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Simon's ability to express contempt is superlative. https://x.com/AoDespair/status/1829190006180622417
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Aug 30, 2024 04:56
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Mcnulty trying to sway the feds by likening drug related crimes to terrorism and they obviously not taking the bait is really funny because I just realized that if Stringer did ice Davis, McNulty would probably have gotten a lot more attention that he would doubtless have ended up hating anyway.
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Sep 1, 2024 04:09
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I read the book. Is Homicide: Life on the Street as good as they say?
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Sep 4, 2024 23:29
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The show? Yeah. It's limited by having aired on broadcast TV so you get "butthead" where nothing but "motherfucker" should do, but you also get to see some tremendous acting in a show that pushed hard at boundaries for the era and became an influence on a lot of other work that came later. For all the hundreds of cop shows that have come and gone in the last 30 years, almost none of them lived up to Homicide.
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Sep 4, 2024 23:59
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I just started watching it with my wife and while we're only a few episodes in at the moment it immediately grabbed us both.
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Sep 5, 2024 17:18
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BiggerBoat posted:I read the book. The first 3 seasons are incredible. Then the network starts meddling in the casting and storylines but it's still good just not as good. I'm just mad that the show loses Jon Polito and Ned Beatty because they're not pretty enough or whatever. The show really is the Andre Braugher Power Hour though, they let him act the hell out of every scene.
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Sep 5, 2024 18:24
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BiggerBoat posted:I read the book. 'Three Men And Adena' may be one of the best episodes of TV ever made
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Sep 5, 2024 21:33
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n/m
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Sep 6, 2024 01:30
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Last night I started a complete rewatch with S1, because my newborn will only sleep chest-to-chest and there's never been a better TV show. As ever, this show is just a joy to revisit. Carver and Herc are particularly wonderful to rewatch in the early episodes, because the show efficiently plants the seeds of Carver's growth in a few key reaction shots but it doesn't ever overplay them (the fact that Herc is the one who clumsily but semi-effectively tries to establish a rapport with Bodie's grandmother, whereas Carver tries to do the same with Bodie himself but only comes across as condescending, is such a lovely bit of detail). Strangely, D'Angelo is the character who ends up feeling like a slightly confused enigma to me in the first few episodes - his character arc is moving at a much more dramatic speed than everyone else, and so much of his story is about the different performances he's putting on in different environments, that he starts out feeling very fragmented. That's no reflection at all on Lawrence Gilliard Jr's excellent performance, and I love where the character ends up, but he has to do a lot of heavy narrative lifting on different fronts as soon as he's introduced, and we almost aren't given time to process it all (in the first six episodes alone he has to give us substantially different emotional reactions - from jittery swagger to traumatised empty boasting to open sadness and guilt - to four different murders that he's directly involved with, while also courting Shardene, butting heads with Bodie, teaching chess and acting as a big brother to Wallace, fearfully handling Avon and Stringer while becoming resentful of their lack of trust in him, dealing with snitches, stick-ups, theft, and fake bills, and experiencing social anxiety over fine dining). Something quite sweet and funny I'd forgotten about is how ridiculously over-the-top McNulty becomes in gushing over Kima and Omar and they both just sort of...awkwardly tolerate his extremely sincere respect for them. ("Stay free!!") Jimmy McNulty, Baltimore PD's greatest and most cringe queer ally.
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Sep 8, 2024 15:33
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I forget, did we ever find out what skeletons it was that Daniels was hiding?
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Sep 8, 2024 16:24
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I think the most detailed it ever got was that he was in a station at a time a lot of bribery/random corruption/whatnot was happening? Hard to remember. I did always think that it was part of the reason his wife separates from him, since she was getting political and whatever-it-was might impact her ambitions. I don't think she ever said that, though.
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Sep 8, 2024 16:30
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Bread Enthusiast posted:I think the most detailed it ever got was that he was in a station at a time a lot of bribery/random corruption/whatnot was happening? Hard to remember. I thought she left him because he decided to stick with his job and actually try and solve cases instead of climbing the ladder to further their shared ambitions. I got the sense that it was as much a political marriage as a romantic one, but I don’t remember if the show ever goes too deep in it. And yeah I think Daniels was just stealing money but I can’t remember if it’s ever spelled out.
