized stops being about notability and starts being about information design.
And, I mean, have at it and all. But don't make it something that it isn't.
You're really arguing not about whether topics should be included in the encyclopedia, but how their articles should be organized. Your argument is placated by reorganizing The Wire into one big article with all the detail from every episode. But the article was broken up not because of some separate notability for each episode (though some of them clearly are, ahem, notably notable), but because it makes WP's coverage of The Wire easier to read.
How are these brief entries any less important than descriptions of the complete episodes of BSG, Doctor Who, The Wire, or dozens of other TV shows? Yes, I've read many of those episode articles and I'm sure they get more hits, but we're talking about making information available to anyone who might needs it. Who can say this is needed, this is not?
It seems odd that a real person can't get an entry but there are probably thousands of fictional characters written up.
By coincidence, I just watched this lecture by David Simon on the same topic. David Simon is the creator of the TV series The Wire and a former print journalist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8E8xBXFLKE
He discusses a recurring theme on The Wire about the decline of a town's main newspaper, and how this results in blatant corruption going unnoticed. Simon doesn't think bloggers offer a true replacement. Personally I'm more optimistic about the Internet, but his opinion is worth your time.
I remember when I first saw an episode of The Wire where they were using typewriters. The computer has become so synonymous with the workplace that I thought their office looked really, really barren without one.
You are about as wrong as anybody can get about anything. The Wire is an outright masterpiece.
I can't see how you'd find it to be "cheap". It's got probably the most brilliantly characterized people I've seen on any screen. I'd understand not liking it based on the first few episodes, but by six in it was already gliding along.
I think that The Wire is the most overrated show on television. Many of my friends are very enthusiastic about it, but I watched at least six episodes and could not get hooked. The show felt "cheap" to me, and boring.
From the comments:
I watched the movie Idiocracy with you and it hit me in the face as to one potential out come for the human race. But talking about the fact that we don't do physical chores that were done a hundred years ago, doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, things have changed. Those chores are no longer an issue.
I just saw Idiocracy yesterday (ironically, I decided it wasn't worth paying attention to so I played it on the top of the screen and coded on the bottom of the screen), and I think that assuming it's a plausible outcome is kind of silly. I doubt Mike Judge, the director, would disagree. Idiocracy is much more a critique of the present than it is of the future.
This was a terrific article, but there're a few fallacies in your argument. The one that most stands out to me is how you talk about music switching from being active to passive, and therefore taking less effort from the listener. You then bring up rock music as an instance of something that provides a big hit rather than focusing on intricacy.
The fallacy is that in the past, most people didn't listen to concerts. There is a long history of minstrel songs: music played in the street, catchy stuff for the public. The average person wouldn't listen to any concert in their lifetime. This is not a new thing. Furthermore, if you look at how many people travel to concert halls to listen to music, I would bet that more people proportionally listen to great pieces of work like Tchaikovsky or Mozart than ever have in the past. If anything, the trend is that once you have access to things easily, you are more willing to put effort into a viewing than you would be if you'd never been before. (I'm going to the Met to see a Tchaikovsky opera two weeks from now; I never would have wanted to if I hadn't torrented 2GB worth of his pieces earlier in the year.)
"Don't turn that dial!" has become cliche: whatever you do, keep your eyes peeled on this station.
That ignores the rise in TV that's actively challenging to watch. To bring up the two shows I always bring up, The Wire on HBO and BBC's The Office. Neither one is easy and clear-cut. They both attract watchers who are there to be challenged. I've watched the entire Office straight through three times in the way that I reread good books. It's not addictive per se, it's enriching.
Your argument about video games make me wonder how avid a gamer you are. I'm not a huge gamer, but the games that I do like are almost always pretty rich in environment. Portal's the cliche in gaming, and that's a game that's clever, well-written, and encourages lateral thinking. My 13-year-old brother, who dislikes most books and isn't a big math kid, got hooked in Portal's advanced challenges, which really are difficult pieces. Then there're RPGs, the best of which are superb storytellers, there are real-time strategy games, there are all sorts of games that encourage you to actively think. You can't play a game and shut off. You need to focus incredibly. My friends that play Counterstrike are the best proof of this: you need to be a special sort of brilliant to play that game well. It's addictive, but only in the way, again, that challenging books or pieces of music are. It's not a "pop" game.
