I have a bunch of open tabs to clear up, so here goes:
Mark Bowden, The Atlantic: The Angriest Man in Television.
Reihan Salam, The American Scene, on the Bowden piece: The Bleakness of The Wire.
Matthew Yglesias, The Atlantic, on Salam: David Simon and the Audacity of Despair.
Ross Douthat, The Atlantic, on Yglesias and Salam: The Simon Worldview.
David Simon himself, in Esquire, not responding to any of the above, just telling his story: A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back.
I'm inclined to regard The Wire as a 21st-Century version of a big fat novel. (Of course we still have those.) And a very fine specimen of the breed, one which might well serve as the type to be emulated by auteurs to come.
Well done, David Simon!
Thursday, January 8, 2009
The Wire
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3 comments:
Troop's been trying to get me to watch this....
People have a threshold for bad language. One really striking scene in the first season has Jimmy and Bunk looking over a crime scene; all the dialogue is, ahem, the f-word, and although it's just one word many times, you know what they are saying to each other. Mostly by the inflections. But that's a tour de force. Brilliant, but showy. And it's significant that it happens very early in the series. The language gets more tolerable in further episodes.
Just for comparison purposes: I could not watch Pulp Fiction. I had to leave the room. I could not stop watching The Wire.
Language wouldn't be an issue (not in that sense).
I've never watched "Oz", either.
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