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The Wire, Season 1
Furtherly in the service of my fannish education, I made good of another new year's resolution, and marathoned the first season of The Wire on dvd. Will listen to the audio commentaries now as well, because the show really is All That.
It was odd at first to see Dominic West and Iris Elba playing Americans, because I had just seen the former as a very creepy and deeply unsettling performance as Fred West, serial killer, torturer and rapist, in Appropriate Adult, and had been introduced to the later via the excellent Ultraviolet. (More recently, he's been playing the title hero in Luther, but I have mixed thoughts about Luther, possibly because it struck me as one of these shows where you have to buy the hero behaving like a jerk because he's a genius and everyone else just has to put up with this.) But I got quickly over the "huh" factor. (Being a foreigner, I can't judge how good their accents are, but I haven't heard complaints down the fannish grapevine, so I conclude that like Damian Lewis and Hugh Laurie, they pass for American unless you know better?) Another old tv aquaintance was Lance Reddick (Mathew Abbadon in Lost and Philip Broyles in Fringe), but I don't think I recognized anyone else. What else has Sonja Sohn, who playes Detective Kima Greggs, been in? Because she's fantastic. Also, I was majorly worried for Kima because names like "McNulty", "Omar" and "Stringer Bell" sounded vaguely familiar via fannish osmosis, but nobody (unless I've forgotten, in which case I apologize) ever told me about this awesome openly lesbian cop who's respected by colleagues and snitches alike. So my worry grew that she would die in the first season, and that was why no one has mentioned her. And then she got shot. And I mentally yelled OH NO YOU DON'T DAVID SIMON; THIS IS SO CLICHÉ!" However, she survived, instead of dying to motivate her male colleagues, and all was well again. (Speaking of surviving women, I was also afraid for D'Angelo's temporary girlfriend who becomes an informer because of the horrible way the dealers treated her fellow stripper, and very relieved she never got caught and made it safe and unbeaten up or killed out of the season. Having struck up a flirtatious friendship with Lester was an added bonus.)
Well, for some qualification of "well". By the end of the first season, the main drug dealer of said season is behind bars, but only for a small part of the years he should have gotten, his chief lieutenant has taken over and the drug business is as flourishing as ever, and the two sympathetic younger dealers with leftover humanity and hopes of getting out are dead and behind bars for 20 years respectively. Otoh, Kima survived, and the rest of our cops of varying degrees in sympatheticness are continuing with the policing, so there is that. The show does a good job of individualizing both the cops and the drug dealers, so you come to care about them (to varying degrees), and serves up a number of interesting slingshots, like "Prez" Pryzbylewski being hopeless in the streets but turning out to be a natural at solving puzzles behind his desk. I didn't count, but the majority of characters is black (in the first season, at least, can't speak for the rest), and there are two prominent gay characters on either side of the law, Kima, and Omar the stick-up man. Friendships exist on both sides as well, including friends-with-benefits, which is what McNulty is with DSA Rhonda Pearlman, who endeared herself to me by not letting the occasional sex get in the way of calling him on his bullshit when necessary and pursuing her own career determinedly.
Vocabulary-wise, I decided to watch the original version instead of the dubbed one but went for the subtitle option to make sure I didn't miss crucial information. In the end, I could follow the dialogue better than I thought I would, given the advance warning, but sometimes these subtitles came very handy. A question: is "I feel you" or "you feel me?" in the sense of "I hear you" or "do you understand me?" strictly Baltimore 2002 street dialect, or is it still in use? Also "shorty" meaning not "small man", which was the sense in which I had heard it used before, but "woman"?
In conclusion: excellent show. Now on to those audio commentaries!
It was odd at first to see Dominic West and Iris Elba playing Americans, because I had just seen the former as a very creepy and deeply unsettling performance as Fred West, serial killer, torturer and rapist, in Appropriate Adult, and had been introduced to the later via the excellent Ultraviolet. (More recently, he's been playing the title hero in Luther, but I have mixed thoughts about Luther, possibly because it struck me as one of these shows where you have to buy the hero behaving like a jerk because he's a genius and everyone else just has to put up with this.) But I got quickly over the "huh" factor. (Being a foreigner, I can't judge how good their accents are, but I haven't heard complaints down the fannish grapevine, so I conclude that like Damian Lewis and Hugh Laurie, they pass for American unless you know better?) Another old tv aquaintance was Lance Reddick (Mathew Abbadon in Lost and Philip Broyles in Fringe), but I don't think I recognized anyone else. What else has Sonja Sohn, who playes Detective Kima Greggs, been in? Because she's fantastic. Also, I was majorly worried for Kima because names like "McNulty", "Omar" and "Stringer Bell" sounded vaguely familiar via fannish osmosis, but nobody (unless I've forgotten, in which case I apologize) ever told me about this awesome openly lesbian cop who's respected by colleagues and snitches alike. So my worry grew that she would die in the first season, and that was why no one has mentioned her. And then she got shot. And I mentally yelled OH NO YOU DON'T DAVID SIMON; THIS IS SO CLICHÉ!" However, she survived, instead of dying to motivate her male colleagues, and all was well again. (Speaking of surviving women, I was also afraid for D'Angelo's temporary girlfriend who becomes an informer because of the horrible way the dealers treated her fellow stripper, and very relieved she never got caught and made it safe and unbeaten up or killed out of the season. Having struck up a flirtatious friendship with Lester was an added bonus.)
