The Wire - The Complete Third Season
by Tim Van Patten, Ernest Dickerson, Agnieszka Holland
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Actor: Aidan Gillen, Dominic West, Idris Elba, John Doman, Wood HarrisDirector: Agnieszka Holland, Ernest Dickerson, Tim Van Patten
Brand: WIRE
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Greek (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: AC-3, Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 720 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-08-08
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: HBO Home Video
DVD Reviews of The Wire - The Complete Third Season
DVD Review: The best show on TV continues
Summary: 5 Stars
With its third year, The Wire heads back to the streets and unfinished business. As with the second year, the third season opens up another dimension of the city, this time City Hall and the civil and police administration, but the focus is squarely back on the Barksdale organisation and Lt. Daniels' unit trying to bring them down and finish the job begun back in Season 1.
Season 3 opens with Avon Barksdale still inside, but his parole hearing is coming up. His friend and collaborator Stringer Bell has guided the crew through some lean times and formed a 'co-op' with several other gangs which has led to them making some serious money but at the cost of sharing each other's turf. However, a new player, Marlo Stanfield, is on the way up and is not interested in sharing his territory with anyone else. The stage is set for a series of bloody showdowns and bodies dropping on the streets, to the growing discontent of the police. Lt. Daniels and his unit are forced to drop their investigation into Bell (begun at the end of the second season) to concentrate on the war, unaware that the two are connected. This war is complicated by the re-emergence of Omar Little, who has sworn to bring down Bell for manipulating him into shooting an innocent man in the second season.
At the same time, an ambitious white city councilman, Tommy Carcetti, is planning to run for mayor, although his prospects in a city with a majority black population seem poor. Connecting these two storylines is a highly controversial initiative launched by police Major Colvin to move the drug dealers off the street corners into three abandoned city blocks where the police will turn a blind eye to their activities so they can concentrate more on murders and crime prevention elsewhere. The 'Hamsterdam' storyline, apparently inspired by the 'legalise drugs' movement, is a stunning and surprisingly even-handed piece of social commentary. There is also an ongoing subplot following the attempts of former Barksdale enforcer Dennis 'Cutty' Wise to go straight after spending fourteen years in prison.
Season 3 is tighter than the second season, as it is able to link the storylines together more effectively than the second, where the trials of the Barksdale gang were largely removed and separate from events on the docks. The new characters, both on the streets and in the city hall, are also more directly tied to the storylines that have gone before and are stronger as a result.
Thematically, the idea behind Season 3 appears to be that of failed reform. The failure of the city's drug prevention strategies encourage some radical, out-of-the-box thinking from Major Colvin. Whilst his policy is initially successful, it leads to a whole host of knock-on effects which are beyond his powers to address, and give a rather depressing impression that, indeed, no one man can make a difference to the system. The breathtaking cynicism and corruption of the political wing of the city is depicted, with Carcetti determined to reform the system from the inside, again with apparently little hope of success. Stringer Bell's attempts to reform himself and his friend Avon on his release from prison into respectable businessmen provides the season with its main narrative spine, but again does not have a happy ending. That said, there are moments of hope, with Cutty's attempts to go straight finally garnering some success and McNulty's attempts to straighten out his personal life ending on a positive note.
The ending of the season seems to be a little more definitive than the prior two, but the writers take care to leave enough loose ends untied to be pursued into the fourth year, with the candidates for mayor squaring up, several of the gang leaders still very much at large and the police unit once again finding themselves heading off in separate directions.
The Wire: Season 3 (*****) follows up on the first two by being just as dramatically intense with some superb characterisation, brilliant acting and some finely-judged moments of comedy to balance the darkness elsewhere.
DVD Review: great sevice, great show.
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this for a friend out of state. She got it within a week, and it was in perfect shape. "The Wire" is the best!DVD Review: Top 2 Finest Season, Finest Hour of the BEST TV Show EVER
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the season I started watching - and got hooked on - The Wire. I was a little uneasy about the cussing at first, but the characters drew me in - the stories with the drug dealers, the politicians, the cops, everything!
