So I finally started watching The Wire.
Went out and rented the first three DVD’s on Monday. I’m about to watch the tenth episode now. I’m ridiculous-addicted — living in Wire World. This is why I’m not writing as much as last week — which is maybe a good thing: one obsession displaces another.
I’m normally cynical about almost everything (e.g. I never took to 24 or The Sopranos, or that show about the island — whatsitcalled). To say that I’m not disappointed by The Wire is pretty high praise… But then on top of that there’s a kind of physical need to continue consuming it. One episode ends and you just automatically have to put the next one on.
Here’s Wire fan Matthew Yglesias today, responding to comparisons made between The Godfather and The Sopranos:
The relevant comparison here is to The Wire which, though not quite equal in length to The Sopranos, is comparable in scale. And the Wire, though I think it does flag a bit in seasons four and five, absolutely never stops feeling like a single coherent work that deserves to be watched uninterrupted from end to end. The Sopranosis extremely well-made television, but especially after season two it begins to get very “televisiony” — full of occasional digressions and sub-plots that feel like filler or stalling or efforts to spread screen time around rather than being crucial to the development of the story. If The Wire had never existed, one might be inclined to say that this is just intrinsic to the medium, but we while it is endemic to the medium we also know now that it’s avoidable.
This is just when I start to have fun: talking and thinking about new mediums, formats, and modes of entertaining and informing. DVD’s have certainly changed TV — not just the way we watch it and the way it’s distributed, but the way it’s conceived.
Yglesias quotes Douthat, who suggested that comparing The Godfather to The Sopranos is “a little like comparing James Joyce’s “The Dead” to David Copperfield.” It’s worth remembering that giant old books like that sometimes were often first published in serial form, in periodicals before coming out as all-in-one books.
Now I’m not just interested in what happens on The Wire. I’m dying to find out what happens to TV.
[Add. - check out these literary reactions to the show.]
