'Wiring' The Wire: Transtextual layers and tragic realism in The Wire | Hacker News Reader

'Wiring' The Wire: Transtextual layers and tragic realism in The Wire

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44 pointschrsw28 comments

It’s incredible how much academic attention The Wire garnered. There were entire academic based conferences dedicated to discussing the show in the Uk. I was never really sure how much of this was warranted vs. just fandom for the show dressed up as productive work

I actually took a class in it myself a decade ago at university, so it’s funny you mentioned this, as it was something never quite discussed or debated in the class itself. It was assumed to be a masterpiece, no doubts allowed.

It’s a good show and absolutely worth watching, but there is definitely some over-hype at play every time it’s mentioned. It is also constructed in such a way that makes it easy to chop up pieces that are memorable and suited for media consumption: catchy one-liners, interesting nicknames, and some frankly implausible characters that are borderline superheroes but treated as being hyper realistic.

They would seem less implausible if you spent some time in Baltimore. Fond memories of a guy dressed as a hedgehog threatening to blow up a TV station until the police shot him with a beanbag and the bomb robot discovered his explosives were foil-wrapped chocolate. For a while there was an anti-gang gang. Omar Little and Avon Barksdale were based on real people. There is very little bullshit in the show.

People always say this when you criticize the show. At the end of the day it’s a television show; I’m sure much of it is based on truth, but ultimately it’s a written piece of art, not a documentary.

But it is based, ultimately, on a doorstep sized book of hard hitting journalism about the participants and victims of the drug war by one of the writers and the real life experience of a journalist, a cop and a teacher. And it shows.

I wonder why, when people from Baltimore "always say this," your instinct is to assume they're also lying. I wonder if there might be other reasons people from Baltimore "always say this"?

I didn’t say people from Baltimore always say this. I said people always say this when the show is criticized. Even then, I’m pretty skeptical of the possibility that people commenting on random Reddit or HN topics were personally involved in the drug trade in Baltimore twenty years ago.

As I wrote in my initial comment, the show is great but has an irritating fan base that is hostile to anyone suggesting that it isn’t a documentary. It’s a television show that uses fairly standard narrative techniques to tell a story. That doesn’t mean it’s made up; but it does mean that it isn’t a unquestionably factual story, as its fan base would like you to believe.

It’s a very similar situation to people that insist New York is the greatest city in the world. Yeah, it’s an awesome place, and probably in the top ten. But this obsession with “being the best city/best TV show of all time” clouds judgement and becomes a cultish attitude after awhile.

We have hundreds of years of scholarship based on ancient Greek theater plays. They were created as entertainment. I wonder which 20th/21st century TV series will be written about in the year 4000. I think The Wire is likely to be one of them.

i'd love a glimpse of the analysis of the "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck..." scene

Might be one of those "unfortunately we lost context necessary to know exactly what that meant"

IMO The Wire is really the greatest thing that humanity has produced for the small screen. It is the epic cultural artifact of our generation.

I think it's entirely warranted. It's not just because of the show itself, but the impact it had at the time. If you watch it today for the first time, it's probably harder to see what exactly made it so important. But being old enough to have seen it when it came out (well, a year later on DVD), at least to me, I had never seen anything like it. At that time, you had the "HBO trifecta" of shows: Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. I watched each of those slavishly. No other thing came even close at the time. It was the most revolutionary TV since Twin Peaks.

The Wire was special in several ways: First was the dialogue, especially the Baltimore accent and slang. I never even heard anything close to that. I'm in Europe, BTW, and even with subtitles I had a hard time following (that was before urbandictionary, mind you). It was actually years later that I learned Idris Elba is British, which still blows my mind.

The characters and casting are impeccable. Idris Elba, Dominic West, Lance Reddick, Wendell Pierce, Wood Harris, all absolutely incredible and pitch perfect in their roles. Probably most memorable is Michael Williams as Omar Little, a side character in the show which is impossible to forget.

It's not a perfect series, but I'd say the first season is damn near it. I would even go as far to say that it's probably enough to watch the first season to get most of what this series wants to say, mainly to watch the tragedy of the war on drugs from the deeply humanist perspective of David Simon. IMHO the later seasons never matched the first one. On the contrary: the later seasons usually have one central theme which is explored (like journalism, education, etc.) and get a bit preachy at times. Also, the series lacks character development. Yes, people become more cynical and burnt out, but they are already very cynical and burnt out to begin with, so there's really not that much to build upon...

> IMHO the later seasons never matched the first one. On the contrary: the later seasons usually have one central theme which is explored

Each season added a theme to the show - the first was the streets, the second was blue collar workers, etc. This was very much on purpose, I thought, and well-executed.

> Also, the series lacks character development. Yes, people become more cynical and burnt out, but they are already very cynical and burnt out to begin with, so there's really not that much to build upon...

Bodie, Carver, Daniels, Cutty, and those are only the ones I can remember on the spot now...

And Bubs! Bubs has clearly the best character arc ever

Less surprising that Dominic West is British, given his roaming American accent.

So many incredible and rich, nuanced side characters. mentioned Bubs in the comments, and as soon as I read his name his memory came back as if I knew him personally. Snoop was a Baltimore native, did a stint in prison and had really lived the life they portrayed.

Well, it is the best American television show ever produced, the only shows that are on the same level are The Sopranos and Six Feet Under.

“Tragic realism” sounds like a literary counterpart to the psychological concept of “depressive realism. The former is a fictional story that carries the hallmarks of classic tragedies but within an incredibly authentic context. The latter is the hypothesis that individuals with depression may have a more accurate perception of reality because they have a dearth of healthy, positive illusions. Makes me wonder if creators of depressingly accurate portrayals in fiction suffer from some element of depressive realism in their own lives.

It was such an excellent show. I recently rewatched it. I wish they'd make more, or a follow-up set in another city. Instead of all this formulaic and totally unrealistic NCIS and CSI crap.

> I wish they'd make more, or a follow-up

there´s

- We Own This City

and

- Homicide: Life on the Street

Homicide is more like a prequel - the source material is the same as The Wire but was developed a decade earlier.

WOTC is indeed a follow-up of sort (same author as The Wire, produced recently), but the real follow-up to The Wire (i.e. what David Simon did straight after, bringing with him a bunch of actors from The Wire) was the short-lived Treme.

There's also The Deuce more recently. I found it excellent, though the subject matter (sex work and early 70s/80s porn industry) probably will turn a lot of folks off.

It doesn't turn me off at all. These things are quite normal in many European countries.

The taboo thing about any sexual topic is very American. I never understood where that comes from. I always suspected it came from religion as I don't have any but American society seems to be more religion-centric. But here where most people aren't religious, things like sex work are pretty normal.

The real prequel is The Corner, which features a bunch of the same actors sometimes on the other side of the law.

There are also multiple actors from The Wire in Bosch.

"the term transtextuality to refer to ‘all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts’ "

Presumably he gets paid for this. He seems to have published reams of similar content.

Without being too harsh, it's now apparent to me that chatbots can replace entire categories of academics.

Ah the classic "I don't see value in this analysis so that means it is worthless"

Surely you spend all your time curing cancer right?

anyone care to lend this pdf? can’t access it would love to read it…

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