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Sep 8, 2024 16:47
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The rumor was Daniels was stealing money but I think he just looked the other way. It's never said.
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Sep 8, 2024 17:00
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IN a lesser, more conventional cop show, Daniels secrets would be a main plot element and culminate in a Big Reveal. Same with Rawls being in a gay bar. But both of these are minor and peripheral elements to what's going on and the show is full of poo poo like this. It's what makes it so rewarding on a rewatch. I was just reminded of The Sopranos where Carm reveals a hidden wall in one episode with a loving AK concealed in there and we, as viewers, swear it's gonna be
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Sep 8, 2024 17:00
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Fitz also says that Daniels has a lot of undeclared money in his accounts that the FBI suspected was dirty but could never follow up on.
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Sep 8, 2024 17:27
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Ainsley McTree posted:I thought she left him because he decided to stick with his job and actually try and solve cases instead of climbing the ladder to further their shared ambitions. I got the sense that it was as much a political marriage as a romantic one, but I don’t remember if the show ever goes too deep in it.
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Sep 8, 2024 17:50
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HootTheOwl posted:The rumor was Daniels was stealing money but I think he just looked the other way. There's a scene in Better Call Saul it reminds me of a little bit. For anyone not passingly acquainted with it or Breaking Bad, there's a major character who used to be a cop in Philly and there's a scene where he talks about how everyone was on the take. Your partners did it, your superiors did it. You had to do it, not just because it was normal but because that's everyone else knew they could trust you. I've always thought it was a similar thing with Daniels. If you're the one guy who wasn't taking a little off the top then you're the office rat even if you never talked to IA
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Sep 8, 2024 20:52
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The impression that I got with Daniels was that he was basically a successful Stringer; he managed to leapfrog into an entirely new economic class due to his criminal activities but was actually able to diversify enough through legitimate channels to maintain his new position. Like compared to who he was rubbing shoulders with in the Eastern district or whatever, Daniels was not that bad, but he was prob on the take for a good long while and did very well for himself as a result. How actively dirty he was at this time is an exercise left to the reader but I like to think he saw a lot of himself in Carver Ainsley McTree posted:I thought she left him because he decided to stick with his job and actually try and solve cases instead of climbing the ladder to further their shared ambitions. I got the sense that it was as much a political marriage as a romantic one, but I don’t remember if the show ever goes too deep in it. also my takeaway
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Sep 8, 2024 20:58
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Thinking about it more, the subtext of that marriage isn’t super subtle. I think she outright says “I fell in love with you because of your ambition” at one point, then there’s the whole “the only way to win is not to play” conversation after Daniels gets stuck with the detail, followed by a scene of them silently, angrily, eating dinner after he decides to play, then they’re divorced not long after if I’m remembering the timeline of the show correctly.
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Sep 8, 2024 21:30
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christmas boots posted:There's a scene in Better Call Saul it reminds me of a little bit. Serpico is also all about this E: didn’t mean to back to back post, oops sorry
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Sep 8, 2024 21:30
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Yeah, from memory it's mentioned that the Daniels have more money and a nicer property than they should really be able to afford on their salaries, and he came out of a division that was notorious for stealing money, but while there was definitely the whiff of corruption about his assets there was no way to actually definitively prove the money was illegitimate. The irony being that by the end of the show, when Daniels finally gets to see a copy of the file he's known they've had on him for all this time, he sees that there is nothing in there that he could actually be arrested for or even accused of. It's all hearsay and conjecture... but it doesn't matter, because by that point of the show he's been elevated to a high-profile enough position that even allegations would be enough to torch his career and damage the rest of the department, as well as scupper his ex-wife's political career just as she's starting to gain some traction for herself. She herself probably knows that now her opponents and "friends" in politics have something to hang over her head as well for the rest of her career. The difference being that this seems to be the norm in Baltimore City Politics: everybody knows that everybody else is into some dirt, and that they have ammunition to use against each other that they won't for fear of ammo being used on them... and thus everybody is in the same boat and can get on and work together, (mostly) safe thanks to both the fear of mutually assured destruction and the comfort of mutually assured rear end-covering. See Burrell going quietly and being rewarded with a six figure salary in a bullshit "job" for playing "the game", a fate that Nerese Campbell openly points out as desirable and the result of doing "the right thing" when everybody is worried Clay Davis is going to try to take the whole ship down with him. God I love this show. 
