I'm divided over whether to post this, but i think I have to. You know the show was so great that I'm actually sick of hearing about it.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
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A couple that I thought should have made it:
1) The chicken McNugget discussion (though I'm not sure there's a single quote you could pull from that).
2) This (NSFW!!) which may be the best-written scene in television history.
I've already nominated Kenard's "Package up my ass, Gump!" as the most overlooked great quote from the series.
I know exactly what you mean.
But I still miss Stringer.
Well...you really didn't "have to" since every other blog on the net has posted it already.
I still miss the Wire. Sigh.
I just watched the first 3 episodes of HBO's The Sopranos (very, very tardy, I know) and I was underwhelmed. It can't hold a candle to The Wire, one of the greatest tv shows of all time.
See, I disagree. I think The Wire is better, but I absolutely think the Sopranos can hold a candle to it. I'd at least give it a season, although I think seasons 2 and 3 of The Sopranos are a few of their best. It's been a while, so I'm sure someone else can correct me if I'm wrong about my seasons.
I think the first 3 or 4 seasons of The Sopranos still hold up marvelously (up to the end of the Jackie Jr. storyline), but after that it was just spinning its wheels. And I thought the last season was flat out bad.
I prefer both The Sopranos and Deadwood to The Wire. I think The Wire lets viewers off the hook too easily: subscribe to the right policy positions and you're essentially one of the good guys. I think this explains its popularity with political bloggers and many contemporary critics: Instead of having to search for what it metaphorically says about America, which is the only way a lot of critics know how to talk about genre fiction anymore, The Wire actually is about actual problems facing America today. Which is awesome! But not enough.
Also, the fifth season was a disaster. Mass murderers got more sympathetic treatment than the newspaper editors, who all but twirled their mustaches every time they showed up.
I'm a bleak guy, so The Sopranos' vision of a fallen world where no one learns and everyone chooses the easy thing over the right thing is right up my alley. It implicates everyone. Deadwood's sort of the flip side of that: It's about people choosing to do the right thing and suffering for it. To me, The Wire is about how we need a saner drug policy (amen), and then in season five it's about David Simon's superiority complex. Deadwood and The Sopranos are also both much weirder than The Wire, and I like weird.
Finally, just because it's fun to say because it gets folks riled up, I watched The Wire all in a row, then did the same with Deadwood immediately thereafter, and based on that apples-to-apples viewing experience, Deadwood makes The Wire look like T.J. Hooker.
to Sean T. Collins: I actually felt like The Wire was very, very bleak. No matter what policies were tried, they failed in the real world. The kids as a group never got a chance to have a good education; the two best boys in Season 4/5, from the perspective of character, intelligence, and potential, ended up as a sort of lost pair: a drug-gang dealer graduated to hitman graduated to lone bandit, and a de facto homeless druggie. The newspaper angle was weaker than all the other elements of the show, but I feel like it mostly featured flawed but good people who tried to do something right in the institutional and in some ways cultural morass of the W. Baltimore ghettos, but ultimately they would mostly fail, even when the good people were in positions of power like the mayor's office. I felt like what made it excel was exactly that it did NOT offer any real easy solutions. But you're right about the relative lack of depth of the characters who took over the Baltimore Sun.
Sean, I think you are a little too harsh on The Wire. But hey, too each his own. In fact, I can't get too riled up. Anyone that holds the greatness that is Deadwood in such high esteem gets a free opinion pass from me.
Although just the mention of Deadwood is sad, I can't remember a show that ended so abruptly, with so many open story arcs and directions left to be explored. I know there was talk of a movie, but last I heard that was dead. Apparently Milch is every bit as strange and turbulent as the world he created in Deadwood. Ian McShane's - Al Swearengen is one of the greatest characters in the history of cinema. I know the hyperbole alarm is blaring right now, especially to those (and there are bunch of them) that never saw the short lived show. But that character, and his acting were top rate. It's a wonder he never won an emmy.
