The Wire - best TV series ever?

[econ21]

And no, I don't understand a word of what she's saying either. That mix of ebonics, slang, technical terms and druggy accent is too much for me too.

I confess I struggled with a lot of what she said initially, too. But I still found it unnerving and funny. I guess it's the context - an enforcer going to a hardware store and getting into the nitty gritty of the specs of powertools. (One unnerving element was fearing what the powertool might be used for, but I won't spoil that.) I could see she said something to the salesman that unwittingly appalled him and revealed her "profession", but it was only when I read David Simon's book "Homicide" that I realised it was about the lethality of small calibre rounds. It's a sort of Taratino-esque conversation like the Big Mac sence in Pulp Fiction - a rather geekish exploration of the banal, in an otherwise highly dramatic setting.

Part of the fun of the series is gradually picking up the vernacular of the police station and the street. I think it is a bit like learning a language - you do get something of an ear for it and it becomes easier to understand. Anyway, most of the dialogue is not as verbose as that I linked to - often it's emphatic short sentences of the kind that you'd get warned for here. But a lot of Brits do use subtitles and for a non-native English speaker, Overknight's advice is certainly sensible.

That being said, watch Oz.

Yes, there are similiarities to Oz - particularly in the strong representations of the criminal leaders, as charismatic and dangerous, if human, people. But I found the Wire a lot less bleak. There is surprisingly little much violence on screen in the Wire. You see the consequences of the violence, and the emphasis is very much on the causes of the violence (it's almost as if each season is leading up to some tragic denouement), but generally the show is not that bloody. It has more of the elements of a traditional police show, whereas I felt Oz was going for a rather grand guignol excess. Both were compelling TV. But overall, I would say I found Oz disturbing, whereas the I found the Wire fascinating - getting me to read more about real life crime in Baltimore and see if the reality bore any resemblance to the show.