The season picks up and refocuses back on the Barksdale Organization so our Season 1 favorite gangsters are back - and our Season 1 - 2 favorite cops are back. This season also adds a new element - the politicians. While the cops like McNulty, Freemon, Greggs, et al go after Stringer (Idris!), Avon, et al, new characters are introduced with a NEW GAME to follow: Mayor Royce, Councilman Carcetti, and their game with Police Commissioner Burrell et al. A new youngblood Marlo is also introduced to add some good ole' gangsta warfare.
This season has it all. The same social-political themes, the academic and cinematographic nuiances - all string the story lines along. But now, you got the good ole cops and gangsta games, gangsta wars, and political wars. There is so much action between the underhanded political games to the blazin action on the streets.
If you have not seen The Wire, this is THE season to start - you will love it and fall in love with it. You can enjoy it on all levels: as a good political drama, a good cops-gangsta drama, and a just plain good story-telling about some GREAT characters. Don't miss this season.
DVD Review: - 1 for the epilogue
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a great show, right up there with Sopranos. This season is tremendous, but I felt the epilogue was overly pedantic. Irritating, and frustrating that such a great season could have this fortune-cookie-philosophy segment tacked on the tail end. Not enough to deter me from watching season four, though!
(spoiler below)
Oh, and Rawls shows up at a GAY BAR!? That single, hillarious, surprise half second, never brought up again in this season OR the next, was worth the price of admission alone. !!!!
DVD Review: The Wire - The Complete Third Season
Summary: 5 Stars
The Wire - The Complete Third Season continues the excellence presented in the first two seasons.
The writing, acting, directing, etc. are all extreemly professional. At times, I felt I was spying on real people in real situations. I would reccommend this series to anyone who enjoys serious drama.
Description of The Wire - The Complete Third Season
Crime drama set in Baltimore.No Track Information Available
Media Type: DVD
Artist: WIRE
Title: SEASON 3
Street Release Date: 05/08/2007
Genre: TELEVISION
With volatile issues of Baltimore city political reform as its narrative focus, the third season of The Wire superbly maintains the series' astonishingly consistent status as the greatest "novel for television" ever created. While the Baltimore police department's wire-tapping investigations continue to monitor the intricate and now legitimately fronted drug ring of Russell "Stringer" Bell (Idris Elba, smooth as ever), detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) continues his loutish ways, navigating through a series of shallow sexual conquests while doing some of the best cop-work of his career. Stringer's ex-convict partner Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) is back in the picture and bent on eliminating a drug-dealing competitor named Marlo (Jamie Hector), and Baltimore P.D. Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin (Robert Wisdom) tries his own defiantly independent brand of street justice by essentially legalizing drugs in "Hamsterdam," where isolated sections of the city are established as open drug-dealing zones, utterly without the knowledge or approval of Colvin's superiors. As city councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen) plots his own ruthlessly ambitious strategy for the mayor's seat, Baltimore officials, McNulty's wire unit, and the entire Baltimore P.D. stand poised for the inevitable fallout from street-level and executive-level manipulations of power.
Of course, this is just the tip of a very large iceberg, as The Wire continues its labyrinthine yet tightly controlled chronicle of over 50 characters, major and minor, who are all flawlessly woven into the fabric of these 12 remarkable episodes. For season 3, series creator David Simon continued to recruit a top-drawer lineup of reputable writers (including novelists Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos) and directors (including Ernest Dickerson, Tim Van Patten, and Agnieszka Holland), and by the time a major character is killed in the season's penultimate episode (arguably the series' finest yet), it's clear that The Wire has earned its crown as the most ambitious and intelligent crime drama in the history of American television. DVD extras are excellent, as usual, including five illuminating episode commentaries (an absolute must for devoted fans of the series), a Q&A session with cast & crew moderated by renowned TV critic and author Ken Tucker, and a classroom conversation with Simon that delves deeper into the creative process of the series. Having deservedly earned its renewal for a fourth season (out of a projected five, according to Simon), The Wire delivers surprises aplenty (keep a close watch for startling revelations) while proving, yet again, that cable-TV is the place to be for anyone seeking respite from the relative mediocrity of mainstream network programming. --Jeff Shannon
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