The lost art of reading other Jews for fucking filth like this.
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How do you feel about the divisive fifth season of the Wire?
Regarding the newsroom storyline, I think David Simon was too close to the source material. The result was something unusually didactic (a flaw of his later work that showed up again in We Run This City) and focused more on settling scores with people he used to work with and for than really examining the deeper structures and institutions at work in destroying American newspapers.
There is a story to be told there about vulture capitalists stripping profitable companies for the equivalent of the copper wire in the walls, about how Web 2.0 companies destroyed the funding model often through deliberate fraud, and the deregulation that made all of this possible. That's not the story Simon wanted to tell.
Regarding the serial killer storyline, I think there were two main problems aside from any issues about realism or sensationalism.
The first is that I don't think it actually got to a truth about police corruption - in real-life Baltimore, the Gun Trace Task Force members weren't running around robbing drug dealers and committing overtime fraud in order to finance investigations of the major criminals actually harming the city, they did it to line their own pockets. Their resentments weren't driven by budget cuts and upper management, they were driven by black residents of Baltimore challenging them over police brutality.
The second is that I don't think it did a good job wrestling with the big question about "good police" versus "bad police." Leaving aside the whole abolition debate (which hadn't yet become a part of public discourse when the Wire was running), I think there are some legitimate questions about David Simon's frameworks about policing, with narcotics surveillance and Homicide held up as "good policing," and street-level War on Drugs policing as "bad policing." However, when challenged about the wave of exonerations coming out of the Baltimore Homicide Department involving the detectives that Simon had lionized as "good po-lice" in his book and Homicide and The Wire, Simon clammed up and stammered denials.
If even the supposed best of the police turn out to be systematically violating the rights of the accused because it's easier than doing their job legit, is there anything redeemable about the system? In Season 5, McNulty and Freamon commit many procedural crimes, but the policework they financed with them was sound - hence the tragic aspects of their downfall. But in reality, they just would have pinned a random murder on Marlo and engineered enough false witness statements to put him away.
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Another David Simon verbal murder
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Out this week: Homicide: The Graphic Novel (First Second, $29.99):
This is a graphic novel adaptation of David Simon鈥檚 Homicide, the true-crime book written after Simon spent a year shadowing Baltimore police. It inspired both Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire TV shows, and now Philippe Squarzoni has adapted it into a graphic novel.
See what else is arriving at your local comic shop this week.
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