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Is This The Best Television Show Ever, Or Is It More Than Even That? Like life? |
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My friend, have you ever watched "The Wire"? Get in your mouse, and get out of here! | |
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fuck that shit. everybody know this is the best show ever!!
[Edited 9/3/14 13:16pm] Well C'mon Teletubby Teleport Us to MARS!! | |
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Ok a case can be made for Muppet Babies, and no I haven't seen The Wire yet though I have my reasons. One day I'll get to it. In the meantime... Tuesday, October 1, 2013"The Wire" is part of the problem A few years ago, I watched several seasons of "The Wire." At first it was very entertaining, but I soon realized that it presented an insidious, conventional perspective. However, those around me love the show so much that they have neglected their usual critical views and refuse to recognize how the show might be rather problematic and conventional.
Why does my social world love "The Wire"? The show is smart and intelligent, exploring the way that problems today -- poverty, deindustrialization, crime, corruption, substandard schools, and so on -- are not only systemic but also interrelated. This incisive critical analysis works well with the gritty realism of a cop show drama. At the same time, the show moves beyond the cop show genre to play with other genres and play with various stereotypes. It also has authenticity through the incorporation of local actors and local Baltimore scenes.
Sounds good so far. So, what is the problem?
"The Wire" presents a conventional narrative about the decline of the city, not necessarily conventional in television but conventional in cities today. Who is to blame for this decline? The show smartly posits that institutions like government, the media, unionized shipyards, schools, and the police play by their own corrupt rules, which in interaction have brought the decline of the American working class and of American cities. Who is not to blame for this decline? The supposed viewer of the show. Those who watch high-quality cable television are generally upmarket, well-educated, urban professionals, maybe also predominantly white and "unmarked" by any obvious ethnicity (unlike the Polish shipyard worker, for example). This viewer can observe the true excitement of the show, knowing that they are not to blame for the situation but, possibly, they might be the solution.
"The Wire" has an underlying structure of meaning. On the one hand, it examines the institutions of the New Deal welfare state (also called the Keynesian welfare state in the sociological literature) -- government, police, public education, and unions -- and finds them corrupt, stagnating, and decaying. In opposition, it explores the criminal world of Stringer Bell and Omar, finding it innovative, creative, and flexible. Now, of course, the show does not advocate either one of these options, but this opposition structures the meaning of the show:
 The show, however, has another structure of meaning that is less overt. Looking at the show, what might the show suggest as a positive alternative to the Stagnant New Deal Welfare State? In sociology, we often see this alternative as the Neoliberal State, a form of government that presents itself as transparent, non-corrupt, good at technocratic tasks, and committed to serving the public, if the public is responsible and entrepreneurial (thus it is exclusionary):
 Now, given that the show presents the media and corporations as close to crime, we can understand the show as criticizing the entire capitalist economy as a kind of free-market crime economy. So, the show could be presenting Socialism as a potential alternative:
 This opposition -- socialism versus neoliberalism -- structures the show in a much deeper and more meaningful way. However, the show never defines socialism (though it would be neither the stagnant welfare state nor the crime economy) or neoliberalism and never suggests any pathway to either, rather we are stuck in the cynical world of both the stagnant welfare state and the innovative crime economy. In contrast to the show, sociologists and many other scholars have demonstrated that we have, in fact, moved to a Neoliberal State.
"The Wire" tellingly appeared at a time (2002-2008) when American cities were being, and continue to be, substantially redeveloped with escalating housing prices, worldwide investors pouring money into restaurants and housing developments; the city was and is not declining. The show performs an ideological function because it reflects the perspective, in an very intelligent and highly entertaining way, of the gentrifiers, the primary viewers of the show. It repeats the narrative that the city was destroyed, but now it is finally recovered and vibrant. So, why tell a story of past decline today? Maybe because the conventional narrative about the city posits that decline threatens to return. Or maybe it posits that corrupt institutions and individuals live amongst us now and we, the supposed viewers, should remain vigilant and vote for those with the gentrifiers' perspective.
The problem is the perspective of "The Wire" then provides a way to see the city. When I talked with a Capitol Hill neighbor about the show, she declared that she lived in the ghetto just like the one portrayed in "The Wire." People might think that they can use what they saw in "The Wire" to understand any city (and probably not suburbs or rural areas). The show can be used to (mis)understand what DC was really like in the past, what it is like to live in or nearby public housing today, and what threatens DC today. Yet, this is a television show with writers of fictional crime novels like George Pelicanos working within (and sometimes against) the conventions of crime drama that make "The Wire" appear real. As my literature colleague wrote me: "Not to excuse it, of course; genre structures how we think about real life." I hope that Sociology in My Neighborhood can provide other ways to think about the city. |
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More awesomeness! |
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No way.