Well, for some qualification of "well". By the end of the first season, the main drug dealer of said season is behind bars, but only for a small part of the years he should have gotten, his chief lieutenant has taken over and the drug business is as flourishing as ever, and the two sympathetic younger dealers with leftover humanity and hopes of getting out are dead and behind bars for 20 years respectively. Otoh, Kima survived, and the rest of our cops of varying degrees in sympatheticness are continuing with the policing, so there is that. The show does a good job of individualizing both the cops and the drug dealers, so you come to care about them (to varying degrees), and serves up a number of interesting slingshots, like "Prez" Pryzbylewski being hopeless in the streets but turning out to be a natural at solving puzzles behind his desk. I didn't count, but the majority of characters is black (in the first season, at least, can't speak for the rest), and there are two prominent gay characters on either side of the law, Kima, and Omar the stick-up man. Friendships exist on both sides as well, including friends-with-benefits, which is what McNulty is with DSA Rhonda Pearlman, who endeared herself to me by not letting the occasional sex get in the way of calling him on his bullshit when necessary and pursuing her own career determinedly.
Vocabulary-wise, I decided to watch the original version instead of the dubbed one but went for the subtitle option to make sure I didn't miss crucial information. In the end, I could follow the dialogue better than I thought I would, given the advance warning, but sometimes these subtitles came very handy. A question: is "I feel you" or "you feel me?" in the sense of "I hear you" or "do you understand me?" strictly Baltimore 2002 street dialect, or is it still in use? Also "shorty" meaning not "small man", which was the sense in which I had heard it used before, but "woman"?
In conclusion: excellent show. Now on to those audio commentaries!
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I sadly don't have more to say, primarily because I am worried about spoiling you. I will say that big parts of season 2 were kind of a departure for me, and I still don't love a lot of that season as much of the rest. But it's all worth all you've been told. :)
ITA that there is not a lot of fannish mention of Kima, which is unfortunate. The Wire is kind of interesting, fannishly/audience-ly for me. Characters like McNulty, Stringer, and Omar kind of get held up for badassery, both fannishly a bit (though there really is not much of a fandom) but also in mainstream discussion. Which is not *wrong* really, especially for Omar, but is so incredibly superficial and misses so much of the point of the show that I am not sure what to do with it.
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Both of these guys are very much in the 'no one knows they're British until they see them in a UK-made role" vein (I think West's accent does slip a bit sometimes, but possibly because the show uses particular regional accents that you don't hear much of anywhere else in the media, it doesn't stand out; and there's a great bit in a later season where he goes 'undercover' as a British man, which was apparently done just so Dominic could speak in his regular voice). Elba, particularly, before he was getting a lot of movie work, did some DJ'ing and such in US clubs, and the story goes that if anyone approached him who knew him as Stringer, he would talk in his Stringer accent to avoid confusing people.
Re: the cast, this is one of those shows where, once you've seen it, you will notice actors from it EVERYWHERE FOREVER, because it's such a large ensemble, and because it's so loved within the industry that the actors will always be in demand (also, more cynically, because it's one of the few shows that really cast a whole lot of African-American actors, so when a show or film NEEDS one to fill the much smaller number of roles that are typically available, they look to The Wire alums.
Re: Kima, she IS great (and unfortunately doesn't have a large body of work otherwise, but seems to have shown up in guest/recurring shots on a number of shows -- I see she played someone named Sonya Rucker in an episode of the The Good Wife so that may be where you recognize her from).
About women overall, I have some frustrations with the way The Wire approaches gender -- the perspective of women on the drug dealer side, particularly, doesn't get the same kind of attention that the lives of the corner boys do -- but it does avoid a lot of the failures that we think of vis-a-vis women-as-victims/love interests within this genre. I'm trying to be as vague and nonspoilery about this as I can.
