Dodgy Wiring
‘The best show on TV.’ ‘A gruellingly edgy combination of complexity and clarity.’ ‘If you haven’t seen The Wire, stab yourself in the eyes, you useless twat.’ The last quote was made up, but it’s not far off from what all those gushing articles about The Wire are like.
You can’t see the words The Wire without the phrase ‘best show on TV’ turning up next to it. Whilst it’s always had great press, the beginning of the fifth season saw a massive jump in coverage. The Guardian - failing to learn from their ‘stop Boris becoming Mayor’ campaign - have been the worst offenders, dedicating a part of their media section solely to The Wire. At the moment there are 47 articles on The Wire and that’s not counting their weekly recaps.
But it’s not even the number that rankles, it’s the sheer repetition. Every newspaper writes about it like no one’s seen it, despite all four series occupying the top ten of Amazon’s best-selling DVD list. So we have to repeatedly hear about how it’s more than a cop show, how there’s no good or evil, how realistic it is or how amazing all its actors are.
In between all this unadulterated hype, The Wire’s flaws get swept under the carpet. No article ever talks about that season two being worse than season one. It wasn’t Heroes season two terrible, but it took an amazing season three to bring the show back on track.
No article mentions how Aiden Gillen’s accent jumps from Irish to American to English in a single sentence. And worst of all, it looks like newspapers have picked the wrong time to back the show, as the fifth season is the worst of the lot. The newsroom storyline has obvious endings and black and white characters, something The Wire always prided itself on not doing. I don’t even disagree with the statements being made about the show, but overhype only brings contempt.
I’m a massive fan of the show, but there’s only so far you can go in praise of something before you turn on people’s inner contrarian. As a direct result of The Wire’s hype, I’ve heard someone say that Dexter was better than The Wire. That’s Dexter, the show with the most ridiculous premise since Pretty Woman. Think about that the next time you start another ‘best show on tv’ rant.
Jason Dike
We are listening to The Killers
Nobody ever mentions the fact that it can be impossible to understand what some characters are saying. I think I only managed to decifer about 10% of words that Snoop said.
Comment by Cynical Scribble — 5/08/08
Last time The Wire was written about on here I said I’d only seen series one (because, for me, to watch a series involves shelling for the DVDs and then prioritising watching them above things I want to watch that are actually on telly and so can’t wait) and that remains the case; I’ve just seen the one series, having been turned onto it by David Simon’s Homicide book.
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I think it’s really great but its canonisation by the media recently has started to irk me, because most of it seems to imply that ‘the best written TV series’ and ‘the best TV series’ are analogous; sorry, but they’re not.
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No one disgraces themselves in the other departments, but they are bettered by others working on other shows I believe. I can remember watching the pilot and thinking: this came from the same stable as The Sopranos!? Fortunately, the quality shot up almost immediately when the series was greenlit; but you still wouldn’t figure the two shows for cousins if you had only seen clips of them; lots of people are saying how novelistic it is… cool, but that doesn’t automatically trump cinematic. And the jury over the best TV series could reasonably still be out. Let’s just concede that The Wire is the best at what it does, and wait a bit more before anointing it more.
Comment by Benjamin Knight — 5/08/08