Zitat
Ist ja nicht so, als fühlte ich mich nicht massiv bedroht von dieser Serie.
Aber, ich kann mich ja darauf verlassen, daß Du mich in schöner Regelmäßigkeit an "The wire" erinnern wirst.
Genau, das habe ich mir zur Lebensaufgabe gemacht, und irgendwann kriege ich dich noch.
Charlie Brooker ist Kolumnist der englischen Zeitung The Guardian und moderiert die Sendung Screenwipe auf BBC4, daraus der Clip Charlie Brooker on THE WIRE.
Ich schließe mich Charlie an: Oh, just watch it ...
OK, OK. So I'm banging on about The Wire again, like some kind of unofficial spokesman.
The Wire is - and I keep saying this because it's TRUE - the best TV show of the last 20 years. If you get into it, I can guarantee you'll look at TV in a whole new light, marvelling at the heights it's capable of achieving, and shaking your head with fresh horror at the lows it generally opts for.
On the face of it, it's a show about police and drug dealers in contemporary Baltimore - but that's a woefully simplistic description. Stick with it, and by the time you get to season four you'll realise that when co-creator David Simon describes it as a "treatise on the death of America", it's not empty hyperbole. By some margin, this is the most ambitious, complex drama serial ever created.
But before you scuttle off, let me offer some advice.
1. Be patient. The Wire is often referred to as "the televisual equivalent of a novel", partly because that sounds flouncy and impressive, but mainly because it's structured like one. Think of each episode as a chapter in a book. It's important to bear this in mind because years of TV watching will have conditioned you into expecting a neat, processed conclusion at the end of any given programme. This first instalment is merely putting characters and themes in place for the rest of the season. The show is a textbook "slow burner" - don't expect to have your world altered by a single chapter.
2. Concentrate, without breaking a sweat. The Wire is more realistic than any other "cop show" you've ever seen. It was created by a former crime reporter and a former homicide detective, so it knows its subject matter inside out. Consequently, the police and the dealers regularly use insider slang without explaining what they mean. Stir unusual Baltimore accents into the mix and you might not understand everything they're saying. No matter. You'll pick it up. Before long, you'll be an expert.
3. Prepare to obsess. No other show on TV has such an impressive range of intricate characters. Give them a chance and they grow on you like moss. I know heterosexual men who are deeply in love with Stringer Bell. Once you "get into" the show, it's impossible to get out, and at the end of each season you'll be jonesing, junkie-style, for your next fix. So get ready to bore your friends by droning on and about its brilliance. Like I'm doing here. Anyway, just watch the bloody thing, will you?
Eine Doku des englischen Senders FX, auf dem die Serie dort ausgestrahlt wurde, über THE WIRE, mit Charlie Brooker und u.a. Fan Nick Hornby, vor Ort in Baltimore und mit Interviews mit einigen der Schauspieler:
Tapping the Wire Part 1
Tapping the Wire Part 2
Tapping the Wire Part 3
Bei YouTube gibt es jede Menge gute Szenen aus THE WIRE, leider ist da aber auch die Spoilergefahr ziemlich groß. Nachfolgend einige spoilerfreie Szenen, Weisheiten zu Macht und Markwirtschaft. Aber nicht nach rechts auf das Angebot weiterer Clips schielen, SPOILER!
The King stays the King
Mr. Nugget
Stringer Bell learns the basics of Macroeconomics
Stringer's 'Product' Meeting
Richtig wertschätzen kann man die Szenen wahrscheinlich erst, wenn man die Serie richtig sieht.
Diese Verhörszene wurde von einem YouTube-Nutzer mit einem Laughtrack aus "Eine schrecklich nette Familie" unterlegt und funktioniert. THE WIRE hat einen ernsthaften Ansatz, aber der Laughtrack unterstreicht, wieviel unterschwelligen Witz und Komik die ganze Serie hat.