Of course, I would also argue that VG composers are writing the most sophisticated orchestral music of the day. Listen to Roar of the Earth by Ko Otani if you can find sample pieces. It's rich and complex in the way good classical music is. Plus, it's attached to a video game that's pretty stimulating in and of itself - ever played Shadow of the Colossus? It's one of the few video games I will call an exceptional piece of art rather than merely a game.
(Sidebar: World of Warcraft is an exception in that yes, it's focused on addiction rather than active focus. But what a piece of art it is in and of itself! I've never played, I don't want to get hooked, but they made an entire world! This is like Tolkien realized. One of my future plans is to make an MMORPG in a much more literary sense, and to create an enormous world that really feels like fantasy - World of Warcraft opened that door for me. It's an incredible achievement in and of itself.)
The Internet is addictive, yes - but in what way is it addictive? My friend and I both competed to parody the 25 Things notes on Facebook yesterday - that requires some thinking and creative prowess. Meanwhile, while I spend hours a day in front of a computer, I'm constantly reading articles like this one, and writing answer pieces. I participate in debates. And I've found that as a result, in debate-focused classes I'm leagues ahead of classmates. It's entirely because the Internet gets my mind going. The Internet is not passive. It's not like rock music or TV shows or heroin. It's active. You consciously focus on what you're doing.
People are less fit because less tasks require physical labor than ever have before. That's why society is so focused on being thin. Now, staying fit requires conscious effort. It is no longer a passive task. It doesn't happen during the day unless you choose it to. So in a way, it's a reversal of the ideas that you're stating here. (I keep a 30-pound weight on my desk, and I exercise and have my computer read long posts out loud. It's such a wonderful system.)
Finally: things have always devoted people's lives like this. If I wasn't constantly on the Internet, I would be writing in a notebook, or practicing an instrument. That's not heroin, is it? That's an exercise in creativity. Think of it like that: anything worth doing is worth devoting time to. And most of society will always ignore those opportunities for wasted time. That's nothing new. It's a part of human nature.
The only HBO show I've bought myself was The Wire, on sale for $90 the entire season. That's less than $2 an episode. iTunes sells shows for $20 a season? That would be $100 for all of The Wire.
How much does HBO charge a month?
I don't know if nobody reads. Nobody reads modern books, perhaps.
It's tough to say something meaningful in a medium that's existed for centuries. You know? So much has already been done that now the medium is shrinking. The people who do remain are less likely to be as talented, because the really talented people have moved on to other things.
Television, for instance. The last 10 years has seen better TV shows than ever existed in the past. The best-written thing I've come across in the last two years was The Wire. I'd compare the quality of writing in that to anything up-to-and-including Shakespeare. And it did stuff that you couldn't have done in a novel. Or in a movie, for that matter.
Mind you, my all-time-favorite novel was published in 2006. And Mark Z Danielewski is still innovating within the form: his House of Leaves is a classic, and it was written just 8 years ago. But those writers are rarer. There's less to be done within the form of pure prose than there was even 40 years ago.
Are you somehow saying that a band is in some way equivalent to a book?
A songwriter and a novelist are both instances of artists. Such is my point: there are more levels of entry for writers nowadays.
Songs are just emotional, they don't transfer any information.
Several bands I listen to weave complex narratives into their music. Similarly, several novelists I read transfer very little information through their novels. Your statement is not entirely accurate.
You can absorb ideas by reading that you cannot by watching movies.
Of course! But you must remember that the opposite is true as well. Movies can convey things that books can't possibly attempt to show. The same with music, for that matter.
Movies run at their own pace, books run at your pace.
Of course. But that's irrelevant to my argument, which is that the book is no longer the only place to which writers flock. If you're young and want to write, a novel isn't the only thing you can write anymore. Just as people with ideas for scenes sometimes write movie scripts now rather than plays. A friend of mine is like that: I write play scripts, he writes movie scripts. If movies didn't exist, he might have become a playwright instead. Similarly, somebody who would have been a blogger 5 years ago might subsist entirely on Twitter or even Facebook Notes now.