Here is a sample, enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu0io1jD75Q&feature=related
"subscribe to the right policy positions and you're essentially one of the good guys"
Don't get this. Bunny Colvin probably had the "policy" closest to Simon's real life views, and even he was evicting old ladies and bringing drug addicts TO Hamsterdam, while his subordinates were covering up murders there.
No one's righteous in The Wire, even when they obviously have Simon's sympathy.
However, the Fifth Season's newspaper plot was a pretty transparent and petty score-settling on Simon's part.
SV: You're absolutely right, The Wire is very very bleak. (Except perhaps for the whole "Ain't that America, land of the free, little pink houses for you and me" montage at the very end of the last episode.) I think what stops me short is that, like I said, many of the problems it addresses are political in nature and could, in theory, have political solutions given a mass outbreak of sanity in this country. That's not to say that it's not also about the intractable problems of human nature, but in the main, I could imagine legislating a lot of the specific evils in that show out of existence. I can't really imagine that about Tony Soprano or George Hearst.
Keith: Yeah, you're right, I'm being too harsh on The Wire. Heh, that's sort of become "my thing"! In all honestly, I never thought it was good as those other two shows, but I caught up with it as Season Five was airing and I ended up watching the final episode at the same time as everyone else, and the difference between the online commentariat's reaction and my own really got to me after a while. I'm sure I oversell my case against it, but that's because I think most people really, REALLY oversell the "GOAT" thing for the show. To be clear, it's a really really good show! And in the cases of seasons two and four, an all-time great show.
Colby: I'm not saying that about the characters, I'm saying it about the audience. And maybe I'm just thinking of myself here, but when I watch The Wire, I think to myself "Man, if Washington were to listen to me, we could solve a lot of these problems." I think that for all The Wire pats itself on the back for what happens to Omar and things like that, it ultimately blandishes its audience: "If only politicians weren't assholes but smart, compassionate people like me, we could really help those kids and that union and that building" and so on. I can't look at Deadwood or The Sopranos--or Battlestar Galactica!--and think the same thing.
But even in terms of the characters, I don't think Bunny is the greatest example in your favor. I felt bad for that one shot of the old lady, but what he did was ultimately really, really good for the city. Virtually every other "good guy" cop character did some far shittier "ends justify the means" stuff that you could cite, even before you get to the cockamamie fake serial killer thing from Season Five.
Sean-
First of all, let me say that I'm not debating out of any sense of "ranking" the three shows mentioned. I see no reason why we can't enjoy all three at once. :) I just like talking about The Wire, and don't get to very often. So, for as little as this matters, I don't think The Wire presents somewhat "simpler" problems. Maybe we can dream up decent policies, but ultimately, we can't enact them- so they're no solution at all.
For example, assuming arguendo that Hamsterdam was the "right" policy (and a Bubbles makes clear, that's a very, very open question) it couldn't stand. And it even had politicians that were "smart" or "compassionate" enough to see value in it! Royce and Carcetti were very sympathetic to it, Royce was basically looking for reasons to keep it. But eventually, the city's other institutions- the press, the political process, the police- put too much pressure on them, and they turned on Hamsterdam.
We can say they should've resisted that pressure, but that's not really a possibility; there's not really anyone else on the show who can do it, and probably not in real life, either. We're all biased toward keeping our job, our lifestyle, our status quo. That's just human nature.
So ultimately, these problems are just as intractable as what we see in other shows, or even in real life. Any solution we can come up with relies on a fundamental change in human nature, or at least a level of knowledge and hindsight that the characters don't have.
I understand what you said, that as the problems in The Wire are socioeconomic in nature, there should be policy solutions. But even you said this is "in theory", and I think one of the points of the show- and certainly one of the points of the Hamsterdam arc- is that such solutions aren't as forthcoming in practice.
