Is this post meant to relate to mine in any way?

I think it was definitely weaker on the media side of the season. I was extremely excited about it as journalism itself fascinates me but it didn't deliver. Gus was the only decent character on that side of it and didn't exactly blow it up, and the whole Blair/Glass thing with Templeton was predictable and flat. And McNulty's character went from being somewhat tired to flat-out bizarre.

Whereas the other seasons' side subjects were all pretty strong. I thought the education season, political season and the stevedores/union focus were all done very well.

Most everything else about S5 was really good. The show missed some good characters from prior seasons maybe but did okay replacing them.

Overall I still think it's a very good season of television, but the other four were great. If anything calling S5 the weakest isn't really a knock, but a testament to how great a series The Wire really was.

I... think that was the point?

I do agree with the rest of your post though. I think the wording is the problem here. it's not that season 5 was the weakest, it was just behind the other 4 seasons in terms of awesomeness.

tbh i can't really understand how people can rate BB > wire considering BB has like 3-5 main chars at any point in time (and calling some of them main is a bit of a stretch), the main char's family (i mention them b/c they've been on screen a lot throughout the 5 seasons) is either: a)annoying as hell; or b)barely playing a role in any of the events of the show, whereas the wire had tons of main-ish characters that actually had long ass arcs and plenty of character development (a lot of it being quite subtle) throughout multiple seasons. Name 5 characters in BB that actually showed significant development other than WW whose development isn't really complex per se, it's just magnified by the contrast between what he was (school teacher) and what he is now (murdering drug manufacturer/dealer/kingpin)

While I do think you can meaningfully rank top tier shows against each other, I also think it starts to break down at some point. What makes The Wire a GOAT show, isn't the only formula for a GOAT show. I personally think The Wire is ahead of BB, but I wouldn't think less of a person who had both in their top tier category and chose BB as the GOAT of GOATs.

I do agree that it's kinda pointless to rank some shows against others, but people still do.

This is pretty much how I feel on the 5th season,I didn't find the media characters interesting at all and didn't really care one way or the other what happened to them.

I also didn't believe that McNulty would come up with such a bat**** insane scheme and that Bunk would cover for him and Lester would actively help him.McNulty could've done a lot of self destructive and crazy things which I might have bought into but strangling corpses and creating a serial killer just didn't seem realistic to me.

Season 5 is still a really strong body of work it just suffers badly in comparison with what went before it,if you swapped the quality of season 1 and 5 around then it would've been perfect imo.

those write ups are awesome. surprised there's not one for Michael

i was just saying this the other day, and actually opened this thread just to see if anyone else brought it up.

when they're walking out and kima says "what'd ya think" and he was like "they were in the ball-park" was just so great, esp after his facial expressions when they were just dead on describing "him".

was made all the better by the fact he was telling kima how big of a waste of time the profiling sessions were, and how they never came up with anything useful.

such an amazing scene.

also, i know almost no one will agree with me, but gus was one of my fav characters.

fyi he also directed the pilot episode and the finale.

those write-ups were really awesome.
would be great if you posted some more. character or episode re-caps would be sweet.

This is what I meant when I said bizarre. McNutty doing something unusually stupid and self-destructive would be fine, but the whole scenario they came up with was goofy. Lester and Bunk, no way, didn't seem consistent with them at all. It's just much harder to suspend disbelief when the show itself was (on the whole) pretty believable. If it were Dexter I wouldn't have cared.

Just finished the Wire after about two weeks. I feel really sad now that it's over even though I have lots of stuff to watch (Shield, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, others i'm sure). I thought S4=S3 > S5 >>> S1 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> S2.

In Season 3 Cutty tells Stringer that he froze when he could've shot the kid that stole dope from him. I thought he pulled the trigger twice and the clip was empty. I rewound it to confirm and heard it again. I don't see any reason for him to lie to Stringer here but did he?

0desmu1, I (and everybody else) would love to see the recaps of all the episodes you said you could post.

He froze. He didn't have it in him to pull the trigger. This is even foreshadowed when Avon is talking about Cutty to Wee-Bey the day before he gets out, when he says "I don't know, the joint might have broke him" or something to that effect.

The best episode writeups you'll find on The Wire are at sepinwall.blogspot.com.

thanks for the link. yeah i remember that after cutty had said said something just before walking away from those two. the way he went to jail seems incredibly odd to, kill somebody and tell police to come get him. i was very sad not to see cutty much in the final season. great character.

Yeah, I don't know why he called 911 (I guess it was a badass move, but you should have the sense to get the hell away from there if you're going to do that).

Supposedly we were supposed to see more of Cutty in the series but it had to be cut for time. David Simon wanted to do a miniseries between S3-4 where we saw the Carcetti campaign and election as mayor, but HBO rejected the idea and so he had to fold that into S4. Cutty's story was one of the ones that had to be trimmed down for that to work.

yeah cutty did not have the game in him no more..... I was hoping he would of shot fruit after he ripped him off.....

Watch S2 again....and again and again. Your opinion should change greatly. Also, are you kidding with S5>>>S1? That's ludicrous imo.

I'm rewatching for ~the 5th time. Already on S3. Show gets better every time.

I'm actually going to rewatch S2 before any other season. As for s5 > s1. Different opinions and could also be recency bias since i just finished that season, may change on a rewatch but sticking with s5 for now.

In the Carver write ups that the guy posted, it talks about how he thinks Carver is being molded/becoming the next Daniels. I'm rewatching with my GF, and we're on S3. There is a scene when someone gets shot in Hamsterdam (over shoes lol) and Daniels wants to move the body out of Hamsterdam a block so it's not in the zone and homicide gets wind of it. He tells the two officers that he would be first on scene and take the **** that came.

Later, Colvin says that HE moved the body towards Carver, and he'll take the ****storm to follow. To me, theres more evidence of Carver becoming a Colvin-esque police officer than a Daniels. Taking the heat from higher up, trying something new (Hamsterdam), having a little relationship with drug dealers and trying to help them, etc. Daniels biggest relationship is with Wallace, and he's more upset because he was going to get clean and all that.

at what point did they know season 5 would be the finale?

Season 5 better than season 1, styjcjsjuhakshruiecjrkeochksucjeidyd0!!

Disagree.

Avon rarely has a bad read on someone. The only person he didnt end up with the right read on was stringer and it cost him

meh my best explanation is that i was way more invested in the characters in season 5 than season 1 so i enjoyed it a lot more despite the ridiculous story line.

I'm on my 3rd time thru. Just finished season 4 and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have it, S4>S1>S5>S2>S3, although I could easily flip flop 2 and 3.

For some reason S3 just didn't do it for me this go around.

season 2 episode 8 cold open is the greatest cold open of all time