Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssijak | Hacker News Reader

I just finished watching all The Wire seasons for the first time and freaked a little when I saw your comment. I often see something on Hacker News that I just recently had contact with and is not that popular.

View on HN

Welcome to the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon [0].

[0]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...

You’re nuts — The Wire, by acclamation, is to TV as Shakespeare is to literature.

the wire had something like 30M viewers at peak and was absurdly well received....

Apparently, Still not enough to get an Emmy. I lost my faith on Emmy's because of that.

Do you have any links or citations for a number even close to that? It’s live viewership numbers are lower than current HBO shows like Westworld that don’t overall get 30M viewers per episode.

Or did you have a different meaning for 30M than per episode? Usually that’s what people mean for tv so I am assuming that.

According to wikipedia the peak viewing for individual episodes is about 4m. Although it's not a stretch to assume it reached a lot more people than that via legal streaming services and illegal downloads.

It was not incredibly popular during it's time on the air. This is part of the reason for multi-year gaps between seasons. It has become somewhat of a post-airing success / cult classic.

And DVDs (this is a 15-10 year old series). Plus the recent re-release on BluRay.

I'd be surprised if you could find a "Best TV Show of all Time" list that doesn't include The Wire in the top 5. Most them of them have it #1 or #2 depending on how the ranker feels about The Sopranos.

Curiously, not very well known in Europe, in my experience, whereas everyone has heard of the Sopranos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com