Theories on The Wire Part 3

There are plenty of theories as to why The Wire hasn't been more popular - white audiences struggle with a mainly black cast (it doesn't bother me), in the UK it was tucked away on a channel no one watches, and audiences are too stupid. My own take on this is:



The Wire is not suited to television. It is the first ever DVD series



It isn't so much that audiences are too thick to understand the show. It really just doesn't work very well being viewed episode at a time once a week. There are too many characters to remember viewed like that. It needs to be watched a few episodes at a time at least. This makes it ideally suited to the DVD format.



I preferred watching The Sopranos on DVD too, but if there was no choice, you could still watch it on a weekly basis without losing too much. But not The Wire. You need to spend time with it, absorbing it to fully appreciate it. You also can't miss an episode. Its predecessor, Homicde, you could watch like a regular cop show, dipping into it occasionally, but this is where The Wire was a marked departure.



It has to be watched on DVD. But we haven't reached the stage yet where series are released straight onto DVD. Poor films often go straight there, but that is out of necessity, not choice. Series need to be shown on television first, even if that isn't the right place for them, so hopefully the show will gain more popularity now in its rightful format.

Rooting for the Bad Guy

When looking for the Talking Heads clip, I came across this quote from David Byrne about his inspiration for the song, Psycho Killer:

"Both the Joker and Hannibal Lecter were much more fascinating than the good guys. Everybody sort of roots for the bad guys in movies"

I understand why many actors prefer playing the bad guy, as it is more of a challenge than playing a bland goodie and I've also worried about what it says of me that I enjoy crimes so much - but actually rooting for the bad guy takes this further. So I started to wonder, do I ever root for the bad guy?

Unfortunately I think the answer is 'Yes, sometimes'.


Moral ambiguity is integral to both The Wire and The Sopranos, and are designed to make you identify with what would traditionally be a baddie. There would be no point in watching the Sopranos if you didn't like Tony at all and the same is true of the drug dealers in The Wire. So I don't think these count.


But I have sometimes rooted for the bad guy when they are definitely the all round baddie.

The most recent case was watching 'Dial M for Murder' the other week. Ray Milland was just so charismatic that I really wanted him to get away with it. Grace Kelly, I didn't care about one way or another. Or was that Hitchcock's intention with his love of making his blondes suffer?

Whilst I do love Columbo, it does sometimes get on my nerves that he solves the case so easily, that he immediately instictively knows who the culprit is. So sometimes while he plays his cat-and-mouse games with the murderer, I do want them to get away with it. Just for once. Especially if its an episode I've seen before, I hope that somehow it may have an alternative ending.


Watching Profiler, the main character did get annoy me and I was bored with watching the show and wanted it over with, so often found myself hoping that Jack of All Trades would hurry up and do her in. I kind of got into it towards the end, but then the first series finished, and I was still none the wiser about his identity and haven't seen any more of it. So I still wish he'd have finished the job off.

But then there are some shows where I always want the good guys to win - Morse, Monk and the Law & Order lot, so perhaps there is hope for me yet.

Growing old with the Sopranos

Not technically a detective show, The Sopranos does feature an awful lot of crime and is one of the best programmes ever made, so I'm including it here (its my blog, I make the rules).

Last night, we started to rewatch the first season of The Sopranos. The OH has a bold plan for us to rewatch the whole lot in order over the coming weeks. (I think it is going to be broken up by the arrival of the next set of 'Homicide Life on the Streets' but we'll see).

Re-watching the first two episodes last night, I was struck at how young the cast look. Obviously it is most pronounced with AJ as he was a little dumpling of a child when it began and is a man by its end. But its true of the rest of the cast too, just in a more subtle way - they all look a bit smoother, a little less gnarled back in the early days.

The show started back in 1999 but we came to it late - obviously in the UK we always get shows later, but we also didn't get into it much later on, once the first three series were available on DVD. I struggled to stay awake to watch much of it when it was on television so found having it on DVD was a much better way to watch - plus you don't have the frustrating week-long wait between episodes.

So it was probably 2003 before I really began watching it in earnest, which means that the cast have aged 7 or 8 years to my four. Even so, it got me wondering about how much things in my life have changed during the course of this series.

Like Tony Soprano, during this time I've lost a parent. He lost his mother, I lost my father - neither of whom were particularly sane. Like Carm, I've stuck with my man during this time, deciding its easier to turn a blind eye to his faults (whilst Tony's major failing is being a murdering mob boss, my OH has committed the lesser sins of sports obsession and a fondness for cheese). I would have like to have blossomed into a beautiful woman like Meadow did during this time, but alas I haven't - I've just got a few more prematurely grey hairs.