[parkbench]

[CubaLibre]

Latter-day Scrubs has proven to be a case study, for me, on why the best shows are always cancelled shows: even if they are forced to end before their prime, they are forced to end. This almost always ends up being an advantage, even if it's not ideal.

X-Files, Simpsons, Family Guy, I don't have to go on.

Pretty much the only thing anime has on us is the acknowledgement that these series have to end, sometime.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[luckystrike]

[les meat]

Peep Show, perhaps the only decent mainstream show on Channel 4 started up again last night. Ahh it was quite excellent
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[rabite gets whacked!]

[Dracko]

Lost is just a cynical ploy for the easily distracted. It's like, how long can we get these poor saps to wank bullshit over our brand new, incoherent plot twists? How long can we milk this bloated holy cow?
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[les meat]

[Dracko]

I'M SURE IT WILL ALL MAKE SENSE IN THE END!
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[Ebrey]

Anyone else watch the 2 hour Drive premier today? It's another big budget, large cast show with an serial plot like 24, Lost, and Heroes. I was interested because a ton of Buffy/Angel/Firefly people are involved: Nathan Fillion, Amy Acker, executive producer Tim Minear (who also did Wonderfalls!), and Charles Martin Smith (who is acting here, but directed the Buffy pilot). I was pleasantly surprised to see two actors from The Wire as well: D'Angelo's mom has a regular role, and Spiros had a guest spot.

Like 24 and Lost, it can be gimmicky and isn't that smart, but it's also fun and uses lots of good actors. I'm looking forward to the third episode, airing tomorrow before 24 (I wish it was afterwards, so it could get a big lead in).

[CubaLibre]

I'll watch any damn thing with Nathan Fillion, but I've never heard of Drive before. I haven't even seen it advertised. Is it network?
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Let's Play, starring me.

[internisus]

It's on Fox. It's 24 with street racing.

Stop putting 24 on the same level as Lost, you guys.

[Broco]

Yeah, The Wire has made the careers of a bunch of actors, I think. Stringer and McNulty are turning up all over the place. It kind of blows my mind, having identified them so closely to their Wire characters.

Yeah, Season 2, it was my least favorite season at first, because I wasn't expecting a sudden switch to a bunch of dockworking Poles and couldn't bring myself to give much of a fuck about them, at least until the admittedly amazing ending. (No more amazing than the ending of any of the three other seasons, however!) But I just rewatched it knowing what to expect and I liked it a lot better. Those union dudes are pretty awesome. Like the way that guy loses his leg in a dock accident, and a few days later walks (limps) into the bar and yells, "I'd give my left leg for a beer!" And the way Nicky tells the truth about everything else but claims that Horse knew nothing -- the union loyalty is amazing (I hadn't been paying enough attention to catch the lie on my first viewing).

[BotageL]

Lost
Why have coherent plotlines and interesting characters when you can have Jack?
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[rabite gets whacked!]

[rabite gets whacked!]

[aderack]

I don't see what's confusing about Lost, aside from the logistics. And even those have been explained pretty thoroughly over the last season or so.

I mean. It shows you A, and it shows you B. It shows you that A is somehow related to B. Do you really need a map between the two? No, not unless you're trying to draw an atlas.

I'm kind of fond of the lack of exposition, beyond what's immediately needed. Feels less forced than trying to tie everything up in a tidy knot, particularly when you've got so many conflicting perspectives to juggle.

[Ebrey]

[jdoe]

[Broco]

jdoe, I don't think Sobotka's reasons are "right" at all and in fact I think they are essentially the same as Avon Barksdale's. Those two are very much parallel characters.

Sobotka and Barksdale have the same basic problem -- they are short-sighted. Their myopia stems partly from ignorance but mostly from wilful blindness.

