I was a bit tepid on season 2 at first but damn if it didn’t grow on me. The way the show connects various parts & factions of Baltimore was brilliant.
There are two types of people in this world. People who think Season 2 of The Wire is pretty amazing…and people who are wrong.
It took me something like 5 episodes to get into Season 1 but then god damn it was good.
I still miss Hampsterdam!
Season 2 is a slow burn. It gives itself away with one of the early episode titles. But the payoff is worth it, IMO, and the characters at the dock are deep and rich and human unlike those in any other show.
For me, 2 stands toe to toe with Seasons 1 and 4, but the Wire is ultimately more of a total story than a series of seasons.
I haven’t, will need to check it out, but that does remind me that the film City of God really is like a 2-hour version of The Wire but set in Brazil. It’s a really great movie.
True, and to be fair to Season 2, Season 1 gets the novelty bump, the “Is this show really this good?” bump, and Season 2 had to be the sophomore effort to try and recapture that feeling. It would have had to exceed Season 1 by a significant amount to feel as good. I’d go S1, S4, S2, S3, S5 if I had to rank them.
I view the Wire as a story (S1/S2/S3) and the sequel (S4/S5). Season 2 may be my favorite, and Season 4 (while utterly brilliant) is the most difficult to watch.
Wire season 2 is fantastic and one of my favorites, in spite of Ziggy. Though he grew on me by the end. Showing a different side of the same city was brilliant.
I’d take the dockside union storyline of S2 over the dreary newspaper melodrama of S5 any day. Also S2 gave us Beadie, one of my favorite characters in the whole series.
Since this thread is already going in this direction, I am going to post my Wire Season tier list! Feel free to post yours too:
4 > 3 > 2 > 1 > 5
5 still has alot of good stuff, including a cracker final episode.
Four episodes to go! First time through for me.
Yeah I agree, it’s pretty depressing.
I typically order it 1,3,4,2, and 5.
1 and 3 outline the similarities across the highlighted institutions, show the internal incentives for people within the institutions don’t align with the stated purpose of the institutions, and how they handle agents of change.
4 really focuses on how the people who are supposed to be served by these institutions are actually treated.
2 and 5 focus on the dying institutions in their fight for survival and the means they go about doing it.
Love the Wire as someone who watched it as it came out and lived pretty close to Baltimore at the time.
2, 1, 4, 3, 5. Now I’m gonna search through the thread and see if I posted an order before, and if it matches.
4,1,3,5,2.
2, 4, 1, 3, 5.
Well I finally finshed all 5 seasons.
Luckily there is a good fandom wiki for it because with my poor hearing coupled with the (a) accents & (b) slang which I often didn’t understand even if I could decipher it, I would have been lost without it! No subtitles were available. I mean there were literally whole conversations with the Barksdale & Stanfield crews that I only really understood at the most macro level; I missed a lot of detail. And as for Snoop…well I understood the “N” word, “motherf#cker” & not much else. And Idris Elba did his very best to mumble his way through 3 seasons. For some reason I found Omar a lot easier to understand generally.
I can’t really split 2& 4 for first & second place, or 1 & 3 for third & fourth. Perhaps the hearing/comprehension problems contributed to that. 5 was definitely last, but still worth the watch.
Very sad to see Duqie at the end; was really hoping Presbo would sort something out for him. Conversely amazing to see the transformation in Bubbles & glad his sister mellowed by the end. His journey was amazing.
Few shows equal the story arcs found in The Wire.
I don’t know how I would rank the five seasons, but this discussion is making me want to go back and watch it all the way through for the third time to find out.
Yeah I am tempted to watch season 1 again, knowing what I now know, to see if it makes any difference; I think it might.
Not directed toward you, just remembered how great Snoop was. :)
SO many amazing characters written and portrayed.
My viewings were roughly five years apart and the last was maybe two or three years ago. Never watched a series like this three times and I was gonna wait longer, but it’s so damn good. I know there is other good stuff, but man.
Why couldn’t you use subtitles, UDAK? We watch everything with subtitles.