The Sopranos Vs The Wire

Salon asks what the best TV show of all time is. Rebecca Traister opts for The Sopranos:

..."The Sopranos" was quite simply a fine piece of narrative, an opera on the turnpike that was simultaneously lush and spare in its depiction of American life. Tony and his buddies were many things that marked them as "other": Italian, murderers, fat. But in all their extraordinariness they were just ordinary Americans.

From the moment it hit the cable airwaves, "The Sopranos" was in the pantheon, but as it aged it deepened and grew, not only matching great filmed epics line for line and shot for shot but blooming into a work of literature. It examined the evolution of the American dream with as much precision, if less economy, than Fitzgerald, and took apart the experience of American masculinity with the sometimes heavy-handed symbolism of Melville. (In fact, several years ago, Soprano family members tipped their hand by mentioning "Billy Budd" and literary critic Leslie Fiedler, who was a great fan of the show before his death.)

As a uniquely American story, "The Sopranos" had all the big themes: class, ethnicity, sexuality, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. It ruminated both on the thickness of blood and on the unsettling ways it can thin with time; it examined the intricate steel on which marriages are built, the high costs of loyalty and even steeper price of betrayal. And then there were the deaths -- both natural (Livia Soprano) and wrenchingly manufactured (Big Pussy, Adriana).

To call it the best show ever would be hubris, and a hubris that reeked of exactly the same kind of self-absorbed futility in which Tony and company wallowed. No. "The Sopranos" was a great, transformative show. And to transcend the gloomy here and now in which the boys ate their gabagool, I will optimistically predict that because of it, there will someday be even better shows. Perhaps they already exist.

Laura Miller chooses The Wire:

For a while, people -- not just critics, but the show's creators, too -- were going around claiming that "The Wire" is like a novel. What can this mean, except that the series is not like what most of us think of as TV? Specifically, it's not like the cop show you're picturing as I tell you that "The Wire" is about the Major Case Squad in the Baltimore Police Department and the black drug dealers it tries to bring down. The series is complex, with a lot of characters, and it's never going to hold your hand through the intricate curlicues of each season's story line. You have to pay attention, even when you're not sure what's going on.

But since a novel may or may not share these qualities, since a novel can be just about any kind of story these days, it might help to know that "The Wire" is also not like, say, a Dickens novel. It indulges in neither sentimentality nor moral goading. Each season has a social theme -- the failure of the war on drugs, the collapse of labor unions, the hash of local politics and, last time around, the crippled public school system -- but "The Wire" lacks the Victorian naiveté to believe that any of us will be sufficiently riled up by these tragedies to do anything about them, or that we'd succeed if we tried.

"The Wire" is also not like the crime novels produced by some of its most celebrated contributing writers (George Pellecanos, Dennis Lehane, Richard Price) because, as is only proper, those books deal in questions answered and narratives resolved. Novels end, but the vast, fascinating, unspooling mess that is the Baltimore of "The Wire" can have no conclusion. The storytellers may stop telling it, but the story itself will go on. If every last character we've loved and hated in the series over the past five years were to roll over and die, it would still go on, with us or without us.

What "The Wire" is about is the game. The "game" is what the show's black characters call the drug business, but the smarter players know that the game's boundaries are not so finite. Although the series is scrupulously realistic (its creator, David Simon, is a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter and his writing partner, Ed Burns, is an ex-homicide detective), there is one improbably romantic character: the maverick stick-up artist Omar Little -- beholden to no one, afraid of nothing, resolute in his abstention from curse words and the injury of "taxpayers," and, last but not least, gay. Leave it to Omar, the show's only true outsider, to state the series' premise while pulling off a bit of prime courtroom rhetoric in a scene from Season 2. Testifying against a soldier of the dreaded Barksdale gang, accused by the gang's sanctimonious lawyer of leeching off the drug trade, Omar coolly tells the shyster: "Just like you ... I got the shotgun; you got the briefcase. It's all in the game."

I tend to support Miller on The Wire, since The Sopranos recycled a lot of plots, other went nowhere, and had many red herrings through out it’s run, which was artificially lengthened due to its popularity rather than due to David Chase's vision of running the cycle of the story he had to tell. Simon has said that this will be last season of The Wire, because the last great story to be told about Baltimore would be too difficult to bring to fruition. That story is the influx of Latinos into Baltimore and the impact they have had on the city and that would require writers and researchers who speak Spanish fluently, thus he has abandoned the idea of bringing that story to life.

What do you think?

Comments

[vin diesel]

I still haven't forgiven David Chase for refusing to follow up on the Russian from the Pine Barrens episode. I can't think of any occasion on which The Wire started to develop a fascinating subplot, got to the halfway mark and then forgot all about it.

But then The Wire is all about the larger canvas--having watched and rewatched (and rewatched) all four seasons, I can report that there are precisely zero episodes that focus on some self-contained plot that doesn't connect intimately to the larger storyline. It's just not written that way. Despite Laura Miller partially disowning the novel metaphor in this latest article, the show IS written as chapters of a novel, not just a collection of related short stories set in the same place with the same characters.

It doesn't stoop to the audience-playing tricks of Lost, trying to stretch out a suspenseful story over as many seasons as it can by doling out just enough detail to keep the viewers from abandoning the show; it doesn't have a perfunctory, skeletal season-long plot along which many repetitive roller-coaster episodes can be attached, as does 24. (Even the first few seasons of 24, which I adored, clearly had episodes of filler, and lots of action for the sake of squeezing in action, rather than because it was necessary for an intelligent story or for character development, of all things.)

The Wire is written as chapters of literature, and isn't for everyone, but for most people who get into it, there isn't anything else comparable on TV.

[MC]

Vin nicely put, I totally agree that it's the best written dramatic show on TV. I think it also has one of the best esnemble casts of all-time as well. I guess it helps to have complex, well-rounded characters written for you to sink your teeth in as an actor.