The Wire - The Complete First Season
by Clark Johnson
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Actor: Dominic West, Idris Elba, Jr. Larry Gilliard, Sonja Sohn, Wendell PierceDirector: Clark Johnson
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 775 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-12
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: HBO Home Video
DVD Reviews of The Wire - The Complete First Season
DVD Review: Flawlessly enjoyable
Summary: 5 Stars
The Wire is, at first glance, Yet Another Cop Show, about a group of disparate and conflicted police officers working to bring down criminals who are often not much better than they are. Yawn. However, there are two things that mean that people should take this seriously. Firstly, it's made by HBO who, up to a couple of years ago anyway, seemed physically incapable of making something unless it was absolutely gripping and awesome. Secondly, it's the creation of former police writer and journalist David Simon, whose previous show was the brilliant Homicide: Life on the Street.
The Wire kicks off on the mean streets of Baltimore, Maryland. A murder case against a young black man named D'Angelo Barksdale collapses when one of the witnesses is scared into retracting her testimony. The furious judge learns from homicide detective Jimmy McNulty that D'Angelo is a junior member of a far-reaching criminal gang run by his cousin, the extremely elusive Avon Barksdale. This gang controls all the drug supplies on the west side of the city, and are protected by a labyrinth of legit front organisations. Determined to get some payback, the judge uses his influence to have a special joint homicide-narcotics unit formed to bring down the Barksdale gang, with McNulty assigned and an up-and-coming officer named Lt. Daniels placed in charge.
The investigation into the Barksdale organisation by the unit forms the backbone of the first season of the show, but that's just one side of the story. We also get to see the investigation from the POV of the criminals themselves, most notably D'Angelo as he finds himself free but busted down to supplying the lowest of the estates, as well as the kids who work for him. A dangerous, unpredictable third faction is also in play in the form of the one-man army Omar Little, a criminal whose personal code means he can only steal from other criminals. The police try to form an alliance with Omar to bring down Barksdale, but their erstwhile ally has an unfortunate tendency to blow away the criminals they're trying to get locked up, which makes this a difficult task.
The appeal of The Wire is hard to explain to those who haven't seen it. It's fairly slow-moving (although never dull) in places and arguably takes two or three episodes to really kick in. It's also pretty unforgiving if you miss an episode. Flashbacks to prior episodes are non-existent, and plot points and character and emotional arcs often turn on a single conversation from several episodes earlier. You need to pay attention here. Luckily, that's made easy by the tight writing, the ingenious methods the criminals go to avoid being caught and the even more intelligent methods the police need to use to investigate them, and the acting. It'd be almost impossible to single out any of the actors for praise. British actor Dominic West has the closest thing to a central role as McNulty, and handles the character very well, but Lance Reddick (more recently seen as the enigmatic Abbadon in Lost) holds every scene he's in as the formidable Lt. Daniels. Clarke Peters develops his character of Lester Freamon from almost a background role to that of the most intelligent and confident officer on the team in a natural and impressive manner. John Doman's constantly-infuriated performance as McNulty's commanding officer and eternal nemesis Major Rawls has to be mentioned as well.
On the criminal side of things, British actor Idris Elba (formerly seen as Vaughn in the excellent Ultraviolet) impresses as Stringer Bell, Avon Barksdale's trusted number-two man, and Larry Gilliard Jr. provides the main criminal POV as 'D' Barksdale, as he tries to claw his way back up the organisation amidst growing concerns about how the family does business. For most people - including Barak Obama - the stand-out performances in the show belong to two of the more morally ambiguous characters, namely Michael K. Williams as the dangerously unpredictable Omar and Andre Royo as 'Bubs', a street informant struggling with his own drug addiction. Royo's performance was so convincing that whilst filming he was offered a heroin fix by a passer-by who thought he badly needed it, and later referred to this as his 'street Oscar'.
The cast is uniformally brilliant, the writing is fantastic and the show is, surprisingly, very funny. Whether it's the stories of some mind-bogglingly stupid criminals, or the ridiculous difficulties the team faces at getting a desk into their basement office, or Bubs' methods of identifying suspects for the police observers, the show has a jet-black vein of comedy which gives several laughs per episode. This is necessary because the show can be quite bleak, showing as it does wasted young lives amidst the crumbling tenements of a poor city, and a lot of the characters die in rather unpleasant ways over the course of the investigation. The investigation also ends messily, and the fates of many of the characters is left wide open for the second season.
The Wire: Season 1 (*****) takes a couple of episodes to build up a head of steam and get you into its headspace, but once that's done it never lets go.
DVD Review: Law enforcement drama with a real edge
Summary: 4 Stars
Reality bites. As one of the protagonists' mothers asks in the final episode of the season `what's right?' In Baltimore's narcotic investigation unit it is hard to say. Nearly everyone has a little dirt. Most of the bad guys were just born into doing what they do with no way out but to take a bullet or a stretch on the inside. Narcos bust for headlines to make rank. Dealers are in the game because they have no other way. Judges turn coat because it is election time, money goes missing, burnt out cops get wire tap equipment from the 1950s, computers are like gold and the body bags are mounting up. If you are not drinking then you are on the take. If you are on the take then the guilt of it runs home fast. Baltimore is falling apart and the worst thing about the drug war is that this label is all wrong... wars are something you can win.
