On Mon, 30 Apr 2007, Doug Henwood wrote:
> People have been talking up The Wire as being as good as or even better
> than the Sopranos. We finally caught a show last night, right after the
> Sopranos on BET. It was bleeped for basic cable - which curiously allows
> "shit" but not "fuck" - but otherwise I presume it was intact. There's
> just no comparison.
I think you're drawing a curve though an unrepresentative point. This week's episode on BET was a transitional show, where both the underworld empire and the cop organization have been been broken up and are re-forming themselves while they are also introducing new worlds of the mobs and unions on the docks.
In the Wire, both the underworld and the cop world are fully as complex and subtle as the world of the Sopranos. There were several allusions to that complexity in this episode, but I don't think you could possibly have registered them in the brief moments they appeared and you couldn't know you were missing them. One big difference between the Wire and the Sopranos is that the Wire is extremely terse. Sometimes you have to go back to catch the crucial one sentence.
It may never suit your taste -- I'm not sure you'll ever think of a stylistic divergence from the Sopranos as other than a vice :o) -- but it's not at all like an average cop show. It's a vast paranomic universe like a Dickens novel -- broader in scope, IMHO, than that of the Sopranos, and certainly less familiar to me personally.
If you really want to give it a chance, I think your best bet would be to rent the DVDs of the 3rd or 4th season, when the kids in school make their appearance. The Wire's representations of drug ridden poor neighborhoods have a depth that I think is not only new to TV, but rare any fictional medium. It's the kind of thing I've only seen in good sociologically minded non-fiction like The Random Family.
And I can't agree with you at all at all about the writing and acting.
Michael