Eagerly awaiting your post at 6am tomorrow morning after you finish the season.
Absolutely true. Speaking from first-hand experience, trauma teams (the docs on er are a somewhat baffling mix of Emergency Room and trauma docs) rarely, if ever, scream “CRASH CART! LET’S GO PEOPLE!” It is usually a couple residents and nurses working intently with professional, calm verbal exchanges between them, while an attending physician offers guidance without even laying hands on the patient. However, that would look pretty odd and dry, so you have actors playing doctors and nurses screaming and dripping sweat and colliding their egos together and anything else that is more entertaining than the real thing.
Which, in my experience, involves severely mangled people who either die or live encased in bandages and other dressings for several weeks, as opposed to them being wheeled happily out the door by their loved ones the next day.
I have to sort of laugh whenever I am watching one of these shows and an intern or resident can’t do something properly and the attending yanks him/her off the patient and does it themselves. I never once saw that happen. What I did see, no matter how complex or life-threatening the situation or procedure was (for example, an emergency C-section), were interns and residents fumbling around a bit and trying to pretend they weren’t fumbling around while the attending sat there and made comments like “Jesus, will you retards hurry it up, it’s 3 o’clock in the fucking morning.”
Scrubs is probably more true-to-life than ER.
Now we’re getting to the heart of why the original post was so wildly daft. I like ER but it feels like fake drama. The Wire feels truer than life.
From that interview:
Well, we weren’t cynical about having been given ten, 12, 13 hours—whatever we had for any season from HBO. All of that was an incredible gift. The Godfather narrative, even including the third film, the weak one, is like… what? Nine hours?
Yeah, about nine hours.
And look how much story they were able to tell. We were getting more than that for each season. So goddamn it, you better have something to say. That sounds really simple, but it’s actually a conversation that I don’t think happens on a lot of serialized drama. Certainly not on American television. I think that a lot of people believe that our job as TV writers is to get the show up as a franchise and get as many viewers, as many eyeballs, as we can, and keep them. So if they like x, give them more of x. If they don’t like y, don’t do as much y.
One of the things that impressed me about The Wire is just how dense it is. 50 minutes of that show felt like 3 or 4 episodes of most other shows.
Indeed. The Wire is not like ER, and it is not a cop show. It is an epic docudrama about the slow piecemeal collapse of civic life. It is about many different systems within the city all dying in their own way, each one contributing to the failure of the others. It is about the fact that all of the pieces matter.
FYI, to those looking to pick this show up, Best Buy has a sale on HBO programs this week. The complete series of The Wire is priced at $89.99.
Also highly recommended: Mr. Show (the complete collection) for $22.49.
This. I’m rewatching Season 1. The lieutenant just caught Herc and his partner scamming money off of the forfeiture, but it turns out that Herc just lost the money in the wheel well of his crown vic. That whole arch took 5 minutes, start to finish. For any other serial, that would take SEVERAL EPISODES of boring procedural filler to the point where it wouldn’t be interesting anymore.
I liked that scene because it asks the viewer to consciously look at it from Daniels’ perspective. Herc asks “you think he’ll believe us that we lost it?” and Carver says “would you?” This questions the possible opinion the viewer may have that Daniels is overreacting because we know what he doesn’t know, that it was an actual mistake.
And yeah, there is nary a detail that gets overlooked like this. Riggs questions her decision to have Omar take the stand as a witness, which reinforces the feeling the viewer probably got that he isn’t actually a witness based on that questioning scene in the basement headquarters. That the writers actually go back to settle or reaffirm the viewer’s opinion on the matter is brilliant.
It’s all these little things that add up. There isn’t a single wasted scene in The Wire. Not one. Every bit of dialogue, even the ones where two dealers are just shooting the shit, is almost always relevant. Even in those circumstances you might get a bit of insight into the motivations of some other character that is being talked about, or a tidbit of information that pertains to a plot point. None of it should be missed, which is why I advocate a second watching of the whole series to truly realize how fucking brilliant the show is.
It conveys the struggle against social, racial, economic, and judicial entropy on a dozen individual levels, and then slaps you with the futility of all the characters’ efforts. It’s like, life, maaaaaan.
H.
It’s that deep, baby.
Spoiler
Which made Bubbles’ and Cutty’s successes so powerful, even if they were as simple as getting clean and holding down a low end job. I feel like the Cutty story-line is Pelecanos’ influence, he just feels like one of his characters, though I have no idea if that’s the case.
There’s an auto shop down the street from me in a crummy neighborhood that Cutty’s gym kind of reminded me of. It opened like 12 years ago and was just a rundown garage with handpainted signs of plywood and spray paint, and I think they originally only sold tires and fixed flats. But every year it got a little better–real signs! more services! It actually looks really professional now. So it’s been pretty cool to see a success story like that in progress.
See, this I just don’t get. Cutty’s story was alright, but The Adventures of Bubbles & Co. was the single most boring (occasionally downright irritating) subplot of the entire series for me.
S-S-S-SPOILER-R-R-R
Fucker even stitched Herc right up, whose new employment by Levy was pretty detrimental to the whole investigation in the end; so no, Bubbles, you just go ahead and rot in that basement.
Wow, I can’t believe you found his story boring. He is such a lovable man. To each their own and all that but still I’m really surprised.
Except for the fact that the only reason the case was made at all was thanks to Herc’s employment by Levi.
And how did Bubbles stitch up Herc? I can’t claim he didn’t because I don’t remember him affecting Herc’s situation at all.
The only problem I had with that show is that I hated everything about McNulty. He was by far the weakest character in the series and by far the worst actor.
Oh yeah, and the shot of Chris and Weebay together in the prison yard made me really wish there was another season.
IIRC , Herc was fired because he assaulted some church guy after a bad tip from Bubbles. Of course that was before Herc ‘let’ someone beat Bubbles up after saying he would protect him.
Herc’s empty promise of protection leading to Bubbles getting beaten–and by causal chain indirectly to the hot shot misfire and Bubs finally hitting rock bottom–is all I remember about their intersections, too. Which just goes to show I need to rewatch!
Ah yes. I can’t believe I forgot about that.
I’m four episodes into Season 5, and I’m not really feeling the newspaper story. Maybe it was sadder when the economy was good, but now it just feels like a couple ex-newspaper guys playing a tiny violin for themselves.