criterionforum.org

I live in Baltimore, and filming in East or West Baltimore is the same as visiting: respect the residents and community and don't interfere with (illegal) business and you'll be fine. Filming was omnipresent and part of the city. Now we've just transitioned to House of Cards, which films in other parts of the city to replicate DC.

Lawrence Gilliard Jr homaged his chess lesson in this Ravens game intro for Monday Night Football (starts ~4:20)

Someone on Twitter posted a fascinating document from The Wire's production - a pitch/early show bible for the first season of the show. Lots of really interesting divergences from the course the season would take and references to the show's inspirations (at least one Mamet namecheck, for instance). One of the biggest changes (though a classic first-draft-of-TV-show thing):

Spoiler

Kima is killed in an equivalent of the Orlando sting-gone-wrong

This is the best television show I’ve ever seen. Incredibly rich narratively and thematically.

hanshotfirst1138 wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2026 4:38 pm This is the best television show I’ve ever seen. Incredibly rich narratively and thematically.

You gotta bring more than this to a conversation here. Future empty posts like this will be deleted until you get your average up here

domino harvey wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2026 5:31 pm

hanshotfirst1138 wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2026 4:38 pm This is the best television show I’ve ever seen. Incredibly rich narratively and thematically.

You gotta bring more than this to a conversation here. Future empty posts like this will be deleted until you get your average up here

Understood. I apologize.

I rewatched this with my son last year, and while I still think season 4 is the high point, I was surprised to find that season 5 worked beautifully. I remember it being a serious disappointment. I can’t even say why now, because it‘s a great ending to the series, brining many of the character arcs to a satisfying close.

I'm a big fan of season 5, and this watch I'm hoping to like season 2 more, which was the only weak spot for me on a first pass.

My wife and I just finished the first season. She's incredibly averse to violence but loves it anyways, which speaks to its power. It's my second time going through it, and while it's always been at/near the top of my favorite shows, I'm noticing myself seeking comedy shows to supplement just how grave it is. Knowing how things play out, I'm finding myself taking a more critical eye, which I don't love - for instance

Spoiler

D is so obviously a softy around every top dog that it's unrealistic that he isn't viewed as a liability. The scene where he repeatedly won't engage with Weebay's directions to the point of Weebay literally pulling him along would be so unbelievably suspicious!

That's the only 'problem' I've noticed though, and hopefully I can stop noticing them

I'll have to give this show another chance. I've tried a few times and made it to season 2, but it just never clicked for me. I think working in criminal defense and seeing how bad of actors police are across the board has turned me off from any portrayal which casts them as the reasonable voice in the room (at least regarding depictions of police in US media).

denti alligator wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2026 6:51 pm I rewatched this with my son last year, and while I still think season 4 is the high point, I was surprised to find that season 5 worked beautifully. I remember it being a serious disappointment. I can’t even say why now, because it‘s a great ending to the series, brining many of the character arcs to a satisfying close.

I think the main issue with the final season is that they had to compress the story into fewer episodes, and this made some of the normally impeccably subtle plotting more jerky and transparent. There were also complaints at the time that the mouthpiece characters representing the media were too saintly, blunt and plain unsubtle. I felt that complaint was overstated. Again, this may have been an impact of the episode reduction, as each of the institutions explored in the previous seasons have had their positive, possibly too-idealistic, exemplars, but they were presented in a denser complex of flawed / corrupt / indifferent counter-examples.

As I recall from the discussion at the time, we were lucky to get a final season at all, let alone one as good as it was.

Murdoch wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2026 9:59 pm I'll have to give this show another chance. I've tried a few times and made it to season 2, but it just never clicked for me. I think working in criminal defense and seeing how bad of actors police are across the board has turned me off from any portrayal which casts them as the reasonable voice in the room (at least regarding depictions of police in US media).

You'll definitely get more 'bad action' if you persevere!

One of my favourite aspects of the series, which only becomes apparent towards the end, is

Spoiler

just how much bad stuff happens because of Herc. Not because he's evil, or corrupt, but because he can't be arsed to do his job(s) properly. He ends up almost being the series' secret villain.

