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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > The Wire: The Rewatch... and all the pieces matter.
 
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Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021

Count Roland posted:

Poverty Alleviation Drama? Are we being trolled?

in a better world, FDR would be the god emperor of the USA and we would be on season 50 about a group of youngsters working at a WPA station.

* # ¿ Apr 25, 2025 22:13
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# ¿ Jun 24, 2025 19:58
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Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021

Count Roland posted:

I don't doubt they exist. I wonder why they're being brought up in The Wire thread, a show about how laws and policy and corruption and poverty combine in complicated ways to gently caress over a lot of people. A show about a party member giving up the easy life to work for her fellow citizens sounds like plain propaganda.

because minning town is actually based on an actual place that grew from scratch in an era where baltimore was sliding? The show is very pretty but kinda drab. A more fictionalized version of the genre is "Like a Flowing River." Because its essentially a fictional story about an historical era, you have "few bad apples" critiques of CPC cadre in the show - much like how american TV dramas show few bad apples in newer cop dramas that don't portray american cities as a GTAV multiplayer Server.

* # ¿ Apr 25, 2025 22:22
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Tankbuster
Oct 1, 2021

Count Roland posted:

Yeah, so it sucks.

I mean most tv is like that, in the West and elsewhere. Easy stereotypes, easy cliches. Maybe challenging in some ways but usually challenging to a certain group and not others. Controversial in ways that seem absurd a generation later.

All that is what the Wire isn't. It's nobody's propaganda (well, maybe for newspaper journalists). It will age very well because it captured things very close to how they are, warts and all.

Those poverty alleviation dramas you are scoffing at also captured things very close to how they were, which is why they resonated very well with their primary audience.

* # ¿ Apr 25, 2025 23:47
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > The Wire: The Rewatch... and all the pieces matter.