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C'mon. The best show?
Modern Family... what beats Jay and Gloria? Nuthin, I tell yas. | |
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By St. Boogar and all the saints at the backside door of Purgatory! | |
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Nope. Everybody knows this is the best show of all time
MJ L.O.V.E: https://www.facebook.com/...689&type=2 / YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/us...nderSilent | |
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The Most Important Thing In Life Is Sincerity....Once You Can Fake That, You Can Fake Anything. |
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Pufnstuff rocked, ... i met the poeple who played the bro n sister on land of the lost recently. | |
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To get high to. 99.9% of everything I say is strictly for my own entertainment |
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[Edited 9/11/14 0:51am] 99.9% of everything I say is strictly for my own entertainment |
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To get high to. 99.9% of everything I say is strictly for my own entertainment |
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Breaking Bad best show on TV
99.9% of everything I say is strictly for my own entertainment |
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By St. Boogar and all the saints at the backside door of Purgatory! | |
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On Television October 8, 2007 IssueThe Heart of Texas“Friday Night Lights.”By Nancy Franklin Fans of Texas high-school football, as those of us who were strangers to the ways of Pigskin Planet learned last season from the NBC small-town drama “Friday Night Lights,” live in the hope that their team will “go to State”—play in the state championship in Dallas, in the Cowboys’ stadium—and make their home town’s dreams come true. When “Friday Night Lights” was renewed in May, its viewers, who had suffered through season-long anxiety that the show would be cancelled, and traumatic postseason worry that it wouldn’t be renewed, felt as if they had not only gone to State but won the big game. The second season—woo hoo!—starts this Friday. Last season, the show first aired on Tuesdays, where it had the misfortune of competing against ABC’s popular showcase for nonbiodegradable fabrics, “Dancing with the Stars.” It was moved to Wednesdays, but didn’t do well there, either. NBC has said that this year it wants to try to appeal to more women, who are apparently less inclined than men to check out the show, because they think it’s just about football, and who, it is hoped, will stay with it once they do see it. Also in the service of this goal was NBC’s announced, and possibly dunderheaded, decision to show less football on the program. There are two ways to look at this approach: on the one hand, you could say that, if tinkering is what it takes to keep the show on the air, go ahead; on the other, you could argue that changing the very nature of a show in order to get more people to watch it—even though it’s no longer the same show that you wanted to get them to watch—is the kind of thing that makes even newborn babies laugh, shake their heads, and say, “That is soooooo typical of a network.” I took a wait-and-not-see approach to “Friday Night Lights” last year, until an unlikely friend recommended it—a young filmmaker who had grown up in Manhattan in a literary and theatrical milieu and had no interest in sports. We were in the Museum of Natural History when we had this conversation, and when she told me that she and her husband were “addicted” to the show, even the animals in the dioramas were so stunned that they froze in their tracks. The following week, I watched an episode, and went from ignorance to bliss. It’s hard to say what’s great about “Friday Night Lights” without feeling that you’re emphasizing the wrong thing, because although the show’s particulars are distinctive and special, it seems not to be made up of parts at all—to just be an organic whole. In short, it feels like life. The show isn’t merely set in the world of West Texas football; it is that world. Watching it, you have a feeling of total immersion—in the (fictional) town of Dillon, in the lives of the football players and their parents, and in all the elements that determine people’s fates in that dry, desolate, and depressed part of the country. This sensation is triggered in part by filmmaking technique and in part by the writing and the acting; but much of it is simply alchemical and wonderfully indefinable. The show grew out of the book of the same name by H. G. Bissinger, who, in 1988, moved from the suburbs of Philadelphia to Odessa, Texas, to follow the Permian Panthers for a season. (Permian High School gets its name from the geological region beneath much of West Texas, the Permian Basin, whence comes the oil that has fuelled both the fortunes and the failures of Odessa.) Living there with his wife and their two small children, Bissinger participated in the local life but also remained clear-eyed, and didn’t flinch from reporting on racism in the town, on the grim economy, on the townspeople’s desperate need to make heroes of the local boys, or on their dismissal of those same heroes if they turned out to be merely human. The 1988 Panthers made it to the semifinals only to lose a game that they should have—or, at least, could have—won. Bissinger doesn’t romanticize the might-have-beens in the lives of the people he writes about; he’s not sappy about the toll that the sport takes on the kids and on their families, or about the town’s self-interested demands on the young