I don’t think you could really claim that the show is pro or anti any group it portrays, it’s critiquing a system that everyone is part of. Though someone who doesn’t like cops will surely get a lot of pleasurable material throughout the series’ run (the first season is the only one so predominately focused on police activities anyway)

When I was in school, virtually everyone I knew in academia (in whichever field in social sciences, political science, journalism, film/television, etc.) was watching this show and borrowing Netflix DVD's of it. It really does everything that could've been done with the rigid format of broadcast television, i.e. a work divided up into separate seasons/volumes which are itself subdivided into strict hour-long episodes/chapters. In some ways, the structure reminded me of Traffik, but greatly expanding the form into something much more grand and ambitious. It was always baffling to me how the Emmys never bothered to recognize The Wire.

Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz absolutely loved the show, and given their backgrounds, it was interesting to hear them dissect it. Both of them are well-known in Chicago - James made Hoop Dreams and other great films for Kartemquin Films while Kotlowitz has long been a recognizable name in journalism after he published There Are No Children Here about the public housing project Henry Horner Homes. (Interesting to note, Kotlowitz's book was published in 1992 and Hoop Dreams, which was filmed mostly around Cabrini–Green and West Garfield Park, premiered in 1994, both being the result of years of work. Frederick Wiseman would also complete Public Housing by 1997, filming it around Ida B. Wells Homes, though he may have been inspired by Kotlowitz and James to make it. Regardless, it's striking how these neighborhoods suddenly became the focus of landmark films and reporting in the 1990s. It probably helped that some of the most famous people at the time like Oprah Winfrey and Siskel & Ebert, all based in Chicago, championed these works and made them highly visible to the rest of the country.) Both men would go on to make The Interrupters as well, another acclaimed film that sparked outrage when the Academy failed to even nominate it.

Basic question: is the only way to see the show in academy ratio to get the original season-by-season DVD sets, starting with this one? For the sake of shelf space, I'd prefer a single set of all five seasons, and there's some online chatter about there being one from before the move to 16x9, but if that's true, it's not clear to me what that set is or where it's to be found (or if it actually makes any difference to my shelf-space issue...).

I have this and it's all in OAR



Probably OOP but here's someone selling copies for a reasonable price

That's what I had too. FYI, the cardboard packaging doesn't hold the discs very well - they don't fall out but slip deeper into the sandwiched cardboard rather than staying in the pockets meant to hold them, and as a result, they'll scratch pretty easily. I actually lent mine out to friends who took the liberty of lending it out to mutual friends and after it went around a big chain, I got it back thoroughly scuffed up, but again I suppose that was inevitable given the packaging.

I think this repackaging fixed that issue

Ah, thanks. I even saw that somewhere and for some reason dismissed it on the grounds that the design looked more recent. Archaeology by cover vibe clearly isn't my strength.

You can tell it's right because it clearly states that the aspect ratio is 4:3 on the back cover

Irrelevant if you want it on disc, but for tire-kickers, I remember that surprisingly they at least used to have BOTH aspect ratios on HBO streaming. Not sure if this holds today. That is how I saw it.

That would have been nice. No, 4x3 seems to have vanished. I gave the 16x9 a decent shot, and wasn’t thrilled. In this show, it matters that people exist within urban space. Too many long and medium shots have become not so long or medium as they were.

Tom Amolad wrote: Wed Oct 21, 2026 10:25 am That would have been nice. No, 4x3 seems to have vanished. I gave the 16x9 a decent shot, and wasn’t thrilled. In this show, it matters that people exist within urban space. Too many long and medium shots have become not so long or medium as they were.

Apologies for the outdated information in that case and thanks for the corrective. Another strike against depending on streaming. Agree otherwise. I accidentally consumed a few of the widescreen converted episodes and found it to be noticeably inferior to the OAR.

I should confess there’s a non-zero chance I simply failed to find it. But in a basic search of the show’s title, it didn’t come up.