I would also mention the TV show as a counterpoint to what you said, wherein episodes become almost chapters. You can either watch slowly, once a week, or you can watch it in massive doses when the DVD comes out. I just watched Twin Peaks like that last week.
It's NOT easier to make a movie. A movie is a masive logistical effort
I never said it was easier, I said it was an option. And it's easier for movies to convey certain types of information.
Forming bands is just a trendy thing, but most bands I know produce silly music. They say banal things.
Look at Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields as a perfect example of somebody who uses the lyric to greatest advantage. But either way, that's not my point. People who want to write nowadays very often write lyrics. I'd say more write lyrics nowadays than write novels, or poetry. That means that the pool of poets and novelists is less, because people have more venues to follow through.
Writing is still the backbone of human thought. In whatever form it comes - the well thought out written word will always accompany human civilisation.
Of course. I never said it wasn't, or that it wouldn't. But words appear in multiple mediums. David Foster Wallace said in interviews that he thought the best-written thing of this last decade was The Wire. I think the best-written thing I've read was either Achewood, which is a comic, or House of Leaves, which borders on visual art. Things branch out, and that's the point I wanted to make.
I am getting really sick of people ragging on TV. "Visual crack"? Really? Have you been watching TV lately? Sure there is show that are just mindless fun but everyone needs a chance to relax these days. TV is more and more producing great works of art, try The Wire if you're doubtful. TV writing is getting better all the time. I'm of the belief that narrative is important which is why so many people gravitate towards it whether in the form of TV, books, movies, comic books or even video games. And with the internet it's become even less of a passive experience inspiring social networks, creativity and intellectual thought among other things. I watch TV because it's a part of doing what I love and I will never apologize for watching 4 hours a day or however much I watch a certain day. And if you tell me to give it up, I'll tell you that you should try giving up all the narrative forms listed above. Some people may be able to do it and be happy but not most people.
It's all about moderation. Doing too much of any one thing is usually a bad idea but if you do small things that you love, it should be positive for you.
This is what I came away with after working on the Netflix dataset.
Incentives, not perceptions, are what need to be changed for realizing better recommendation engines (or collaborative filtering algorithms; whatever you call them). Negative recommendations are not a good idea. Unlike false positives, the consumer really has no way of knowing whether a negative was in reality true or false. Recommendations are also about feeding our ego , even if the engine is ultimately basing its suggestions on consumers whose tastes are very similar to yours. It is indeed magical; consumers who think they are expanding horizons by seeking out indies or documentaries on Netflix are simply discovering latent interests that have already been explored by others in your interest cluster. The author is right though; false positives are what weigh most heavily on our perceptive scales. Risk aversion ensures that people do not venture out beyond what are suggested to them (by an automated agent or friend), and collaborative filtering algorithms have a cold start problem. For a movie to appear on the radar, enough people need to have watched and expressed enjoyment. Digital filtering makes it even harder for random exploration that is needed to seed these. Failing that, you get middling recommendations like that of Netflix, where the average rating (~=3.6) is no better that what you would get without it. There is one easy way to get around the risk aversion obstacle. Offer "free" movies from a different, high variance list of movies, with "free" meaning a fourth movie on a three-per-month subscription, and variance being high on the predicted ratings of the consumer. Such an offer, while being marginally more expensive for Netflix, will allow consumers to experiment without any perceived costs (which, currently is the wait for the next Wire or Deadwood DVD you could have gotten otherwise). If I may speculate, recommendations should be about gentle, guided exploration and not avoidance.
1) Facebook is useful to me in order to a) always have up to date contact information b) have a central place where I can browse photos and c) have a quick introduction to new people that I friend, and see what they are into d) and keep tabs on what all my weak connections are up to. I don't have any major issues with Facebook.
2) I'm selective about what I watch, so I don't browse YouTube. I watch the Daily Show and selected PBS documentaries online. Occaisionally I rent a movie from Amazon Unbox, but the selection is terrible. I use NetFlix to watch old The Wire and West Wing episodes. I wish I could watch those shows online, but they are not available.
3) I wish there was a small niche news site for thoughtful political commentary and policy analysis (as opposed to the endless ranting on reddit). New.ycombinator and programming.reddit.com are great for my programming, business, and startup news.