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: Unrated
Studio: HBO Home Video
DVD Reviews of The Wire - The Complete Third Season
DVD Review: Still riveting but a little off the standard
Summary: 4 Stars
The third season of "The Wire" takes aim at City Hall and the way politics subverts efforts to fight crime and put the bad guys away.
Most of the familiar characters are back, both good and bad guys (if you can tell the difference) and a few new ones are added.
The plot revolves around the decision by Police Major Colvin, who controls western Baltimore, to try a new experiment to cut the crime waves destroying his community. He designates three small areas as drug zones where police will not interfere in sales and trafficking as long as the hoodlums leave the rest of the neighborhood alone. As a result, crime drops and the neighborhood shows signs of renewal. Of course, when the police commissioner, the mayor and the media find out, all hell breaks lose.
Though still vastly superior nearly anything else on TV, I found this series a little less riveting than the previous two. Perhaps it's because of the growing feeling anyone watching these dramas must get that in the end it's all fruitless. Drug dealers and gang leaders come and go but the drug trade remains. One gang is broken up and its leaders sent to prison: another instantly rises to fill the gap. The market is always there and as long as there's big money to be made and no alternatives, someone will fill it. As my own research showed in Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons (Prentice Hall Paperback) the "war on drugs" has been a disaster for our inner-cities and our society as a whole.
In this series, we see that there's no honor among thieves. But there's no honor among politicians either. The one difference is that the thieves ultimately settle their differences with bullets.
Well, I'm going to plow on and see the next two seasons. Perhaps the greatest strength of "The Wire" is its all-encompassing view. We see one aspect of the problem after another. Heroic individuals struggle to redeem the city and themselves but the task is too great without a change of heart by society as a whole and massive government intervention.
DVD Review: Powerful conclusions
Summary: 5 Stars
Seasons 1, 2 and 4 lend themselves to solitary viewing one can do without having seen prior seasons and not getting the feeling you missed crucial plot elements.
Seasons 3 and 5 of "The Wire" conclude cliffhanger endings that will only add up if you watched prior seasons.
David Simon planned a five-part, five-season series here but by 2004, he wasn't completely sure if they'd be renewed yet (of course, they were), so he wrote this season powerful and complete enough to be a series end if necessary.
What viewers get is a masterfully written adventure that documents the downfall of Season 1's West Baltimore drug empire and the rise of a new one, a careful examination of the community's War on Drugs while also detailing just how screwed up and ineffective some of the city's basic institutions (City Hall, The Police) are, bogged down by politics, bureaucracy and conflicting interests.
Season 4 (Baltimore School System) is my personal favorite but Season Three is probably the most powerful of all five seasons because you see the great storylines at all levels -- the Streets, City Hall, the Police -- and get to see how clearly what effects/influences one directly effects and influences the others.
Chalked full of social commentary, bitter endings for some of the series' most popular characters and poetic justice for others.
A bonus to purchasing this Season's DVDs are the Special Features Q&A with the shows' writers, producers and cast members Idris Elba (Stringer Bell), Jamie Hector (Marlo Stanfield) and Seth Gilliam (Sgt. Carver).
"The Wire" is so beloved for its presentation of complex moral issues, multi-dimensional character representations and realistic portrayals of the hypocritical world we live in. This Q&A gives you an idea just how passionate fans of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds were (and continue to be) of this great, great show.
DVD Review: No fake actors
Summary: 5 Stars
This is real, second to none....CSI,24 all those types of shows are fake if you want a real show with real people as actors this is it trust me I've watched season one through five...DVD Review: Great Series, Weakest Season
Summary: 4 Stars
This season for me was the weakest season even if it ends a great note. Too much of the beginning was confusing and boring and not as interesting as the two previous seasons. Even as the beginning of the season is slow, the story soon pulls together and goes out on a great bang. A very touching one. Idris Elba is an amazing actor and is a great asset to this show. DVD Review: Great Series
Summary: 5 Stars
You're going to get so involved in these character's lives. There are no all bad/all good people here. It's a multi-faceted wonder!
Description of The Wire - The Complete Third Season
The heat is on in Baltimore. The drug war is being lost, bodies are piling up, and a desperate mayor wants the tide turned before the election. But the police department hasn't got any answers. With the demolition of the Franklin Terrace towers, Stringer Bell and the Barksdale crew have been forced to improvise. But no matter how hard McNulty and the detail try, the dealers always seem to be one step ahead of the game.DVD Features:
Audio Commentary
Episodic Previews
Episodic Recaps
Other
Audio Commentary:Five audio commentaries with creatorDavid Simon, director Joe Chappelle, writers Richard Price and George Pelecanos, and producers Karen L. Thorson and Nina K. Noble
Interviews:Q&A with David Simon and Creative Team, Courtesy of the Museum of Television & Radio Conversation with David Simon at Eugene Lang Collete, The New School for Liberal Arts
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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