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:) The irony is that in the role I've seen him before this one, he doesn't use his own accent, either, since Fred West apparantly spoke in a strong West Country burr. So I still have no idea what his natural voice sounds like.
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Kima is fairly popular with some fans. Overall Omar gets the most love though and for once I can see it.
One thing I like about the show is how every season has a different flavor and showcases different characters, zooming in and out, relegating major characters to the background and vice versa.
I agree with the poster above that season 2 felt a little off to me, since I had problems connecting with some of the characters. It's still good, mind. But the next ones are gonna be even better imo. Wait till you get to season 4 (which I just watched for the fifth time and somehow it gets better with each viewing.)
The not-really-happy ending and no actual clean solutions is the whole theme. Maybe that's one reason it never faired with viewers as well as it should've. (That, and the lack of white characters, if I should hazard a guess.) Doesn't fit the mold the audience has grown used to.
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Also "shorty" meaning not "small man", which was the sense in which I had heard it used before, but "woman"?
I've heard it used both ways in American rap. CONFUSING.
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But...but...she's the most prominent black woman of the show! (At least in the season I just watched.) How can this be?
another essay in the same collection described Pearlman in quite sexist terms -- "married to her job"
...as opposed to the male cops, I presume, she says sarcastically. Good grief. (I would say "male lawyers", but we've only gotten to know Maury Levy in that category.) I forgot to say re: Rhonda Pearlman, that she looks surprisingly "normal" for an American tv show, i.e. over thirty, attractive but not glossily so, more like someone you can imagine meeting in every day life than in Hollywood, normal weight, too, instead of being super thin, and the clothes she wears are functional instead of model-like, too - in short, a really believable state attorney looks wise as well as in behaviour.
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Yes! That goes for all the professional-class women on the series. Pearlman becomes more sleek as the series goes on and her hair and wardrobe are updated, but never to the point of implausibility. Same with Kima, and Beadie, who is introduced in season 2.
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A question: is "I feel you" or "you feel me?" in the sense of "I hear you" or "do you understand me?" strictly Baltimore 2002 street dialect, or is it still in use? Also "shorty" meaning not "small man", which was the sense in which I had heard it used before, but "woman"?
"You feel me?" or "I feel you" is still in use - speaking as someone born and raised in inner-city Philadelphia from the late '80's forward. It's used more to mean "do you understand me"/"do you agree with me". "Shorty", meaning "one's ladyfriend" is not really in widespread use now. A more common phrase would be "boo", though you still hear "shorty" in some places (an ex-boyfriend from West Philly was prone to "shorty" much longer than anyone else, as was most of that section of the city, but you wouldn't hear it in say, North Philly or NY).
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It is most frustrating! With Daniels you get the sense that they know each other very well and that she respects him (and vice versa), but she doesn't hero-worship, so when she tells McNulty that Daniels will fight for the case, it doesn't come out as "he's the greatest, of course he will!" but as a reasoned judgment. With McNulty I get the sense that there was an undercurrent of sexual interest on his side before he figured out (well, was point blank told) that she was playing for the other team, while she has him sized up pretty quickly and is occasionally amused, but mainly they're comrades-in-arms who work really well together. And yes, Herc and Carver were very much fuckup little brothers, first complaining that they have to listen to big sis and then freaking out when someone dares to shoot her.
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I like The Wire a lot (though I will probably always love "Homicide: Life on the Street" more -- a number of Wire actors show up there too, though not Sohn (and I have so much annoyancerage at "The Good Wife" for using Wire actors and being SO BAD about race issues)), and agree with the comments re S2 and portrayal of women.
Re accents: It wasn't until subsequent viewings that I could hear Dominic West's English accent show up here and there. I don't think I noticed the same thing with Idris Elba so much. (But then, apparently, I can also hear some (lower mainland Vancouver) Canadian accents that other people can't, so maybe I'm just hearing things.)
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ETA: That is, I knew he was British because I'd seen him in a couple Shakespeare films -- he plays Demetrius in the Midsummer Night's Dream that came out in the late 90s, the one with Kevin Kline as Bottom -- and also shows up as Richmond at the end of McKellan's Richard III but nobody ever pays attention to Richmond, so I'm not surprised
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But that would mean it was the second time in one season that they had a Bury Your Gays plot, so, yeah, good that they didn't.
Also, I really like Greggs, so I'm glad we got 4 more seasons of her!
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ETA: Since marathoning The Wire, I've seen Kima's actress again - she has a recurring guest role in season 2, 3 and 4 of Star Trek: Discovery - and was very glad to.