How the Wire’s Omar Changed TV | Hacker News Reader

How the Wire’s Omar Changed TV

theguardian.com

87 pointstosh20 comments

I'm a bit numb after seeing so many obituaries about people who have died due to drugs, including people I knew personally.

This news comes shortly after the Sackler family finally got away with defacto mass murder.

At this point, it is pure speculation, but I wonder if this is also yet another case where the product was laced with fentanyl. last year alone they counted ~100.000 drug related deaths in the US. it's madness. Fentanyl is wiping out entire rural communities.

I don't have an answer for how to stop this or at least slow it down, there are just too many factors at play, including floods of cheap fentanyl smuggled into the country from china.

My cocaine and heroin using friends slowly started dying in 2013. We didn't know it was fentanyl-contamination at first.

It's grown completely out of control and it seems like every few weeks I learn of someone else dying.

A few years back, NYC shut down several methadone clinics and open-air heroin dealing has run rampant throughout parts of the city around where the closed clinics (like Penn Station) were. Certainly not helping matters.

The party is officially over for me and has been for years now. The risks are too high.

Please, if you have friends that use, urge them to stop -- by any means necessary.

> after the Sackler family finally got away with defacto mass murder

For those unfamiliar with US news, the family who owns the primary opioid manufacturer and distributor, and who was proven to have intentionally lied about addiction risks and pushed excess volume into rural communities to boost sales, obtained blanket legal immunity for their entire family as part of a bankruptcy settlement.

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1031053251/sackler-family-imm...

They made $10 B selling opioids.

They'll pay $4.3 B and forfeit ownership of their company, in exchange for the immunity.

Joe Rogan I believe talked about this on his show the other day and speculated that this is a result of fentanyl laced cocaine. Fentanyl is so cheap and requires such a small dose you can turn 1 kg of cocaine into three, nearly tripling your profit. This is an unintended result of the US drug war and will probably result in a reason to continue the US drug war. If people could buy cocaine with a prescription, they wouldn't be getting laced cocaine.

There are no easy answers, but the path we are currently following with the drug war seems worse than if we didn't do anything at all.

Having said that, the Omar character on the Wire was very well acted.

I had a friend who bought what was supposed to be cocaine last weekend. This is not a regular drug user, he was just wanting to party with a girl, she wanted coke, he had a 'hookup'. It gets there and he does a 'nummy'to taste it to make sure. (I stopped him here asked him why he did this, saying that this wasnt the movies- he was dead serious when he told me this is what it is now, you have to check everything you get) anyways he noticed it tasted weird so they smoked a blunt of weed while they waited to see. Shortly thereafter my buddy just remembers hitting the blunt and waking up in the hospital. He is a huge bear of a man and OD'd hard. Had the girl taken it, she probably wouldn't have survived. All from a 20 bag of coke. One line, one bump- dead. That could easily have been me as a kid.

This is not new either, when I was young they would lace weed and coke with crushed crack to try and get people hooked. But that was rare and could be spotted. This fentanyl shit is everywhere killing people left and right and these absolutel pieces of shit get a pass and half the money.

The drug manufacturers and pushers don't want it legalized so they can continue to prey on us, I'm so fed up.

I have no faith left in humanity.

Edit to add- had the emt not had norcan or whatever it is to give him on-site, he wouldn't have made it to the hospital to receive it there. Fentanyl is beyond evil. I've watched friends and family start on painkillers and become addicts. Some kicked it, some never did. How can you destroy lives and families and not only profit but gain immunity =(

Jimmy and Bunk only need one word to solve a crime (season 1, episode 4). Inspired by Mies van der Rohe: less is more.

https://www.vulture.com/2018/02/the-wire-oral-history-fuck-s...

https://youtu.be/at8FUPwlIYM

For this of you that never saw it, The Wire is truly worth watching. It’s also worth turning on the subtitles, as it will make it easier to pick up on s the slang.

The first episode of The Wire didn't impress but I should look beyond, I guess. This same actor played Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire ... that was an awesome portrayal.

I had to give The Wire 3-4 episodes before I was hooked, and then binged watched the whole thing. I love it, one of my favorite shows for sure.

Every time I rewatch it, I think I like the dock season more and more.

It felt like a non sequitur the first time, but it makes more sense when you see the show as "telling stories about people who typically don't have stories told about them," rather than a drama about the drug economy.

The rampant poverty in the school season is heartbreaking.

As the son of a Title 1 kindergarten teacher, can confirm that's not far off. And this wasn't even inner city, just rural satellite town.

There's a reason teachers have a specific tax credit for unreimbursed classroom expenses -- and it's because they do things like pool money to buy clothes for the kid whose family can't and won't give him a clean pair.

This season was one of the best pieces of television (or film) that has ever been produced. It’s so good, and so true, it’s hard to watch.

Resonates with my experience growing up in schools with some kids in real poverty. So many that don’t even know that they are trapped in place that they could get out of, if they had one filament of connection to the outside world.

Give it the first season, if you want to try. It doesn't cram all the characterisation or plot into the first few episodes, like most shows now do.

The first episode (the “pilot”) of most dramas isn’t a great measure because they have to do so much work to a setup the world and the characters. So they can be very workman-like as they’re intended first and foremost to sell executives on the show. I honestly don’t like watching most pilots so I’ve trained myself to at least give shows two episodes to compensate.

Comedy is different. If the first episode isn’t funny it rarely improves imho. One doesn’t build a funny character slowly; the human frailties that make them funny are obvious, typically to everyone but them.

As others said, The Wire takes a few episodes to really get going, but the payoffs are huge and well worth it. Slowly but surely, you get to know realistic, flawed characters intimately, and you see them struggle (or thrive) in the social mechanisms that trap them - that trap us. Characters go from "bad thugs and good cops" to "just a bunch of people trying to survive every day in a fucked-up system". And when you think you've finally settled into familiar surroundings-BANG! they take you to another little corner of Baltimore, overlooking another piece of the system, and force you to consider even more points of view, even more merciless dynamics, even more awful connections between the drug economy and the official one...

And of course, The Wire perfected the original "make you care about people, kill them, then keep going" trick well before GoT.

Definitely turn in the subtitles, pro tip right there! Also I'd say give it a few episodes before you knock it – it's slow paced in its portrayal of the vast array of different characters, but it's time well spent. Perhaps the most well written show I've ever seen, with great performances by some amazing actors. Especially Michael K. Williams' portrayal of Omar which is nuanced, complex and very human. I'm sad to hear of his passing, a huge loss to the arts and culture.

Here is a 1.5h supercut of all the scenes with Omar Little: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP2Yx9XTgFI

Truly an epic character, and an epic actor as well!

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