The show revolves around Det. Jimmy McNulty, good police who does things behind the backs of his superiors, gets dumped with a bad detail and slowly turns into it a career making case that threatens to rock everyone from the street dealer to Capitol Hill. Within the space of 13 episodes you watch how broken cops build a reliable unit out of nothing and they work the streets to build a case against a residential area's top hoods. This is great drama through and through.
The Wire's got a lot of heart for telling it like it is and this is one of the reasons why this little known show often hits the top 10 best TV shows in the reviews. If it wasn't for the reviewers who know a good TV series when they see one, we wouldn't have a clue this was out there. Who would have thought that a little unknown knocking around could be a contender? If you like good TV then chances are that you will eventually want to try a few episodes and who knows, you might get the wire bug.
Pros:
- Like the real deal
- Solid police story, good balance of views
- TV drama for men
Cons:
- Only 13 episodes
- Sometimes its low production values are apparent
- Catering for male viewers and is not really viewing material for a couple.
- You might expect too much with the hype.
DVD Review: Very Good Crime Drama
Summary: 5 Stars
HBO series are unsensored television. That's a good medium when you want to tell a complicated and often ugly story. The Wire leverages those advantages to produce one of the best crime dramas ever filmed.
It lived up to the hype of all the previous reviewers so I'm on to season two now.
DVD Review: Easily one of the best shows ever made
Summary: 5 Stars
Superlative and slow, engaging and evolving. Get it. Watch it. Nothing more to add other than its obvious pointing up of our society as a whole. I could only compare it to a Dostoevsky novel with guns and drugs.DVD Review: One Of The Best Television Dramas Of All Time.
Summary: 5 Stars
Others have written long positive reviews, so instead of going on about how great The Wire is, I'll just focus on one member of the fictional cop "cast"...Jimmy McNulty.
Now I am of the opinion that the best TV cop of all time is/was Andre Braugher's Frank Pembleton, of Homicide fame. That belief was unchallenged until detective McNulty came along.
Although his character was slightly watered-down in later seasons of The Wire, Season 1 introduces us to this driven detective in all his uncompromising glory. Witness a police detective that allows nothing to interfere with his single-minded pursuit of justice. Like a doberman with a juicy bone, McNulty is dogged and relentless. He circumvents the chain of departmental command, annoys fellow officers, treats partners poorly, breaks the rules, and refuses to compromise. He's arrogant, self-righteous, a binge drinker, an adulterer, a drunk driver, and a general all-around jerk.
But if he's on the case, you'd better believe it's going down. He'll put his own young children in danger to make certain of it.
McNulty is a mad dog in the Baltimore police department. And he might just be the best cop in TV history (sorry, Frank).
The Wire Season One? Five stars!
Description of The Wire - The Complete First Season
From David Simon creator and co-writer of HBO's triple Emmy-winning mini-series The Corner this unvarnished highly realistic HBO series follows a single sprawling drug and murder investigation in Baltimore. Told from the point of view of both the police and their targets the series captures a universe of subterfuge and surveillance where easy distinctions between good and evil and crime and punishment are challenged at every turn.Running Time: 780 min.System Requirements:Running Time 780 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre:?DRAMA Rating:?NR UPC:?026359887321 Manufacturer No:?98873After one episode of The Wire you'll be hooked. After three, you'll be astonished by the precision of its storytelling. After viewing all 13 episodes of the HBO series' remarkable first season, you'll be cheering a bona-fide American masterpiece. Series creator David Simon was a veteran crime reporter from The Baltimore Sun who cowrote the book that inspired TV's Homicide, and cowriter Ed Burns was a Baltimore cop, lending impeccable street-cred to an inner-city Baltimore saga (and companion piece to The Corner) that Simon aptly describes as "a visual novel" and "a treatise on institutions and individuals" as opposed to a conventional good-vs.-evil police procedural. Owing a creative debt to the novels of Richard Price (especially Clockers), the series opens as maverick Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West, in a star-making role) is tapping into a vast network of drugs and death around southwest Baltimore's deteriorating housing projects. With a mandate to get results ASAP, a haphazard team is assembled to join McNulty's increasingly complex investigation, built upon countless hours of electronic surveillance.
The show's split-perspective plotting is so richly layered, so breathtakingly authentic and based on finely drawn characters brought to life by a perfect ensemble cast, that it defies concise description. Simon, Burns, and their cowriters control every intricate aspect of the unfolding epic; directors are top-drawer (including Clark Johnson, helmer of The Shield's finest episodes), but they are servants to the story, resulting in a TV series like no other: unpredictable, complicated, and demanding the viewer's rapt attention, The Wire is "an angry show" (in Simon's words) that refuses to comfort with easy answers to deep-rooted societal problems. Moral gray zones proliferate in a universe where ruthless killers have a logical code, and where the cops are just as ambiguous as their targets. That ambiguity extends to the ending as well; season 1 leaves several issues unresolved, leaving you begging for the even more impressive developments that await in season 2. --Jeff Shannon
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