Rank The Wire montages:

Rank The Wire montages:

1. Season 2
2. Season 4
3. Season 1
4. Season 3
5. Season 5

s2 is underrated, really liked the sobotkas.

1. Season 4
2. Season 1
3. Season 2
4. Season 3
5. Season 5

agree completely with your ranking OP

season 2 is my second favourite season but just barely

the sobotka family tragedy hits hard

s2 is GOAT

>You're more like me than you know.... You're a Sobotka!
That fucking killed me

The montages, not the seasons?

1. S5
2. S2
3. S4
4. S1
5. S3

If I were to rank the seasons themselves, it'd be what OP had.

>putting the GOAT montage, the last one, last

It has two of the best moments in the entire show in it.

Frank just tries so hard to provide for his family

That argument he has with his old schoolyard acquaintance, the "we used to build shit" sequence, always hits so hard.

Also drunken Nicky, "COLLEGE KIDS AIN'T SHIT." So hard to watch.

Nick Sobotka is one of the best characters Simon has ever written, Frank too. So fucking underrated.

>It has two of the best moments in the entire show in it.
No it doesn't. Bubbles walking up the stairs was overrated. Faggot never even mentioned his sister and SUDDENLY he has family. Whatever. Season 5 was trash.

>Frank just tries so hard to provide for his family
and at the end his family is flushed away. Frank fucked up. there was more to life than being the big man at the union hall.

Agreed. Frank is one of the very best characters of the entire show. I like how every season has one character who is meant to be pushing against the aspects of the game that they can't take, ultimately failing to succeed. D'Angelo and Frank's struggles are extraordinarily sad.

1. Sopranos is better
2. who cares?

I'm not sure what that means. I said Frank tried so hard to provide for his family. He did. He also tried hard to make things work for his union. He did what he thought was right. Of course he erred and ultimately went astray and died as a result, that doesn't make him any less tragic. He pushed for what he believed and that shit caught up with him.

4>3=2>1>5

Sopranos is such shit compared to The Wire

>I'm retarded as fuck and can't follow basic plotlines

Bubble's arc is the best in the whole show.

The S5 montage also shows how Dookie is heading down the exact same road, it's heartbreaking. But I guess if you only like LOL EPIC GANGTAS and COPS xD you wouldn't appreciate their stories

Frank is one of the enablers of "The Game", he's playing it even when he doesn't know. S2 is all about following the chain of suffering another rung, (this continues the whole way to the end), and you see the root cause of the situation in the inner cities (post industrial america), and again how hard it is to pin blame on any one person. Everyone is just defending their own "corner".

The moment he tries to fight against The Game, (snitching), even though he only considers it, he gets iced.

not that guy but the season 5 montage is overrated as fuck

the parallelism is extremely amateur and only serves to wow plebs. "I mean whoa, that kid is going to be Omar!" An incredibly easy way of feigning pathos.

It's good but it's nowhere near being as good as 2's montage

Well said

...

>Sopranos is such shit compared to The Wire
Sopranos is better but The Wire is amazing. I guess it comes down to personal preference.

I dropped The Sopranos after season 4. Seemed like pretty standard gangster stuff but nowhere near as good as the great gangster movies that exist.

I'm just saying Frank really fucked up by caring more about the union than his family. He said it was always work but it definitely wasn't: When Frank was younger, he definitely got paid hundreds of dollars a week to just sit around reading the newspaper. It was this and other men like him that caused the industrial sector to collapse: People were getting paid too much to do almost nothing. Men like Frank ruined America, and their homes (Ziggy is a typical problem child who would have fared better with some attention)

this is a fundamental misinterpretation of the show, that is clearly not the idea that Simon is advancing in Frank's case. he is meant to be a tragic figure

The entire point of S4 and S5 completely flew over your head then. Fuck, half the point of the WHOLE SHOW did.

It's a cycle of violence and despair. The point of bringing in the kids in S4 was to show where the Avons and the Stringers and the Omars came from. It's not parallelism for it's own sake like you'd see in some cheap Spielberg film, it's the whole reason those characters were written in the first place. Bookending Bubbles finally pulling himself out of the shitty life we've seen him live for 5 seasons and climbing the stairs with Dukie starting his own shitty journey was vital, the Wire is never mawkish or sentimental. The point of Bubbles story was to show just what that cycle of despair is like and what it does to people, how hard it is to leave. You can't give him a happy ending without showing the bigger picture, or it wouldn't be The Wire.

S2's montage has better direction, but S5's is more vital to the series as a whole.

wow you must be retarded. the sopranos is hardly even about gangster stuff

The Sopranos is weak in comparison. The fucking pop psychology is the absolute worst

Wow! The show is about cycles! You're such a perceptive viewer!

