Why The Wire isn't as good as people say it is

It's a few years now since The Wire finished, but like a dread necromancer, the hordes of zombies it masters are still blindly blathering its brilliance have not succumbed to the ravages of time. And they cannot be reasoned with. In their Manichean worldview, there are only those who love The Wire unreservedly, and those who have not seen it yet. Oh, and a group of perverse untermenschen who have seen it, but fail to praise it to the heavens because they're just contrary, or idiots, or both. I'm not sure if black, white and one shade of grey is so much better than seeing things just in black and white after all. I'm not saying it's terrible. I'm not saying it lacks redeeming features. I'm not even denying that, in the main, I enjoyed watching it. But for it to be the best thing ever? Why all the fuss? It is, after all, a television series, and there's quite a few of those. And people can accept that you don't worship at the altar of Sex And The City or The Sopranos without branding you as a venal idiot.

Challenging, weakened

It was a challenging weekend to get through. My girlfriend was laid low with the sickness she'd had from Thursday night onward, and I was at the clutching-at-the-floor stage of my hangover. So rather than achieve anything epic and salutary on Saturday, we lay about the flat trying to avoid movement. I did read to her from Kolymsky Heights, my favourite deeply-implausible spy thriller, but there wasn't much else worth attempting.

Relax

I read the last 200 pages of The Corner tonight. That was as cheery as one might expect. Unfortunately, I'd also been listening to the weepiest Rachael Yamagata songs I possess, so by 9.30 this evening I was utterly broken.


Eating all the food in the house had done nothing to lift my spirits, whether it was blue potato crisps or bitter chocolate coated ginger sweets. I wondered if I should engage in substance abuse to take my mind off The Corner. I doubt David Simon and Ed Burns were proselytising for the joys of heroin in their phonebook sized tome though.

The Wire - Season 1 (Abridged)

Apparently "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love The Wire and those who haven't seen it. Yet." (The Daily Telegraph et al)

[I have to assume that there's also the small category of a few million farmers in Western China, a man on a boat off the coast of Somalia, and maybe a few pygmies hiding out in the Amazonian jungle.] There's also my friend Barry, who says he "watched the first 5 episodes and nothing of interest happened."

Now, if you are one of those people who haven't seen it yet, and you're not sure whether you should sacrifice around 60 hours of your life on an altar created from a box of DVDs you spent a hundred quid on / a handful of badly-remastered DVDs you bought from a man in a pub for twenty notes / some random intellectual property infringement you brought back from Shenzhen last week, then I have a gift for you:

The Wire - Season 1 (Abridged)  
[may contain spoilers, ad hominem attacks and displays of ignorance or hubris]