As for Bunny, that was kinda my point- he's clearly far better than any of the other characters (At least on the law-and-order side), but even he had major ethical lapses. Granted, my point was in response to something that WASN'T actually your point, but still... ;)
for me "Sons of Anarchy" on FX is probably the show that has come closest to replacing the void that the wire has left in my life. Great show. Not "the Wire" great, but great nonetheless.
Snoop's scene at the hardware store is one of TV's greatest.
Snoop had a few priceless scenes.
The one that broke my heart, though, was her final scene: The one where Michael is about to shoot her and she asks, "Mike, how does my hair look?" Just devastating.
Yes, that was devastating. She had class.
I toured the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys on vacation last year, where they rescue injured sea turtles and name each one.
So, the tour guide is standing in front of the whiteboard, which shows all the tanks and all the turtles' names, and she's explaining to us what causes them to come in: encounters with boat propellers, fishing line, etc.
Did I ask her, in front of twenty tourists, if the turtle named Snoop was injured by a $700 nail gun? Yes, yes I did.
What was the guide's answer? (and I'm guessing you weren't the only one in the group thinking it...)
The guide had no idea what I was talking about (I guess Snoop wasn't her turtle). There *were* some snickers from the group though.....:)
I just feel like I should say hi to my husband, who is probably watching this at work and reading the comments right now.
Hi honey!
The first season of True Blood gave me hope, but then the series jumped the shark when Godric committed "sunicide".
If it's about vampires and sex, then it's always already jumped the shark.
LOL, but I would contend that it was actually about bigotry and there just happened to be vampires and fang bangers.
That's fine, but if you can't be bothered to come up with a less hackneyed and overplayed way to work that out than vampires, then the whole project is pre-shark-jumped.
Thanks, TNC. That cheered me up after the disturbance of my Palin-morning.
I loved so many people on that show, but I have a special affection for Bunk, and the way he swears, especially.
The king is still the king.
My favorite:
"By the way, price of the brick goin' up." (Marlo)
Some more that they should've made the list:
Marlo Stanfield, to the security guard: "You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
Bunk: "I'm just a humble motherfucker with a big ass dick."
Beadie Russell: "Jamie and Listerine. Your scent."
Lester Freamon: "Y'all still open for carry out? I want some of that pepper steak."
Nicky Sobotka: "First of all, and I don't know how to tell you this without hurting you deeply, first of all, you happen to be white. I'm talkin' "raised on Rapolla Street white", where your mama used to drag you down to St. Casimir's just like all the other little pisspants on the block. Second, I'm also white. Not "hang-on-the-corner, don't-give-a-fuck white," but "Locust Point I.B.S. Local 47 white." I don't work without no fuckin' contract, and I don't stand around listenin' to horseshit excuses like my cousin Ziggy, who, by the way, is still owed money by you and all your down, street-wise whiggers."
Yes, I had to look that last one up! Heh.
I need to get back down to Faidleys for crab cakes, greens, and a Natty Bo.
Good stuff, but you left off the part of Bunk's quote that made it a true classic. "Okay, I'm not really all that humble". I'm sure you can surmise which one I'm talking about.
My most unforgettable:
"How my hair look Mike?"
"You look good girl."
I think my mouth was literally hanging open for like, a whole minute after that one.
"Got to, man. This America:.
"Why you always give a f*** when it ain't your turn?"
Per David Simon, it did not get any more Dickens than with what happened to ("where the f*** is") Wallace.
And the guy who played Chris was amazing.
not a quote, but there's nothing more striking than when wallace pisses his pants before bodie and pootie kill him.
Man, no one's mentioned the quote that made me laugh the hardest? (Well, actually, Omar and Levy in the courtroom--"Just like you"--probably made me laugh hardest, but this comes in second.)
Season 2, Bunk comes down to visit McNulty at the marina and says, "Girls always told me about the little man in the boat; now I know what they talkin' about."
HEE!
They cut off the best part of the "nail-throwing mayhem" monologue: "Man say this the Cadillac of nail guns. He mean Lexus, but he ain't know that."