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Sep 9, 2024 02:46
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BiggerBoat posted:I was just reminded of The Sopranos where Carm reveals a hidden wall in one episode with a loving AK concealed in there and we, as viewers, swear it's gonna be They bring the AK out in the episode with the bear again but nothing happens.
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Sep 9, 2024 16:33
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Made it to Season 2 and like a lot of people, I’m always stunned by how much more I love the stevedore storylines on a rewatch than I did when I was 18 and getting annoyed as I waited for Daniels’ unit to reassemble. By comparison it’s now the Major Crimes storyline that feels a little flimsy and ill-paced, at least in places. There’s a lot of great spiky humour around it with Valchek and Rawls, but also some awkward moments apparently caused by the expanded scope of the season, like our heroes somehow - in the immediate aftermath of a people-smuggling incident - taking several episodes before they figure out onscreen that the stevedores’ dirty money must come from smuggling; or Herc and Carver being sent off to surveil random neighbourhood dealers for the purposes of comic relief (Daniels’ explanation for this is that they should try and crack a couple of drug cases to make the operation a success, but it isn’t clear why he thinks Valchek would care). The storyline also comes with a few of those expositional scenes you only get in procedurals where the protagonists explain a plan to each other by chiming in with half a sentence each, one after the other - which instantly reminds you of lesser cop shows. On the other hand, the Sobotkas’ tragic tale of grain piers, industrial collapse, and lawyer ducks continues to be really loving compelling even decades and several rewatches on. grobbo fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Sep 10, 2024 |
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Sep 10, 2024 18:11
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it's possible Daniels was on the take like everyone in that department just because it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If he doesn't, he's a rat. If he does, he's corrupt and criminally liable if caught. Or it's possible he did it to get a socioeconomic leg up but hid it well and didn't get too greedy.
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Sep 10, 2024 20:18
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Kemper Boyd posted:They bring the AK out in the episode with the bear again but nothing happens. That wasn't the same episode?
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Sep 11, 2024 00:36
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I always figured that whatever dirt they had on Daniels was unrelated to his actual financial situation because neither he nor his wife seemed dumb enough to buy a $5M house or whatever outright using ill-gotten gains.
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Sep 11, 2024 04:16
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BiggerBoat posted:That wasn't the same episode? That’s way later, the bear is in season 5 or so after Carmela kicks Tony out of the house, the bear lumbering around the backyard is a metaphor for Tony still haunting Carmela’s life
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Sep 11, 2024 05:37
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Dunno why everyone keeps trying tongive Daniels the Noble Reluctant Cop treatment. He stole money while doing drug busts. Like Carver is obviously Young Daniels, part of the cyclical theme of institutional problems the show points out, and Carver stole money from drug busts, played politics to get ahead, was arrogant and brutal with the people, etc etc and then he got The Talk and started becoming the, uh, Good Cop (not a real thing but in the fiction of the show it exists) like Daniels. That's all lol
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Sep 11, 2024 12:53
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Yeah, Daniels stole money and he got away with it, and he was smart enough to know when enough was enough and move on from that once he'd gotten enough to help supplement he and his wife's incomes and raise up to a rank in the department where he felt he had some security.
