Thursday, January 8, 2009

The Wire

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!

3 comments:

blake said...

Troop's been trying to get me to watch this....

Hector Owen said...

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.

blake said...

Language wouldn't be an issue (not in that sense).

I've never watched "Oz", either.