Some Serious Series: The Wire (2002-2008)

created by: David Simon
directed by: Joe Chappelle, Clark Johnson and others
written by: David Simon, Ed Burns and others
cast: Dominic West, Wendell Pierce, Lance Reddick, Michael Kenneth Williams
imdb

The Wire often appears as one of the best in every all time series lists. That's one of the reasons why every series fan will eventually give it a shot.

Allow me being absolutely sincere at this moment. My first thought after watching the first episode of The Wire was 'Is this it? Is this supossed to be the best series of the last twenty years?'. The first thing you see is a cop talking to a kid while a corpse lies in the middle of the street. Also the image has a kind of VHS quality and the photography seems from a TV movie of the nineties (the first episode dates back from 2002).

But this first impression couldn't be more wrong: The Wire is as good as they say, and even more...

Season 2 Opening Titles

The first season establishes the foundations on which the series is going to build this great social painting, because it begins focusing on the poorest streets of Baltimore (the city where the series takes place); this season tells the duel between an special police squad and a gang of drug dealers (the Barksdales), everything with a realistic approach, both in the writing as well as in the shooting, that visually may be describred as 'Hill Street Blues enters the ghetto'. The most important is that there you won't find heroes or villains here, but men and women who try to find their way throught the jungle that the streets are.

Little by little, the plot robustness, the achievement of the script, the great performances, as well as a solid  but artisanal (shrillnessless) directing, keep gripping the viewer.

The Wire s01e06 The Wire

The Wire s01e01 The Target	The Wire s01e03 The Buys
The Wire s01e06 The Wire	The Wire s01e05 The Pager

The second season drifts away from the Barksdale (although we keep getting news from them) and focuses on the port of Baltimore, and how smuggling is entered in the USA, white they portrait the life of the polish community of the city.

The Wire s02	The Wire s02e04 Hard Cases
The Wire s02e09	The Wire s02e11 Bad Dreams

The third season goest back to the Barksdale, and shows how the liutenant of the boss, Stringer Bell, tries to get control of the family. At the same time, another drugdealer, Marlo Stansfield, is slowly taking control of the whole city.

The Wire s03e02 All Due Respect	The Wire s03e06 Homecoming
The Wire s03e4 Hamsterdam	The Wire s03e08 Moral Midgetry
5	6

In this season we look up at the city council, and the secrets of the politics. This shows the differences between the real street police work and the stats that police chiefs work with, and how all this ends in the wonderful experiment of Hamsterdam.

The Wire s03e12 Mission Accomplished

The fourth season gives the definitive leap that makes The Wire become "the great american novel of the XXI century", both in ambition and quality, as well as in social portrait and truthfulness.

Why is it "the great american novel of the XXI century"? There are several reason: first, it portraits different communities (criminal, police, justice, education, politics, etc.) that would represent the whole life of an american city, and all this with a great accuracy.

Its ambition, quality, emotion, veracity, etc. make The Wire a referencial work, and not only in television.

The Wire s04e01 Boys of summer

The Wire s05e04 Transitions	The Wire s05e06 The Dickension Aspect
The Wire s05e10 -30-	The Wire s05e10 -30-
5	6

The fifth season doesn't follow the increasing realistic path of its predecessors, specially with its psychopath plot, although it approaches the world of journalism and some of its problems, which brings to the series "the fourth power", which helps support the claim of The Wire being a timeless classic.

The Wire is an absolute must-see.

The Wire - Complete Series

Some Serious Series: The Following (2013)

created by: Kevin Williamson
directed by: Marcos Siega, Joshua Butler
written by: Kevin Williamson y otros
photography by: David S. Tuttman
edited by: Matthew Colonna, Rob Seidenglanz, Todd Desrosiers
music by: John Frizzell
cast: Kevin Bacon, James Purefoy, Shawn Ashmore
imdb

Kevin Williamson was the "renewer" (as far as the genre allowed) of teen terror in the mid-nineties; titles such as Scream (1996), I know what you did last summer (1997) and The Faculty (1998) opened a new path that produced uncountable copies/parodies.

He then made a big career change to focus in televisión, where he brought Glory Days (2002), Hidden Palms (2007), but maybe the best known of all series he made for tv is still Dawson Creek (1998).

In the last years, he made two series both targeted to the teen audience: of The Vampire Diaries (2009) and The Secret Circle (2011), a Dawson Creek with witchcraft  product. But it was not yet until The Following, that Williamson created a series aimed to an adult audience.