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Sep 11, 2024 13:02
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if Herc wasn't so astonishingly incompetent, he might have ended up as another Valcheck down the line
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Sep 11, 2024 17:29
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ulvir posted:if Herc wasn't so astonishingly incompetent, he might have ended up as another Valcheck down the line Too stupid to be a cop is an impressive bar to clear but damned if he didn't manage it
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Sep 11, 2024 17:32
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Herc working for levy and just giving the unit marlo's number because he was still pissed about the surveillance camera was one of the bigger lols in the series for me. Exactly the kind of petty vindictive poo poo valcheck would've pulled if he was in that position Edit: and of course it wasn't an accident that the script had herc talking to valcheck over the mayor's blowjob. Eason the Fifth fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Sep 11, 2024 |
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Sep 11, 2024 18:18
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Lol Herc is the reason Marlo stayed out of prison.
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Sep 11, 2024 19:27
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Cranappleberry posted:Lol Herc is the reason Marlo stayed out of prison. I need to watch S5 again. I don't remember a bunch of details like this.
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Sep 11, 2024 21:08
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Herc tells Levy that based on his discussions with people and his own experience with how Lester Freamon operates, he has to believe that Marlo was being surveilled, and probably for quite awhile. Levy knows from the official police records that surveillance wasn't how the case was put together, but Herc's impression and knowledge makes him ponder if perhaps the official police record isn't actually telling the truth (it's not). He broaches the idea briefly with Marlo, considering how quickly Lester supposedly cracked the clock code, and takes a gamble when he negotiates with Pearlman (and when he has his own career and possibly freedom on the line!) and it pays off, because she agrees to a deal that 99% of criminals (not Marlo) would be over the moon about. There's a reason Levy is gushing over Herc and claiming he's part of the family now at the end of the series: Herc not only got him one of the biggest and most high profile (in terms of other drug dealers) wins of his career, Herc saved Levy's actual career, livelihood and high potential of going to prison himself.
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Sep 11, 2024 21:45
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DaysBefore posted:Dunno why everyone keeps trying to give Daniels the Noble Reluctant Cop treatment. He stole money while doing drug busts. Like Carver is obviously Young Daniels, part of the cyclical theme of institutional problems the show points out, and Carver stole money from drug busts, played politics to get ahead, was arrogant and brutal with the people, etc etc and then he got The Talk and started becoming the, uh, Good Cop (not a real thing but in the fiction of the show it exists) like Daniels. That's all lol I don't think anyone was taking that angle. I wasn't. I just wondered if it every really came out what he'd done because I didn't recall. Also: The Game is the Game
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Sep 12, 2024 00:19
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Marlo does get out of jail in the end, but his final scene makes it clear that he's never going to be able to get out of the game and is going to either get himself killed or end up back in jail for violating the plea agreement. Kind of how his predecessor Avon refused to give up the corners when he could have gotten out of the game because he couldn't conceive of a world where he wasn't running all of the corners in West Baltimore.
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Sep 12, 2024 01:06
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i feel like marlo and stringer each got what the other one wanted, which feels kind of ironic and fun. stringer (i forget if there's a new watcher itt, so spoiling just in case) gets a public, life or death confrontation with two of the biggest known names on the street, while marlo gets a legal pass to clean his dirty business, with connections and networking opportunities with the upper crust of baltimore society. would have been perfect for each other, but each of them considers it a burden on themselves
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Sep 12, 2024 02:37
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Very good take
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Sep 12, 2024 19:23
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You know what, Chad L. Coleman gives one of TV's most quietly compelling performances, and while many of The Wire's black actors have ended up typecast or shoved into supporting roles, it feels particularly galling that he's never had a leading part off the back of this. We're just a few episodes into Season 3 - just a few scenes of Cutty largely standing around, silently observing - and I'd already take a bullet for the man. We get so much humanity and character out of him just brushing his shoes in preparation to meet his ex, or in his shifting micro-expressions as she offers him a job opportunity while also quietly letting him know there's no chance of a relationship there. Incredible acting, incredible work. Is there a single bad key performance in The Wire? Jamie Hector is better-appreciated these days. Pablo Schreiber is maybe a touch flat, the journalists don't have a ton to work with, and the Greeks are a little broad and hammy, but...bad? grobbo fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Sep 13, 2024 |
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Sep 13, 2024 04:39
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