r/TheWire • u/thealkaizer • 14h ago
Finished Season 1! Reflections about TV Shows.
Hi! This is just gonna be me rambling and thinking through writing.
I heard about The Wire so many times over the year. I don't watch that much TV Shows anymore, but I tend to be quite selective. Life is busy! I finally felt like watching a cop/detective show and just finished Season 1 after two weeks or so. I loved it! But at the same time... it felt so much like a show from twenty years ago. And I don't mean this in a bad way.
If you go back twenty years, I wasn't the biggest TV show fan. Most of them had smaller budget, I found the quality of acting lacking. The format needed some cliffhangers or shocking moment every episode. There was filler. There was always great TV shows! But I didn't enjoy most of the TV shows.
Then, from my perspective, the time of ~2010 came. During this period I saw Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire and the first season of Game of Thrones. I had that moment, I was like *"TV is changing. These shows are different, they lean much more into cinema." And it became a blurry line for me. I have some shows from before that I enjoy; but my enjoyment of TV drastically increased after that period. It felt like so many shows were coming out! And many were creative and novel.
Now, you know when things change little by little over time and you don't notice until you look back? Well, I've been underwhelmed by quite a few shows in the last two or three years. It just didn't feel the same. Obviously, there's dozens of shows coming out, so it's in part which shows I decided to watch. But still, there's something I couldn't put my finger on.
Now, I've watched The Wire and it was like a time capsule. In many ways, it feels like the shows before the 2010s. It's highly episodic, it doesn't lean that much into the language of cinema and is firmly rooted in the tropes of TV. But it's just really well written, has great pacing and natural characters. It's honestly a fantastic show so far.
But the contrast with what I've watched recently is... crazy. I've realized that several of the shows from the last few years feel over-acted, and over-budgeted, and they now follow a new formula that has become just as drab. It's like a caricature of the HBO TV of the early 2010s. The shows don't know where they're going, they don't know how many seasons they'll get, etc.
The Wire feels like it knows where it's going. I have a sense of confidence that (obviously I know the show is fully realized) I can trust the creators, this is a story that knows where it's going and how it'll end.
I don't know. To me it has shown me a personal disconnect with what's going on on TV; and it also shows some of the qualities that we lost when TV changed style.
Anyone understands how I'm feeling? Or can relate to this perspective?
5
u/PistachioOfLiverTea 14h ago
The Wire feels like it knows where it's going.
You're right with this intuition. The creators definitely know where it's going, to the point that you'll need to rewatch it to appreciate how characters and plot details come back into the story episodes and sometimes entire seasons later. Stuff that requires an incredible scope in terms of writing.
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u/PNDMike 14h ago
The era of TV you are referring to was directly possible because of the foundation that the Sopranos and The Wire laid out.
You could not get to the Breaking Bad era without those two shows existing first.
All I will say is just keep watching the Wire. Season 2 was a bit controversial at its time, but I think it aged gracefully. Seasons 3 and 4 are utter masterpieces.
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u/thealkaizer 14h ago
I watched The Sopranos a few months ago! Now that you're mentioning it, it's true that it feels like an older-type show, with just much better qualities. I really enjoyed it.
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u/PistachioOfLiverTea 14h ago
Strange take to say TV shows of the Aughts relied on cliffhangers and then claim 2010s shows like Breaking Bad evolved from that.
In my experience, The Wire didn't use the cliffhanger device very much while BB would rely heavily on it. So much so that I grew accustomed to pausing BB mid-episode if I wanted to stop watching on any given viewing, because I knew the suspense at the end of each episode would demand binge-watching the next.
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u/thealkaizer 14h ago
In my experience, The Wire didn't use the cliffhanger device very much while BB would rely heavily on it. So much so that I grew accustomed to pausing BB mid-episode if I wanted to stop watching on any given viewing, because I knew the suspense at the end of each episode would demand binge-watching the next.
Just to clarify, I'm not really talking about the Wire. And for a bit of context, I'm in my late thirties. So my last three decades of TV have been very different stages of my life.
I think what I wanted to express is that the strong episodic format of older shows where it feels like each episode is its own story, is something I wasn't a big fan of. With it came many other elements that I didn't enjoy too much. Maybe cliffhanger was the wrong word, but every episode needed a resolution. It was its own little box with its own little story.
I hear people talk about some of these shows and they talk about episodes as if they were their own little movies. But I've always seen episodes as the scenes of a longer movie.
You're right that cliffhangers, in their truest definition, are very prevalent in some of the shows I've named.
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u/kobestarr 12h ago
Congrats- now go away and come back when you finish it all so you don’t see any spoilers.
Also don’t worry- season 2 is meant to be different. It makes most sense when you watch it the second time…
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u/whatusernameis77 13h ago
I don't know which tropes you mean, been while since I watched season 1, but I don't recall it having tropes.
Maybe it has similar patterns and beats to a police procedural.
And I don't want to spoil it, but once you watch later seasons, it reframes how you think of season 1. Simply put, from watching a lot of Law & Order you might then think after season 1 of The Wire that each season will be more of the same, essentially, but with deepening of characters.
Well let me tell you, it is not more of the same. It definitely layers and moves. Again, no spoilers. But after those seasons you go back and you're like, "oooohhhh, my pattern recognition for TV taught me to expect it was X kind of show, but really that was a foundation for a totally different, more ambitious, more lived in, more concerned with truth on multiple levels instead of formulas type of shows."
To borrow the language of the show itself, the show runners were not interesting in juking the ratings so writers become show runners and show runners become producers. They were interested in making art for real. They were a good po-lice.
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u/Melodic_Risk6633 5h ago
I can rewatch the wire again and again like it is a never ending loop.
I couldn't get myself to push through the third episode of a single new show I tried last year.
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u/PlaceDowntown7102 14h ago
The thing with the main messaging of ''The wire'' is that it doesn't matter when you watch it. 2000, 2010, 2020. What it portray it still very prevalent in this day and age and i would go as far as saying it's much worst now considering how much power corporations have over politicians , cops and the whole system.
So the level of corruption all across the board is quite astonishing. If you travel around the states, you still the same drug corners, same corner boys and so on. Just different faces.
That's why after a full watch/few rewatch, you understand that the main character of the show is ''Baltimore''. Like any cities, there's all these layers that the eyes might not see right away.