Why I am feeling stupid

There are lots of candidate reasons, naturally. But it's actually a TV show that has left me feeling foolish.

I've just read that Jason Kottke has this to say about the TV show The Wire:

Collectively the best program ever shown on TV, case closed, next topic, I'm not even gonna discuss that with you.

And that Nick Hornby says this:

Three or four years ago, I got an email from a friend in which he described The Wire as the best thing he’d ever seen on TV, “apart from Abigail’s Party.” Here was a recommendation designed to get anybody’s attention.

No mention of The West Wing, or The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or any of the other shibboleths of contemporary TV criticism; just a smart-aleck nod to Mike Leigh’s classic 1977 BBC play. It reeled me in, anyway, and I went out and bought a box set of the first series.

I’d never heard of the show. It’s not widely known or shown here in the U.K., although whenever a new season starts, you can always find a piece in a broadsheet paper calling it “the best programme you’ve never heard of,” and I didn’t know what to expect.

What I got was something that bore no resemblance to Abigail’s Party, predictably, and very little resemblance to any other cop show. At one stage I was simultaneously hooked on The Wire and the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of Bleak House, and it struck me that Dickens serves as a useful point of comparison.

Yet I've never watched The Wire. Excusable?

Not really.

I regard David Simon's book Homicide, a portrait of the Baltimore murder squad, as one of the finest reporter's books I've ever read. I can't believe that I missed the fact that he's written a TV programme.

So read this.

And this.

Then watch this.

Comments

[Nick]

For the completists there's also The Corner which is an HBO mini series based on the book. It was on the back of that they commissioned the wire. A number of the actors in it appear in the Wire but there's a rather neat rule that if you're a cop in the Corner you had to be a dealer in the Wire and vice versa. Also Nick Hornby is, as ever, spot on. Dickens is exactly the right comparison. Except I know some strange people who don't really like Dickens. Never met anyone who'd watched the Wire and thought it was anythng other than genius.

[Bruno Alves, Portugal]

Daniel,

The Wire is the best show in television (I actually wrote something about in my own weblog (in portuguese, so not worth a link) last Wednesday using the same photo you did). I've wathced the show Homicide (based on daid Simon's book) a few years ago, but The Wire is even better. The way those characters talk, their 'poetic slang', is just extraordinary. And some of the characters (Stringer Bell, Omar), are without comparison in TV's history

[Steve MacFarlane]

I watched 40 mins of season 1, ep 2 after reading this - ok, it has something. But slow, slow, slow. There's a grittiness, but some of it languished between stylized and wannabe.