The Following has a lot from The Silence of the Lambs, and the Joe Carroll character a lot from Hannibal Lecter. But, on the other side, the character played by Kevin Bacon, Ryan Hardy, an alcoholic former agent of the FBI, is totally opposed to the one that Jodie Foster played in the famous movie, Clarice Sterling, that stands as a young and driven agent.

The Following plot tells the prosecution that this former agent portrayed by Bacon leads to hunt the disciples of a convicted serial killer, Joe Carroll, who guides them from prison in what seems to be a one thousand tentacles cult.

The Following has a great visual package, as expected; the script of the first episodes is quite enterntaining, but we will have to see if it doesn't become too repetititve. 

Some Serious Series: An "Old" One (The Wire) & A "New" One (Homeland)

creator: David Simon
emission: 2002-2008
director: Joe Chappelle, Ernest R. Dickerson, Clark Johnson, Ed Bianchi, Steve Shill,
Daniel Attias, Timothy Van Patten, Agnieszka Holland, Brad Anderson and others
writer: David Simon, Ed Burns and others
photography: Uta Briesewitz, Russell Lee Fine and others
music: Blake Leyh
editor: Kate Sanford, Thom Zimny and others
stars: Dominic West, John Doman, Deirdre Lovejoy
imdb

The Wire is usually recognized as one of the best series in recent (even all-time) television. The secret of its success? Hard to tell, but almost everybody points to its realistic approach. The thing is that, although the first episodes may seem a little slow (maybe not slow, but un-directioned), the plot grips you and doesn't let you go.

And obviously, another key point of The Wire's succes is the character depiction; we follow the "good" (McNulty and co) and the "bad" ones in their daily misadventures, each ones trying to making their best.

A lot more from The Wire, here.

The Wire is an american series. It can be described as the greatest american book about the life in an american city downtown in the present days. It is really difficult to imagine it located in another part of the world. And so may seem Homeland. But it isn't.

Homeland was inspired in an israeli series, about some prisoner soldiers that are freed after being held for several years. But it is true that the adaptation works like a clock.

creator: Gideon Raff
emission: 2011
director: Michael Cuesta, Clark Johnson, Jeffrey Nachmanoff
writer: Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, Gideon Raff and others
photography: Nelson Cragg
music: Sean Callery
editor: Jordan Goldman, Joe Hobeck, Terry Kelley
stars: Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, Morena Baccarin
imdb

Homeland is a great series, absolutely gripping from the beginning, wonderfully keeping the spectator on the edge of knowledge about the true purpose of the rescued marine.

The writing is great and supported on Claire Danes, Damian Lewis and Mandy Patinkin, that are all great on their roles. Even the characters are wonderfully developed, and not merely as puppets.

Whilst the series becomes a modellic thriller in twelve episodes, the only criticism may be the end of the first season, too open in my opinion, and excessively driven towards the second season.

Some Serious Series 2012

Grimm (2011) imdb



In the present day a police officer discovers that he is a Grimm, a lineage of men and women that can see the (numerous) monsters that live around us, and have to fight them.

The series began a little weak, like the writers were a little disoriented about where they pretended to go. Luckily the series grabbed strenght basicly giving more weight to the relation between the police man and the "good monster" who advises him. This change makes the series become something like "X-Files" investigate the Brothers Grimm tales.




Once Upon A Time (2011) imdb



"Once Upon A Time" is based upon a really original idea: the evil witch punishes the rest of the characters of the classic tales to live in a small town where they have forgotten who they were in the past. Only a child knows the truth.

Parallely we see the days before the spell of the evil witch.




The River (2012) imdb



Do you imagine "Lost" (2004) meets "Paranormal Activity"? This is "The River. And it is not surprising coming from Oren Peli, the man behind "Paranormal Activity".

The series is chaotic but it has some kind of charm that finally gets you hooked




Alcatraz (2012) imdb



The last two series from JJ Abrams, "Fringe" and "Alcatraz", have adapted the "X-Files" strtucture: a couple of investigators facing misterious cases, although it is true that "Fringe" has evolved in the direction of "Lost", a paranoia only for fans.

"Alcatraz" has learned from the mistakes of "Fringe" and brings from the beginning a reasonable continuity combined with the indpendence of each episode.







Touch (2012) imdb



With a really impressive pilot episode, "Touch" has risen great expectation. With elements of "Searching for Bobby Fischer" (1993) or "Numb3rs" (2005), "Touch" tells the story of a man with an autistic son that discovers that the only way he can communicate with his son is with numbers, but also that his son can predict the future. The structure reminds of "Heroes" (2006).