(Part 2) Top products from r/TheWire

Of these projects, I most enjoyed The Wire. But it's worth evaluating each of these projects in terms of what they were trying to accomplish, since they all had different goals.

1. Homicide: Life on the Street
   
   This was adapted from Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, but I don't know how much Simon worked on the show day-to-day.
   
   This show is much more of a crime procedural than any of the other works here. And with a few notable exceptions—e.g., Luther Mahoney or Brodie—the near-exclusive default point-of-view is that of the police.
   
   The show was groundbreaking for network TV at the time. For one thing, at least one of the main-cast characters was a cop who was an asshole and basically corrupt. This show also demonstrated that the bosses and their subordinates do not always see eye-to-eye, and not just in the "crusty-but-benign" way described in the movie Network, either. Most cop shows at the time didn't just show cops, but they identified with the cops' perspective. (This is still pretty common today.) This is legitimate, but showing that cops have human foibles which have on-the-job repercussions was taking a chance, especially for a network show at that time. And, like The Wire, it got critical acclaim but relatively small (but devoted!) audiences.
   
   The show's style was very different from that of, say, The Wire. For example, it had a non-diegetic score and camera moves that were more likely to draw attention to themselves. H:LotS also included collaborations with Baltimore native Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana. The latter went on to create HBO's Oz, and you can see plenty of influence there from Homicide.
   
   H:LotS was also able to attract high-level talent throughout its run. Not only was the regular and recurring cast very strong (as you'd likely expect, even without having seen a single episode), but it attracted a number of actors best known for their film work. As just one example, Robin Williams appeared in the second season premiere, playing the husband of a crime victim. Steve Buscemi played an odious racist. Arguably, though, the most memorable guest appearance was Moses Gunn as Risley Tucker, the sole suspect in the homicide of 11-year old Adena Watson. Gunn may not be a household name, but he's been in projects from the original Shaft to Roots to stage performances.
   
   Homicide was also remarkable, especially at the time, in that it shot on location in Baltimore. (For context, consider that Vancouver (almost) never plays itself; typically, a show at the time would be shot in New York or Los Angeles, even it it's set in another city.) It also helped establish some of the vocabulary familiar to those who've watched The Wire: "the box", "the board", etc.
   
   
2. The Corner
   
   This was a six-part miniseries for HBO based on David Simon's book about real-life addicts and dealers. If Homicide was primarily a show from the perspective of the cops, The Corner introduced what life was really like for those who lived in places like West Baltimore.
   
   For me, Homicide was always more stylized in its aesthetic, but more traditional in the types of stories it tried to tell. It was groundbreaking relative to other cop shows, but it still chose the cops' vantage points as the default. The Corner inverted this.
   
   A lot of the content from The Corner will be familiar to those who've already seen The Wire. (And, conversely, those who've seen The Corner would have some useful frame of reference for the events depicted in The Wire.) One attribute The Corner clearly focused on was authenticity. Homicide was a solid show, but The Corner felt real. Much of the cast of The Corner reappears in The Wire, too. And some of the real-life people whose lives Simon chronicled in his book played minor characters on The Wire. One of the most notable examples was the late DeAndre McCullough, who played Brother Mouzone's assistant Lamar.
   
   Again: a killer cast. A good story, well-told. And, for a change-of-pace: even some Emmy nominations and wins!
   
   
3. The Wire
   
   I trust you're all familiar with this, right? :)
   
   I think having laid some groundwork with the reporting which underlay Homicide and The Corner, The Wire had the basis to be incredibly ambitious. It told stories from the perspectives of cops and dealers and dope fiends and stevedores and City Hall and newspaper newsrooms. It also had a definite point-of-view, and it was unafraid to advocate for its argument, but by showing and not merely telling. Yes, it's about all the conflict between characters on all sides of the law. But it's also making some very important arguments: the drug war is unwinnable, and the consequences of that gratuitous futility are disastrous for countless people. Deindustrialization of big cities leaves the corner as the only employer in town. Actual reform that will have any kind of substantive effect will require something other than the standard bromides that have typically gotten politicians elected and re-elected. And so on.
   
   
4. Generation Kill
   
   This is a seven-part HBO miniseries based on the book Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Ice Man, Captain America, and the New Face of American War by Evan Wright, documenting those American Marines who were the tip-of-the-spear in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As with The Corner and The Wire, this goes out of its way to convey authenticity, especially in the context of the military jargon. Oh, and you get to see Baltimore native James Ransone, who played Ziggy, as a Marine, too.
   
   
5. Treme
   
   This is Simon's love letter to the city of New Orleans, set in the immediate aftermath of Hurrican Katrina. Again: a killer cast, including everyone from Clarke Peters (who played Lester) to Khandi Alexander (who played Fran Boyd on The Corner) to New Orleans native Wendell Pierce (Bunk Moreland) to John Goodman (in damn-near EVERY movie) to Stephen Colbert's bandleader Jon Batiste (as himself).
   
