Television musings.
Jan. 21st, 2008 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckThe weather here has been relentlessly grey for the past few days. I don't like it. To tell you the truth though if it were fine I'd probably complain about the achingly blue sky.
I'm going to talk a little bit about television. There's a show I've been watching and I've never talked about it. I've seen some posts about it on the fringes of my friends' friendslists, so I guess folks won't be too interested about my ramblings.
Still, this is the final season of The Wire and thus it's sort of high time that I say something about why I like this show. This will be a bit of a disjointed ramble and probably won't get anyone to watch it, but I can't be bothered doing a proper post detailing the show's history and so on.
It's not an easy show to watch: The ensemble is huge and every season introduces new characters while only a handful of the old characters disappear (and might suddenly reappear without much introduction). It's difficult to watch because of its language. It doesn't streamline police jargon or in this season newspaper jargon so that the average viewer has to work hard to understand what the characters are talking about. An added difficulty - especially for me as a non-native of the English language - is its use of African American English which can be rather challenging. The plots don't help much either: they're all interconnected and span from the high world of politics down to the level of the corner kids selling drugs.
So, why watch? It's a fascinating glimpse of different worlds, so different to my own that it feels like another planet, but at the same time the characters are human beings and are portrayed with all their flaws and inconsistencies.
It still surprises me, like when a character I thought to have a particular moral standpoint diverts from that and turns out to be much more of a means to an end kind of guy. The characters change and when McNulty cleaned up last season I was glad that his assholish days were over for the duration only to see him fuck up spectacularly this season.
It challenges me in all sorts of ways and it even makes me laugh on occasion, like in the season opener when some black street kid is hooked up to a photocopier and made to believe it's a lie detector. Yes, that kind of laugh, that sticks in your throat and makes you uncomfortable, because it says so much about the power balance and what's wrong with the world.
I'm going to talk a little bit about television. There's a show I've been watching and I've never talked about it. I've seen some posts about it on the fringes of my friends' friendslists, so I guess folks won't be too interested about my ramblings.
Still, this is the final season of The Wire and thus it's sort of high time that I say something about why I like this show. This will be a bit of a disjointed ramble and probably won't get anyone to watch it, but I can't be bothered doing a proper post detailing the show's history and so on.
It's not an easy show to watch: The ensemble is huge and every season introduces new characters while only a handful of the old characters disappear (and might suddenly reappear without much introduction). It's difficult to watch because of its language. It doesn't streamline police jargon or in this season newspaper jargon so that the average viewer has to work hard to understand what the characters are talking about. An added difficulty - especially for me as a non-native of the English language - is its use of African American English which can be rather challenging. The plots don't help much either: they're all interconnected and span from the high world of politics down to the level of the corner kids selling drugs.
So, why watch? It's a fascinating glimpse of different worlds, so different to my own that it feels like another planet, but at the same time the characters are human beings and are portrayed with all their flaws and inconsistencies.
It still surprises me, like when a character I thought to have a particular moral standpoint diverts from that and turns out to be much more of a means to an end kind of guy. The characters change and when McNulty cleaned up last season I was glad that his assholish days were over for the duration only to see him fuck up spectacularly this season.
It challenges me in all sorts of ways and it even makes me laugh on occasion, like in the season opener when some black street kid is hooked up to a photocopier and made to believe it's a lie detector. Yes, that kind of laugh, that sticks in your throat and makes you uncomfortable, because it says so much about the power balance and what's wrong with the world.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 09:56 am (UTC)Maybe it's one of those finished series I can start watching, like I did with BtVS and Angel.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-22 12:33 pm (UTC)I'm going to buy the dvds once they're a bit cheaper, I think.
It's definitely worth watching though if you're not into police stories I guess it's really difficult to get into.