Der weiße Typ mit dem Kugelschreiber ist Soziologe und möchte das Sozialverhalten von schwarzen Jugendlichen untersuchen, in welchem Alter müsste man spätestens ansetzen, um einen Weg in Kriminalität und Gewalt zu vermeiden. Polizist Bunny Colvin hatte ihm vorher gesagt, dass 18 zu alt ist, aber die Erfahrung musste der Wissenschaftler empirisch selber machen. *g* In der vierten Staffel begleitet der Zuschauer dann vier 13jährige Jungs im letzten Jahr vor der Highschool. Die meisten Serien, die aus mehreren Staffeln bestehen, werden von Staffel zu Staffel schwächer, wiederholen sich, stagnieren, nicht so THE WIRE. THE WIRE ist eine der wenigen Serien, die sich von Staffel zu Staffel sogar steigert, für mich ist Staffel 4 die beste Staffel einer genialen Serie.
Ein Interview von Nick Hornby mit David Simon.
Die Zeitung Observer fragte Is this the best TV Series ever made? und bekam die Antworten von sechs Krimi-Schriftstellern, darunter Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) und Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch Reihe). Am interessantesten finde ich die Antworten von John Harvey, und John Williams:
... here was a TV show, a product of the most commercial industry you can imagine, and it was taking bigger risks than anything I'd lately encountered in the world of fiction, especially anything in crime fiction.
Some time in the 1980s it struck me that mainstream contemporary fiction was doing a woeful job of reflecting what was going on in our modern-day cities. Meanwhile, in the world of crime fiction, writers like Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Sara Paretsky and the late, great George V Higgins were turning out books that married social realism to energetic storytelling.
But as I went on reviewing crime fiction in the Noughties, I felt an increasing sense of disappointment at the prevailing lack of ambition to do anything more than entertain. Everything people always used to say about crime fiction - isn't it just a formula? - seemed to be true. There was a plague of serial killers, pathologists and profilers, cops with bad marriages and drink problems. Lumbering plots with saccharine endings. I couldn't deny it any longer: the world of crime fiction had ceased to interest me.
Then I watched The Wire. And there was everything I'd liked in the work of Higgins or Leonard or Pelecanos: the inventive dialogue, the characters etched in shades of grey, the prevailing mood of moral ambiguity and profound cynicism as to the motives and efficacy of the forces of law and order. There, in particular, was the sustained attack on the war on drugs - a war that makes the Iraq adventure look well thought out - that neither our newspapers nor our novelists (with the shining exception of Richard Price) seemed able to make. There, in a nutshell, was the revival of American social realism: the Steinbeck/Hammett/Algren tradition that seemed to have been lost in a welter of postmodernism, post-colonialism and pure unadulterated schlock.
So I watched The Wire, and watched it some more, and nodded my head in respect as it widened its brief to take on education and politics, becoming positively Zola-esque in its detailing of the ways in which the rich and the powerful fail and exploit and madden the poor and the powerless and - in Baltimore at least - the black.
My one consolation, I suppose, in finding a TV series that is so much better than contemporary crime fiction is that much of the series is actually down to writers - not screenplay writers but book writers. Its progenitor, David Simon, made his name with a wonderful non-fiction account of policing in Baltimore called Homicide. And the show's regular writers include the aforementioned George Pelecanos and Richard Price, as well as Dennis Lehane.
...
Auf der Guardian Website gibt es einen Blog zu THE WIRE mit vielen interessanten Seiten, dadurch fühle ich mich als THE WIRE Fan wenigstens nicht ganz so einsam. Während THE WIRE im englischen Fernsehen lief, wurden die Folgen gemeinsam kommentiert, es gibt persönliche Top 5 Momente und Top 5 Listen, ein Special warum wir Bunk Moreland lieben ...
Daher weiß ich, dass es nicht nur mir so geht, dass THE WIRE mich für weniger gute Geschichten und Umsetzung verdorben hat. Ich lese und schaue gerne Krimis (den Serienkiller-Plot kann ich allerdings schon lange nicht mehr sehen), THE WIRE hat die Meßlatte aber so hoch gelegt, dass es immer schwieriger wird, Bücher, Filme und Serien zu finden, die genauso begeistern können.