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crack is back

just watched the opening episode of the wire season 5. gotta say david simon and the writers are still at the top of their game. in the opening scene bunk owns two kids in an interrogation with nothing more than a mcdonald’s bag and a copy machine.

its one of the small victories that we have been allowed to enjoy over the last four seasons.

for those of you unfamiliar with the show here is david simon’s quote on about the show from nick hornby’s interview in the believer.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 3:10 am. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with pbe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.