hopefuls, but the point of the book isn’t to run down something that is (to many people) glorious and turn it into something mundane. He’s able to get at both the larger-than-life and the regular-old-life-size aspects of his subject. A movie version of “Friday Night Lights” came out in 2004, but it used only the top layer of the book’s themes (winning; losing; and maybe next year), telling the story of the Panthers’ season in a conventional way. It was directed by Peter Berg, who also developed the TV series, for which he reached deeper into the book to get at its darker core (and, in order to keep the story going beyond its fact-based, yearlong frame, fictionalized it—the town is still Odessa-like, but the series is set in the present, and the TV Panthers, at the end of the show’s first season, win the state championship). The opening credits for “Friday Night Lights” say that the series is “inspired by” Bissinger’s book, rather than “based on” it. Which doesn’t mean that the show isn’t about football: as Bissinger says in his book, “Football stood at the very core of what the town was about, not on the outskirts, not on the periphery. It had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with how people felt about themselves.” Berg, who wrote and directed the first episode and is also one of the series’ executive producers, gets you right down in the middle of it all. The show is filmed documentary style with a handheld camera, meaning that you’re always aware of a sensibility and an intelligence at work. A lot of scenes are shot from a car—not establishing shots that indicate whose house the next scene will take place in but exploratory shots: What’s down this road? Who lives here? The camera in “Friday Night Lights” goes where strangers usually don’t go—right up in people’s faces. It is the observant outsider who somehow got through the town’s gates, and who has an open-minded, openhearted agenda, which is to find out who these people are and what their lives are like. The radio is usually on as the camera shows us the town, and is often playing while the Panthers’ new head coach, Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), is driving his car. Taylor can’t get away from the pressure and the expectations of his job, even when he’s alone; as soon as Monday morning rolls around, the local sports-show gadfly, Slammin’ Sammy, starts talking about that week’s game and whether Taylor is up to the challenge. Slammin’ Sammy’s show is a great device: every time we hear him and his call-in listeners blabbing away, we’re reminded of how irrational and intense people’s love—need, more than love—for the Panthers is, and how the coach’s job depends on their fickle support. The players, their families, and their girlfriends are also involved in the drama, and have dramas of their own, all of which were made more complicated by a life-changing, team-changing, and town-changing event in the first episode of the first season. The Panthers’ star quarterback, Jason Street (Scott Porter), was paralyzed by an injury in the opening game of that season; he’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Overnight, he went from being a young god to being a patient who is encouraged to look on the bright side because he still has the use of his hands. Almost all of the actors who portray the team members and the other teen-agers are wonderful, even though most of them are too old for their roles. (Porter, the oldest, is twenty-eight.) It’s the adults who really stand out on the show, though. Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, who plays his wife, Tami, have been around for a long time, and though I had every reason to think Chandler would be good in this role, I had no clue that he would be great. And I had never expected any more from Britton than what I saw during the years she played the generic sometime love interest of Michael J. Fox on “Spin City.” Individually and as a couple, they are brilliant; there is no better depiction of married life and married love on TV right now. Brad Leland plays Buddy Garrity, whose character is, in a way, the central one of the show, the one who signals to the viewer, “This is what Texas is all about.” (Leland is himself from Texas.) Buddy’s a local car dealer, a mover and shaker in Dillon, a Panthers maniac and meddler; he shows up at practices and thinks nothing of telling the coach what to do, and he literally gets down on his knees in church and prays for the team to win. The character is an archetype; Leland never lets him sink to the level of stereotype. As good as it is to have “Friday Night Lights” back, the first episode of the second season may leave you with some worries about the show’s direction. The principals don’t disappoint, but there’s a twist in the episode that is absurdly melodramatic and unbelievable, and will have enormous consequences. The plot thread could easily overwhelm the show and kill it. If that happens and the ratings go up, executives at NBC will think they’ve scored a touchdown, but fans of the show will know that the network dropped the ball. ♦ |
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I didnt know that John Mayer was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer show MJ L.O.V.E: https://www.facebook.com/...689&type=2 / YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/us...nderSilent | |
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Dont you be picking on Xander.
The Most Important Thing In Life Is Sincerity....Once You Can Fake That, You Can Fake Anything. |
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I'm going with Jack:
FOOLS multiply when WISE Men & Women are silent. | |||||
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