Where are we now?
Box set scorecard
The Wire Season One: finished!
It was as good as you all said it was. We were forced - forced by the sheer momentum of the narrative - to watch three episodes on this lazy Day After Boxing Day to reach the end. It's done. Barksdale is in prison. D'Angelo is in prison. Wee-Bey is in prison. McNulty's on the boats. Freamon is promoted back to homicide from the pawn shop unit. All meaningless if you haven't experienced this top-flight cops-and-robbers show yet - which was me just a few short months ago. Season Two has been ordered. I am already checking ahead on the excellent HBO website.
The Sopranos Season Six: four episodes in.
Episode Three, Mayham, written by Matthew Weiner and directed by Jack Bender, and Episode Four, The Fleshy Part Of The Thigh, written by Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider and directed by Alan Taylor, were both up to scratch, with Paulie, Vito and Silvio getting plenty of airtime while Tony recovers (as Coma-Tony aka "Kevin Finnerty" - "in finnerty", geddit? - heads towards the light of a family reunion with the symbolic Native American wind blowing the trees behind him). Phil Leotardo is being all too nice as he bounces between Sack and Soprano - this bodes well for some gratuitous pyschopathic violence at a later stage, I think. Christopher's trying once again to crack the movie business with "Saw meets Godfather II". A nice cameo in the second of the two episodes from that fine old character player Hal Holbrook, as a rocket scientist with cancer, and a funny subplot about rappers being shot to improve their commercial stock.
As ever, The Sopranos manages to be elegaic and deep without losing its street cred: "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky." You don't get that sort of guff on The Wire and yet they're comparable in many other ways. Also, in our house, one is just beginning, the other is moving towards its final act. It's wrong to compare.
Because I ended up rattling through The Wire in a matter of days, I didn't have time to log the writer and director of each episode on here. They deserve it as much as the crews of The Sopranos and West Wing. I noticed that Tim Van Patten directed one - a Sopranos alumnus. No surprise really.
Curb Your Enthusiasm Season Five: one episode to go.
But this series has been a rare treat, with a much more entertaining through-story (Richard's kidney) than Season Four (The Producers, which bogged it down, and robbed it of that abiding realism). Bingo! Bin-go!
Upstairs Downstairs Series Five: only four episodes in.
Because not all essential, long-running DVD box sets are HBO. Set in the roaring twenties, this is the final series, and is all the more poignant for that. A full household, with Hudson feeling the strain physically and culturally, and Lord Bellamy straddling the old and new with speeches about home rule in the Lords and a feisty young bride. As soon as we finish, it's back to the beginning of Series One, such is the quality of the writing and acting in this magnficent work. And it wasn't even on the BBC.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 11:33 PM
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Damn, did we forget to warn you that The Wire is terribly addictive? You are now an official addict. Join the club. Just don't start ranting about why the series never appears in the Emmy or Golden Globe nominations...
If you've gone to the HBO website you'll have seen that most of season one was written by David Simon and Ed Burns. Burns was Baltimore homicide. Simon met him, and wrote about him, when he wrote the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. (Which was adapted for television and became the best cop show prior to the Wire).
Later Simon and Burns wrote The Corner together, an excellent - and horrifying - book about the Baltimore families caught up in selling and using drugs. That became an HBO miniseries and the forerunner to The Wire. Burns is the equivalent of Bill Clark on NYPD Blue.
Season one also had an episode written by George Pelecanos. Yep, that George Pelecanos. By season three they had brought in Richard Price and Dennis Lehane. So they've got a startlingly great pedigree of writers.
The only real glitch is, the fifth season is going to be the last.
No more The Wire. No more The Sopranos after the coming season. No more Deadwood after the two telemovies that take the place of season four.... NO!!!!!
Hurrah, someone else watching Upstairs Downstairs! I bought the first series on DVD earlier this year (being 31, I wasn't born when it first aired but had fond memories of afternoon repeats when I was at university). And I was blown away by it - it wasn't just a quaint period piece, it was really complex, fantastically written and brilliantly acted. I've got the first four box sets but as I left the world of freelance journalism for a full time magazine job a few months ago, my onetime daily lunchtime DVD watching has been reduced to an hour or so at the weekends so I'm still only on the third series. Can't wait for the final two (although it might have to wait as I got Bleak House for Christmas and my boyfriend and I are currently working our way through it) ...
good dog said everything I wanted to say apart from Charlie Brooker's appraisal of the show which shows spoilers for season 2 and 3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ2iGYwdEi8
Never watched Upstairs, Downstairs, though like stellanova I would love to watch anything that opens my mind to such wonders, and indeed meet anyone that opens my mind to such wonders. Sadly all I meet are Reality TV acolytes with little more to offer.
Avoid all spoilers. It's easy if you try.
Although it does mean that when you get to the final episode of season four you'll be utterly heartbroken by the events that turn on a simple misunderstanding.
Amongst the writers I should have also mentioned Rafael Alvarez, a novelist who, like David Simon before him, wrote for The Baltimore Sun newspaper.
alvarez wrote a companion book to the wire i think called the wire: truth be told.
I think it is worth getting both books by David Simon - Homicide: a year on the killing streets and The Corner. Both incredibly detailed like Dickens' stuff, but more accessible due to the language used.
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