Sobotka is the leader of a dying institution, an institution which is in fact dying for all the right reasons. The seniority system hurts young union members and hurts overall productivity. The refusal to integrate machines also hurts productivity, and regularly leads to serious accidents. The dockworkers' culture of concealment of each others' thefts fosters increasingly deep-set corruption. The docks are pathological; they deserve to disappear. Sobotka's efforts to keep that zombie lurching on harm Baltimore. (And it goes without saying that his chosen method of keeping them alive, propagating drugs and prostitutes and political corruption, does even more damage.) All this was true before Season 2 even started and Sobotka's plan started backfiring horribly. Sobotka's ends are wrong and his means are wronger.

Why does Sobotka do this? To protect his union members. He does vast harm to everyone else to help the people immediately surrounding him. And Sobotka does not want to admit this to himself, but perpetuating the harmful institution fails to ultimately help even this inner circle (look at the injury of New Charles and others like him, or how Nicky chose not to go to school -- this is again, before everything started going horribly wrong).

How is any of this really different from what Barksdale does? Barksdale is not selfish -- he lives for his family and his gang. In the same way as Sobotka, he harms Baltimore, and he ultimately harms his inner circle by enmeshing them in violence. He justifies his actions by wilfully refusing to see further than the tip of his nose. Avon to D'Angelo: let me teach you how to avoid seeing the murders that are right in front of you. Sobotka to The Greek: I don't want to know what's in the can.

[Ashura]

So far, I'm digging Drive. I like what they've done so far with at least three fourths of the characters, so it's not just Nathan Fillion keeping me around to watch, I'm actually interested in what's going on.

I do wonder how long it'll take for the whole 'oh, by the way.. you thought I was a real cop/coffee shop worker/flourist/baker/etc? Well I really work for THE RACE PEOPLE and I'm here to give you a message.' thing to get old.

Has anyone caught Raines? Essentially Jeff Goldblum is an insane police detective who, when faced with a homicide, imagines/hallucinates the victim talking to him. The way he imagines the vic changes depending on what he learns. So they can go from prom queen to slut to whatever depending on what he learns. They only go away when he solves the case.

[jdoe]

I agree a lot with your points, Broco, but I can't simply equate Sobotka down to a metaphorical force that is only harming Baltimore. He and the dock community are all humans. Is his right to fight for his own survival wrong? As much of a detriment they may be to the city's advancement, to ask them to simply cut off their support systems for the greater good seems draconian. One of the minor points of the season is that there is no room for them in Baltimore anymore beyond the docks. The end of the season shows their inevitable downfall, and it's anything but an improvement.

And I do no agree that Sobotka and Avon are parallels. A younger, less powerful Avon, maybe, but the Avon we see is far from a willfully ignorant pawn along the lines of Frank. He's shown sympathy and there is a certain tragedy with his fall from power, but his reasons for keeping the drug institution alive is not survival (this is season 1, not 3 when there is a threat). His instinctive need to conduct murders to show his power is evidence.

I may write more later, I've got to go.

[Ebrey]

There are strong parallels between dock working and drug dealing. Both are risky jobs that pay shit compared to safer jobs in offices. But to poor young people, the senior drug dealer/union member seems like the most glamorous job in the world.

Also, isn't it true that the Barksdale family had been running Baltimore crime for generations? This gives Avon the same reason to deal drugs as Sobotka has to be a dockworker: it's the family job.

Admittedly, Sobotka wouldn't shoot someone. This makes him more human and yet more cowardly than Avon.

[jdoe]

[Broco]

I'm certainly not saying Sobotka is not deserving of sympathy and that there aren't other, more human sides of him than his economic impact. But everyone on The Wire is a sympathetic human character, excepting Marlo (and my money's on that that will change next season), and I was just objecting to your implication that he deserved more sympathy than the rest. I mean everyone in The Wire is just doing their best in life according to their respective limited perspectives, their "code", and those perspectives drive the ethical compromises that they choose to make. The docks, the drug dealers, the cops, the teachers, the stick-up crews, the political operatives, they're all the same in this. How is Sobotka different just because he is a member of a subculture where murdering people isn't conventional?