The Bubbles' arc in season 5 is the best aspect of the season by a long, long shot. The rest of the show, as you said, deals with the parallels and the cyclical despair the show is so intent on showing us. The montage on the other hand is completely bereft of any subtlety and only rams the cycles down our throat in a completely unnecessary way. I mean it's still a good montage but it feels very on-the-nose compared to the montages of the other seasons.

The source: Your ass

That's a nice backstory you've created in your head, but it's not even hinted at, at any point in the show. You need to stop making everything about your own personal political agenda.

Wrong wrong wrong. The Sopranos is on the level of those so-called "great gangster movies" and manages to perfectly encapsulate how that sort of criminal activity in the modern era has to adapt or die.

I am a major Sopranos fan so I have some bias, but you have to acknowledge its greatness. Give it another try down the road. You need to watch both The Sopranos and The Wire in full to make a real objective decision.

Now, having said that I am a Sopranos fanboy, I am currently in a "Wire phase" watching the series for my third or fourth time. I am discovering a lot more nuances as I go through, but I stil prefer The Sopranos. I could put on any episode of The Sopranos from any season and still be in love. With The Wire I very much need to go linear, or I will not appreciate most of what's going on.

Wait, what? That "backstory" was really prevalent. Whenever Ziggy and Frank talked about Frank's wife. She was totally ruined by Frank's profession and so was Ziggy, and Frank.

That "fucking pop psychology" was incredibly accurate, actually.

I had seen The Wire several times before watching The Sopranos. It's definitely a good show but I don't think it's anywhere near the greatness of The Wire. I didn't even find the central character all that interesting, he spent most of his time sputtering in rage. I liked his relationships with his family but in general I was far more interested in that nephew of his than I was in him. The show never felt it had all that much momentum for me. Moments of brilliance for sure but it felt like a far lesser show than The Wire.

I never claimed to be being particularly perceptive. The fact it's about cycles is fucking obvious, that is the whole point of the S5 montage and why it is vital. It's the final note of the Wire, that despite everything we've just seen, everyone pushing against the flow that has gotten eaten up, and even the spare few that made it out the game alive and happy, the cycle is still going on and will continue to, until the route causes are dealt with.

The Wire doesn't do subtlety like you are saying, it never has. Every fucking scene is on the nose, explicitly introducing a new idea that adds nuance to the overall picture, but in itself is blunt and obvious as fuck.

A tragic figure can still fuck up. Frank fucked up by not giving a shit about his family. It's why Ziggy turned out the way he did.

I hate when people like you attempt to evaluate art. You guys have absolutely zero compassion and the fact that your life has likely mostly been spent in front of a computer screen prevents you from having any ability to gauge what it's like to actually be a human being. Frank tried his best. We all make mistakes, we all hurt people we love, we all struggle to make things work and to provide for the people we care about. If you can't see that in Frank then you don't understand art and you have an extremely high opinion of yourself.

What's with the personal attacks? Frank legitimately fucked up and the show goes through lengths to demonstrate this. Frank didn't stress college enough to Ziggy and the kid turned into a murderer. You don't think the parents of criminals are complicit in their crimes? Parents have a responsibility and Sobotka failed in every which way. He is tragic, and I feel sorry for him, but I pray I don't end up like him. He is not a romantic figure.

Not him, but I think you are hella overreacting. He has a point, that Frank was a shitty father: just look at Ziggy. That is all down to him.

It's totally disingenuous to say he caused the deindustrialisation of many American cities. That was globalisation and "the market". And when you look at what that did to the stevedores and lived through it, David Simon is saying that produced two main archetypes: Frank, the type who kept scrapping and clawing for a living and holding onto that pride even when the market was making their position completely untenable, or his brother, who just disappeared entirely from it and went "quiet". Its what happens when a way of life is removed from a society.

Are you saying the industrial unions are totally blameless in the collapse of the industry? Look at the typical things that unions want.
>Guaranteed work
>Full benefits
>Pristine working conditions
Don't we all want those things in life. But most people make sacrifices, or adapt accordingly. These unions need to face reality but instead they fought and pissed and moaned.

The show never goes to lengths to show that Frank didn't care about his family. In fact, it was the opposite. Nobody is debating whether he fucked up, you just seem so dismissive of him that it doesn't sound as though you experienced what the show wanted you to feel. The Sobotkas are meant to be a tragic embodiment of a system that was rigged from the beginning, there wasn't an opportunity for them to make it. The tragedy is in the inevitability of the situation.

They are also the only reason there is any way of life at all to be found in these industries after the top-down decision to globalise and move manufacture to foreign countries where the workers are paid almost nothing. Union backed working standards (that save lives) have a negligible effect compared to all that.

