Here's my final stop at Slate.com's TV Club and then I'm out. Maybe the Wire fed off its place as critical darling too long, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Maybe the web's intelligencia's overanalysis of the show has made for a journalistic competition as to who can find the biggest, widest holes in the Wire's plotting, character development, etc. Whatever it is, the boys here at TV Club have slowly squeezed all the joy out of analyzing "The Wire".

I don't know, maybe you should start by analyzing what actually, you know, worked for the show before you start skewering what you didn't like. To start, for all our sakes, please stop refering to your personal experiences as LIVING PROOF that what the Wire is portraying as a legit newsroom makes the show's vision worthless. Of course you haven't been through all these situations, no one person has. That's part of writing, taking personal experiences of multiple people and stringing them together for an enhanced experience. Repeat: ENHANCED experience.

Omar, of course, is the most enhanced character of the show. A real Omar, if he'd been in the game as long as he's portrayed here, would have been dead a lot sooner than now. Men who rob drug dealers tend not to live that long. Lest we forget that he robbed one of the Barksdale stash houses dressed as an old man in a wheel chair. Fine with that. Yet he breaks through a window in a fit of desparation, and it's unrealistic? Or wait, do you even watch the previous seasons?

What makes the newspaper story work, and what I think was clarified perfectly in this episode, was that media entities, and the public in general, eat that type of excrement up. No research, no police source varification to understand motive. No concept that the real serial killer is the man who had 22 young African-AMerican men shot to death in cold blood in row houses.

Also, please tell me you covered the police beat in some city where you can say without flinching that cops talk the way they do in this how. Yes, I'm sure all cops, as they are portrayed in "The Wire" are foul mouthed, shit talking, booze guzzling alcholics with a flair for the dramatic. All of them, here me.

For "Wire" fans, I suggest watching "The First 48" on A&E. It works as a nice complmentary documentary to the hightened realism that the "Wire" protrays. Also, the best professional analysis of the Wire continues to be Tim Goodman at the San Francisco Chronicle and Alan Sepinwall at NJ.com.

Now, I'm done.

Well said, all of it. I wish I had your self-discipline -- I think I'll continue to read, if just for something to focus my frustration on.

Their obsession with what's "realistic" is so irritating -- "The Corner" was realistic... and almost unwatchable. These guys clearly don't WANT to like the show anymore. Maybe because Simon got under their skin with his response to their early posts (which isn't OUR fault!), or maybe just because they're smart asses who think they know everything about journalism but don't realize they know NOTHING about creating a work of narrative fiction.

In the last two episodes, The Wire has regained its form. The newsroom is starting to hit its stride, with the noble characters making cold decisions and being duped, and our fabricator actually seen TRYING (to the point where I was rooting for him to make up some quotes!) The serial killer plotline, which bothered me at first, is starting to pay off -- we're actually ROOTING for it to work now. I LOVE the way Simon explores far fetched, but intellectually viable experiments in his show, with the legalized drug zone of season three, and last season's classroom. It's absolutely unique, and raises the show above anything I've ever seen on television.

These guys are so far off now, that even the moments they single out as the best are wrong. My head still hurts from that overblown Duke/Cutty conversation. And Clay's "Sheeeet" reeked of "catchprase."

I couldn't agree more. I've always read Goodman but thanks for recommending Sepinwall as well.

What I find most interesting about the intersection of the serial-killer and newspaper storylines is that Templeton has now stumbled onto a real, huge story--"Cops Falsifying Evidence in Homeless Deaths"--since he knows that Jimmy's got to be lying about the cops' phone call ("Our guy sounded just like, and said the same things as, the guy you just made up in your head and never really talked to"), and has to be curious as to why. But he can't make a story out of it, because it all hinges on the fact that he falsified a lead on a story, a lie to which he can never admit.

Not necessarily heavy realism, but juicy plotting, nonetheless.

i also think these TV club guys are just not use to seeing their profession portrayed differently from their own experiences--welcome to the club --law firms and hospitals are never shown in any realistic light.

the wire is looking more like an episode or drawn out "Homicide" series--but i liked that show too--isn't Mcnulty's ex-wife one of the detectives from that show?

Couldn't agree with you more.

Also, when things aren't "realistic" on The Wire, it's probably that they weren't intended to mean. I don't mean Omar, for which we don't really know what's happened yet, but McNulty's "too fast" decline into alcoholism and self destruction - I mean, he already WAS a self-destructive alcoholic, and the quickness with which he returned to it only emphasizes what a mess he is.

Plus, there is theoretically a year off screen between seasons, the quickness that it happened also emphasizes how realistic it is for these characters to be experiencing things when the cameras aren't rolling - ya know, like real people.

Just have to agree with Greenman and the rest.  I had my issues with the TV Club's first letters and it only got worse from there.

And it may just be the ill will I feel towards Plotz and Goldberg for turning what used to be a celebration of analyzation of The Wire into their journalism memoirs but it has made me closer examine Slate.com as a whole and I find myself reading a lot less of it as well.

Someone back me up or let me know if I'm just getting ahead of myself by saying that Slate.com is not the Slate.com of the past, TV club aside.