[Wall of Beef]

I have not read this thread, but I just wanna drop some love for "Little People, Big World" The Roloff family is very entertaining. Its surprising how quickly you actually forget that most of the family is Dwarves.

Oh the show got fucking extreme this year. A dude got the shit kicked out of him by a 1500 pound concrete block on a Trebuchet.
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[jdoe]

[Broco]

[Broco]

Somewhat offtopic, but I just checked The Wire's official forums for the first time, and the stupidity of the crowd there depresses me. I was expecting discussion as pretentious as ours.

[Ebrey]

[Ashura]

Man, I (almost) live in Baltimore, but I've never seen The Wire. Maybe I should. My friend was talking about an episode where someone stashes bodies in boarded up row-homes while we were driving by some the other day.

Is it filmed here? I think it would be hard to capture Baltimore otherwise.




(some photos I took recently for an animation project.)

[luckystrike]

The Wire is in fact filmed in Baltimore City.

On Sobotka: I agree with most of what has been said by both sides of the spectrum: on the one hand, Sobotka is (unknowingly, I think) perpetuating an inevitable destruction of an establishment that doesn't have a place any more through illegal and harmful propagation. On the other hand, unlike Avon who gets most of his family (and community) involved in the cycle of violence, Sobotka keeps most of his own (Besides Ziggy, Nicky, and Horseface) out of the ring, and takes most of it on himself. I agree that neither Avon nor Sobotka were very far-sighted, though Avon stuck to the here and now at great personal fault (look at the difference between him and how he reacts to Stringer [Avon: "Just a gangster, I suppose"], who was trying to prepare for the long run in Season 3) while Sobotka was desperately trying to get the longshoreman community in Baltimore new life by dredging the docks. Also, I think Sobotka's crew was in a serious predicament, facing total extermination. You get the feeling that if the union falls, most of these guys really have nowhere else to go, both professionally and socially. And fuck Prezbelewski's dad, man that guy is a real piece of shit.

Also, I think most of this discussion about The Wire could warrant moving to a new thread! A lot of good discussion going on here, but I think its sort of derailing another good thread.

[jdoe]

[Dracko]

Joke's on them, then.

It's not like TV's around to teach people not to be stupid. In any case, if it's got an audience to live on, then so much the better.
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[CubaLibre]

Man Ashura, you live in Balmer? I'm in Silver Spring right now.

Wonder how many MD SBers there are.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[aderack]

Baltimore looks like Boston with straight streets.

[elvis.shrugged]

Less than two weeks until new Veronica Mars! Let's hope it doesn't get canceled my brothers :(

24 has lost it this season.

This week's episode of Bones was really fucking good.

This forum needs a Twin Peaks quote thread amirite?
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last.fm
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[KonamiCode]

I'm thinking that 24 introduced Ricky Schroeder this season to replace Jack Bauer.

-He's essentially the *same* character as Jack. He's only more abrasive because he's not willing to put up with the incompetence at CTU.
-We don't know much about him, but they have hinted a bit at his history, which gives opportunity to bring in "old foes" in a future season.

And the ultra tin-foil hat reasoning:
He's got the same number of letters in his first and last name as Jack, and he's blonde.

Not that I think 24 is smart enough to do it, but it would shake things up.

I still want to see Chloe killed off. This season has been completely shit.
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THAT GIRL ON THE INTERWEB WILL NEVER LOVE YOU

[remote]

Doesn't look like anyone's talking about The Riches. Am I the only one enjoying this show?

It's got Eddie Izzard (being very serious!), and it's got Gregg Henry (who was in Slither and an episode of Firefly, among tons of other stuff). Minnie Driver's not so bad, either.

Hard to say where the show is going, but it's fun to watch --- there's always a sense that it's all about to come undone, whether the show is canceled or the Malloy family's charade crashes and burns.

I like this poster:


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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[elvis.shrugged]

[SplashBeats]

[KonamiCode]