>The show never goes to lengths to show that Frank didn't care about his family.

Eh, Ziggy's whole arc, and all their scenes together show that Frank was a shitty dad who didn't spend enough time with his kids, or encouraging them by being the right kind of role model. That said, Nikky's dad wasn't that great a role model either, like you said with the system rigged, the next generation could never live up to the bullshit claims of their fathers gen, and all the constant work they had and how many ships they turned around in a day. Because the work wasn't there anymore.

>The Sobotkas are meant to be a tragic embodiment of a system
I have never once denied that they were meant to embody a tragedy. My problem is with people saying Sobotka was entirely blameless for the collapse of the unions. I shouldn't have to give you a history lesson here: Unions were obscenely corrupt in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Frank Sobotka, Horseface, Nat Coxson, Ott, all those old guys were probably throwing money around (making sure the right bum got elected), swiping shit from ships (his story about Tang), many more little nods to the inherent corruption in trade unions ("seniority sucks, if you ain't senior"). People like Fran got too comfortable and felt that their work would always be protected because they were in a union. Everyone paid a price as a result of their corruption and lack of foresight.

You sound like you might have lived a privileged life mate.

A lot of fathers are shitty, fuck 50% of marriages divorce. Just because Frank might not have always been a perfect dad in no way means that Ziggy HAD to end up a murderer. It's a far more complicated issue, reducing it to "bad dad = unfortunate son who ends up in prison" is far too simplistic. The conditions surrounding Frank and his family were responsible for Ziggy's downfall, as well as Ziggy himself. Frank was a part of it of course but to just accuse him because he might not have been the best dad is a little narrowminded. Especially given that we don't see what their relationship was like when Ziggy was younger. I mean Ziggy is in his 20s now so it's a much different relationship then it could have been when Frank was an actual dad figure to him.

Ziggy had a bad dad, but he also had a shitty mother. Shitty role models in general (those port guys were drunk, uneducated, and took pride in horrific things like workplace injuries and drinking 53 beers). This led to Ziggy's inherent personality flaws and inevitable downfall.

>reducing it to "bad dad = unfortunate son who ends up in prison" is far too simplistic

It's almost like I went on in that post to show more reasons why I think Ziggy ended up why he is.

Stop throwing out random ad hominems to everyone you disagree with, it makes all your arguments look weaker.

>I mean Ziggy is in his 20s now so it's a much different relationship then it could have been when Frank was an actual dad figure to him.

You should probably rewatch the show, they explicitly show how shitty their relationship was when Ziggy was younger.

Can you remind me? I haven't seen it in a while.

1. Season 5
2. Season 3
3. Season 1
4. Season 4
5. Season 2

This guy needed more screentime. Hamsterdam, playing dice in the classroom with Mr. Poluski, Boxing, Omar comin yo. The wire was so amazing.

There's a big scene after Frank witnesses Ziggy burning a hundred dollar bill and confronts him about it. They talk about Ziggy's childhood a bit and Ziggy reveals that he only remembers stuff relating to Frank's problems with the unions: arguments with his relatives, getting injured at protests, etc. It's all Ziggy can recall from his childhood. Then there's the scene when Ziggy's visited by Frank in jail, and Ziggy basically tells Frank that he hated his childhood and his homelife.

>Tom Waits
>last
what in the fuck?

You have them in the exact wrong order, amazing

Who was Woof?

who is /bestcharacter/?

He was a pretty great character. Probably the only great character introduced in season 3.

Bubs.

bump

disgusting list

Bubbles mentions his sister in season one. We also see her when he tries to go clean, she let's him stay in her basement. Then he relapses not long after when Kima gets shot.

There was some trash in season five, but the trash was pretty much restricted to the serial killer plot/newspaper storyline. The stuff focusing on the street was good.

Fuzzy Dunlop. He's the realest nigga in the game.

Nigga wasn't built for the modern urban crime environment though, he was weak af

Fucked up twice in a row, end me.

S4
S3
S2
S1
S5

Season Five was actually based, just most people don't get it because it tried something different to the ones that went before it. A lot was self commentary, because it was about media itself.

People also mistake The Wire for being super realistic and gritty, which it is fucking not, only by TV cop show standards. The Wire is meant to illuminate and illustrate real life issues and the problems real people face, but plenty of fantastical or thought experiment tier shit happens in it, and pretty much everyone is a walking stereotype.

Another user who didn't read the word "Montages".

Such is the power of Fuzzy Dunlop. He may have taken a hit while out in the modern urban crime environment, but his power lingers. You evoked him, user.

Fuzzy Dunlop a soldier, yo