   For me, Treme was solid, but it was less compelling than The Wire. A lot of the goal of Treme was to show the importance and centrality of New Orleans to American culture, in everything from music to food. For me, that case seemed secondary to the lives of the characters themselves. Many of the themes from The Wire are familiar: indifferent institutions, crime and violence, etc. But it also has some ferociously good performances, amazing music performed live, and an important reminder that life for so many in New Orleans still wasn't really "after Katrina" yet, even years after the storm, because of just how much destruction was caused all around.
   
   Oh, and like The Wire (among others), Treme cast a lot of local New Orleans natives who lived through the storm, as well as musicians who hadn't grown up with training as actors.
   
   
6. Show Me a Hero
   
   The title comes from an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: "show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy". Like The Corner, this is another six-part HBO miniseries adapted from a nonfiction book. It's about a huge fight that the city of Yonkers, NY had with federal courts by resisting efforts to remedy housing segregation.
   
   Some of the themes should be familiar: a stellar cast including Oscar Isaac, Winona Ryder (in a role I wouldn't have expected for her), Catherine Keener, Alfred Molina, and Clarke Peters (again). As you might have guessed from the quote, this story doesn't have a happy ending for everyone. The main theme is about how to do the right thing, especially as an elected official, in the face of violent opposition from much of the city, and what cost doing the right thing will entail.
   
   
7. The Deuce
   
   This is a forthcoming David Simon series about the world around Times Square in the 1970s: pornography, just as it was becoming legalized, HIV/AIDS, drug use, and the economic conditions of the city at the time. Even if the whole team totally dropped the ball here, I'm sure this will be better than HBO's 1970s music drama Vinyl, at a minimum.
   
   The cast includes James Franco (playing twins), Maggie Gyllenhaal, Anwan Glover (Slim Charles), Lawrence Gilliard, Jr. (D'Angelo Barksdale), Chris Bauer (Frank Sobotka), and Gbenga Akinnagbe (Chris Partlow). Oh, and the pilot is being directed by Michelle MacLaren, whose directing credits include Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Westworld, among others.

Your post inspired me to go track this down.

http://www.amazon.com/Down-Hole-unWired-World-Ogden/dp/1576876020

I haven't read much up on it, just clicking around on links like a true internet man. I'll try to post more info when I read up on what this book is suppose to be. All I know is looks awesome!

Try Snitch or Wised Up, both pretty good.

http://www.amazon.com/Snitch-Informants-Cooperators-Corruption-Justice/dp/B001G7RCXE

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0786016221

http://www.amazon.com/Search-Respect-Structural-Analysis-Sciences/dp/0521017114/ref=la_B001IGHNIW_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368699663&sr=1-1 this is a VERY intresting book about an anthropologist who studied crack dealers, its pretty cool.

[Link to book] (http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Paid-Anthropology-Contemporary-Issues/dp/0801495989/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369931821&sr=8-1&keywords=getting+paid) for others but also because it sounds very interesting and I don't want to forget about it.

Crowns

> Countless black women would rather attend church naked than hatless. For these women, a church hat, flamboyant as it may be, is no mere fashion accessory; it's a cherished African American custom, one observed with boundless passion by black women of various religious denominations.

My wife is the manager of a GED program for 17-24 year olds in Chicago. I've heard many stories similar to Dukie's (and the rest of the child characters for that matter)...parents stealing from their kids, blatant neglect, nowhere to go, living on friends\family's couches, on the street, gang members who want out with nowhere to go. It's quite disturbing just how many kids out there start so far in the hole. These kids I hear about (and met) are also very street smart, but don't have essential skills to be successful beyond a minimum wage job indicative of failed institutions and social neglect that plague our inner city. Season 4 was so hard for me to watch because of these parallels.

If anyone is interested into getting a further glimpse of the inner-city life, there is a great book my wife had me read called "Random Family". While it is considered a work of fiction, it is written by a social worker who gathered her insight from working in the Bronx for about 11 years and most of the characters are based on real people. I had read it before watching The Wire and gave more context to the kid’s environment.

The Last Shot by Darcy Frey reminded me a lot of Season 4. It's a true story that follows 4 NYC high school basketball players in the mid 1990s, trying to make it out of the neighborhood. Very well-written and thought-provoking, especially with the epilogue that came 10 years later.

I think you can find this essay and many more academic pieces like it in this book

It's not that far off the truth: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0040EQ5OC?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

According to Williams in "All the Pieces Matter," he didn't know Landsman was a real person until after filming a few episodes. When the real Landsman saw Williams, he immediately went on a diet.

Check out this book, Basic Baltimorese.

There are a few accents in Baltimore, but they're similar. There's the East Baltimore, Dunkdalk and Essex (primarily white) accent. Ziggy has this accent nailed down. It reminds me of going to diners along Merritt Blvd as a kid where all the waitresses called you "hon."

Then there's the African American accent, which is a bit different. A "dugg" is that thing in your yard that barks at strangers.

Ghettoheat. Customers who viewed this also viewed The Wire, and The Avon Barksdale Story.

You can get them legally, but he probably just torrented them.

Here you go

Book: "Truth To Be Told"

Book: "The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television"

Video: "Style in the Wire"

Anyone who works in Baltimore knows cops don't sit on rooftops, O"Malley didn't defund the police department to help schools, and that drug dealers don't stand on corners.

The police department soaked up most of the city spending increases during O'Malley's tenure, how do I know this, because I reported on nearly $50 million in overtime doled out by the department in less than two years. SOme cops who were technically 80 percent disabled were collecting over $100k per year. Police were also getting 8 hours of overtime for meeting arrest quotas, which was easy during the zero tolerance era which the The Wire completely ignored,

Since then, the focus of drug interdiction has been run and gun. A unit called the Violent Impact Crimes Division comprised of roughly 60-80 plan clothes cops (not undercover) who are tasked with making not one, but several drug arrests per day. They drive around the city in rental cars and disrupt. Thus, not time for sitting on roof tops. As for standing on corners, pretty tough with the amount to LE roaming the east and west side looking to make quick hit arrests.

This is just my observations as a reporter..

If you want to get more of what is realistic you can read a book I wrote with a former homicide detective...

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Do-Kill-Pathology-Baltimore/dp/1463534809/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1

A novel he wrote whilst in prison apparently.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wolf-Trap-Dennis-Wise/dp/0975393820

EDIT: and another - http://www.amazon.com/In-Guns-Trust-Dennis-Wise/dp/1424329566/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1

"Difficult Men" is a book that covers a variety of TV shows with male protagonists, e.g. Breaking Bad, Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Wire...so it's not focused on The Wire, but it's got a lot of great anecdotes.

On the multitudes of problems with Season 5:

> For these, among other reasons, perhaps the deck was stacked against The Wire as it moved into season five. For many involved, there was a palpable sense of having peaked...

>In the writers’ room , oddly, there was more dissent about a different story line: one in which McNulty (reactivated for this final season), in a final, desperate effort to direct the department’s energy toward the drug infrastructure, invents a false serial killer. Simon had been toying with the story for many years; it had started as part of an aborted novel he had begun to write as far back as 1996 and of which he had completed one hundred pages. The plot would not seem to be any more of a radical departure from reality than Hamsterdam had been, but it was the cause of much conversation both in the writers’ room and among viewers


McNulty being McNulty:

> The kids were not the only thing different about season four. Dominic West had been growing increasingly restless. With a new baby back in London, he was putting his wilder days behind him, and it was hard to be an ocean away, occupying the same head space as the hard-drinking, skirt-chasing McNulty for yet another season. There were also the temptations of bigger stages. Almost alone among The Wire actors, West had become moderately famous thanks to the show. There were murmurs about his becoming the next James Bond. For all these reasons, West had asked to be put on the back burner for season four. The previous season had ended with McNulty busted down to beat cop and happy about it.

> ...Still, West was needed for at least brief scenes in every episode, and the production often tied itself into knots attempting to accommodate his schedule— often cramming scenes from several different episodes into his visits to Baltimore, about a week per month, so he could hurry back to London. This was already causing some stress among what was usually a strikingly peaceful ensemble. When West began showing up unprepared and grumbling, his fellow actors felt it was time for some self-policing. A group of them— Sohn, Royo, and Gilliam, and others— rented a hotel room and staged a gentle but pointed intervention.

Idris Elba being quite unhappy about an alternative story arc (obvious spoilers if you haven't gotten past season 3) for him:

> By all accounts, the producers honestly meant to sit down and talk with Idris Elba about the timing and manner of Stringer Bell’s death. Instead, that meeting never happened, and he learned about it by reading the script— and subsequently hit the roof. Making things worse was the script direction that had Omar standing over Bell’s body and urinating on it, apparently a real Baltimore gang tradition. Elba headed to the set and started telling fellow actors he wouldn’t shoot the scene, enlisting some in his cause.

> “He was pissed, man . And I got it, because , in effect, we were firing him,” said Pelecanos, who wrote the episode. “David and I went to his trailer and tried to talk him down. We said, ‘This is the end of the character. We can’t keep his story going, it’s not logical. And this is exactly the way he would probably go out.’” Elba fixated on the pee. Omar wouldn’t be peeing on him, Simon and Pelecanos said; he’d be peeing on a fictional character. “Not on my character,” Elba told them.

(someone should ask him about this in his IAMA today)

Many other great anecdotes about the show in this book. Well worth picking up, even if you don't like any of the other shows covered in the book (extremely unlikely)


I also bought Snoop's autobiography, which is a good read, but her description of getting onto The Wire is unfortunately brief (though the rest of her life is very interesting)




edit: One more from "Difficult Men"...the discarded plots are a hoot:

> This was the flip side of Simon’s determination to expand The Wire each season. You can see it in Pelecanos’s story notes and beat sheets, handwritten on legal pads, which begin season three in neat, amply spaced penmanship and grow increasingly more cramped and chaotic— filled with arrows, cross-outs, reorderings, and parentheticals— as the episodes progress. The notes are also tantalizing glimpses into phantom story lines left on the cutting room floor: at various points, the plot included Omar kidnapping Poot, the hapless Everyman corner boy, and, as disturbing, Herc wooing Beadie Russell.