critically acclaimed is like saying the Bears are having a pretty good season -- it’s an understatement, to say the least. David Simon, creator of The Wire, which the Financial Times recently called the best television show ever broadcast in America, comes to Northwestern University’s Block Cinema 8 p.m.
Thursday for a Q A session about his Baltimore-set show, the fourth season of which is airing Sundays on HBO. The event is free, but no advance tickets are available, so Wire-heads should get there early. Block Cinema is at 40 Arts Circle Dr.
, Evanston; phone 847-491-4000. in The Wire | Permalink | Comments (3) Metacritic.com, which assembles and scores the reviews of dozens of critics from many different publications.
“The Wire” got an overall score of 98 points out of 100, and the word “masterpiece” comes up a lot in reviews. “We are delighted -- though not surprised -- at the initial critical response to the new season of ‘The Wire,’ said Carolyn Strauss, the president of HBO Entertainment, in a statement released Wednesday morning. David Simon and his remarkable team have created a riveting and thought-provoking series that's unlike anything else on TV.
The announcement from HBO noted, however, that the show’s fifth season will be its last. “The Wire’s” current season began airing on Sept. Don’t miss it.
in The Wire | Permalink | Comments (2) interview on HBO’s Web site. “The schools and [the] police department [are] unresponsive, because it’s about keeping the world as is, so you’re on top of it.” Some have nearly given up the fight -- former Major Crimes officer Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) is working as a beat cop, seeing no future in thoughtful police work.
But there are still some cops who won’t give in to the entropy. The jovial cynicism of Bunk Moreland (the terrific Wendell Pierce) hides a ferocious drive to do good work; the canny intelligence of the quietly charismatic Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) is finally recognized, and Daniels may get a chance to make some real changes at the stats-obsessed police department. Like any good, meaty novel, “The Wire” requires you to pay attention, but the attention paid to these Baltimore stories -- which are written, in part, by novelists Dennis Lehane, George Pelicanos and Richard Price -- is more than amply rewarded with gripping storytelling and unshowy acting by a crackerjack ensemble cast.
“The Wire” takes time to create its world, but the cumulative power of that portrait -- of post-millennium urban America, of four boys with slender hopes for the future -- is on a level with the best work in television history. Whether it happens in the opening minutes or in the third or fourth episode of the season, you will be hooked by “The Wire” and find yourself impatiently waiting for the next episode to air. You’ll want to know what happens to the boxing coach who tries to make a difference, to the drug dealer’s son who struggles with life on the corner, to Dukie’s friend Randy (Chicago actor Maestro Harrell), a savvy schoolyard entrepreneur who’s desperate to better his life.
And once you’ve seen the season’s closing image, you won’t be able to stop thinking about what it all means. in The Wire | Permalink | Comments (12) The makers of “Battlestar Galactica” have never shied away from taking the program into dark terrain, and the first two hours of Season 3 may be the show’s darkest moment yet. As the season begins (and I’ll have a more full review when it debuts Oct.
6 on Sci Fi), residents of New Caprica are being tortured, ripped from their makeshift homes in the middle of the night, held in dire prisons, and resorting to sabotage and other desperate acts of resistance. I won’t say what the final sequence of the first two hours was, but suffice to say, it was nausea inducing. Why was it so hard to watch, yet so compelling?
Two reasons, I think: Over the course of the previous seasons, we’ve come to know the characters that inhabit the “Battlestar” universe. And the more real and identifiable they become as human beings, even flawed human beings, the more affecting it is when they’re terrorized and put through awful situations. The second reason we can’t look away is because “Battlestar” so honestly depicts real events.
Every single thing that we see on “Battlestar’s” Season 3 opener occurs on a daily basis right now, or has occurred within the lifetime of our parents and grandparents. A child screaming as its parent is taken away in the night by the authorities is always going to be heart-wrenching, no matter the setting, no matter the decade. And when the person being taken away seems like your friend or neighbor, you can't not watch.
The images we see as the season begins, and I suspect this is deliberate on the part of the show’s creators, evoke not only a variety of current situations in the Middle East but also occupied France during World War 2. We’re seeing not just the nightly news come to life on New Caprica, but grainy, powerful images from history books. Seeing our past and present depicted so powerfully makes it hard to look away.
“The Wire,” which begins Sunday (the season premiere is available now via HBO On Demand), may be even harder to watch, given that it’s set in the present day, not on another planet. Maybe that’s one reason this fine HBO drama has struggled to find an audience – it’s too real. It’s too painful to see lives and good intentions wasted, as so often happens on “The Wire.
” And this season can be especially difficult, because it’s impossible not to begin to care for the boys at the center of one of the show’s Season 4 story lines, which concerns the street and classroom educations of four eighth graders. Thanks to the skills of the actors and the programs’ writers, these inner-city boys become intensely real. And they are only kids, after all -- tall, gangly adolescents making the transition to adulthood, but still boys.
Yet the creators of “The Wire” pull no punches about the possible futures ahead of these young men, who inhabit a gang-ridden neighborhood in a broken city and attend underfunded schools. You want them to make it out, to get to a better place, but the possibility that they won’t makes the show … yes, difficult to watch. But that’s one of the reasons we watch television, or read books, or watch films with any depth, or look at art that challenges our world view -- we do all of that to learn something about human nature.
To understand the lives of those whom we might otherwise write off or ignore. To me, the fact that television is offering us so many hard but ultimately compelling programs is a sign that the medium has grown up. Great art, in any medium, is sometimes hard to take.
Photo: Michael Hogan as Col. Saul Tigh and Dean Stockwell as Brother Cavil in Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. On a lighter note, here are two other “Battlestar” bits: The first of 10 “Battlestar Galactica” webisodes are up at Scifi.
com. There’s more on the webisodes in this interview with Bradley Thompson, who wrote and produced them with David Weddle. New episodes in Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance go up at the Sci Fi site each Tuesday and Thursday.
Check out Dwight Schrute’s “Schrute-Space” at “The Office’s” Web site for his musings on what would happen if the “Battlestar Galactica” crew crash-landed on the “Lost” island. An excerpt: Adama would want to imprison the 'Lost' cast in the old cave with the creek in it, but President Roslin would want to reason with them and have both casts mate in order to create more surviving humans. in Battlestar Galactica, The Wire | Permalink | Comments (16) Chicago actor Maestro Harrell, who just turned 15, plays Randy Wagstaff, one of four boys featured in the new season of “The Wire.
” A born charmer with an entrepreneurial gift, each day Randy fills his backpack with candy and snacks to sell to his classmates and dreams of opening his own store some day. “The more money he makes, the more he thinks he can get himself out of his position,” says Harrell, a Morgan Park Academy sophomore who spent most of the last school year filming on location in Baltimore. “He does it so he doesn’t have to be in the streets, so he can have a better life.
” As a former resident of group homes for kids in the child-welfare system, Randy is determined to stay in a better place, with his strict-but-stable foster mother. “He hated the group homes; it was a terrible experience,” Harrell notes. “His whole existence is devoted to not going back.
” One link between the schoolboys and the Baltimore police is Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski (played by Steppenwolf ensemble member Jim True-Frost), who quit the force to teach 8th grade, an experience that is modeled on that of “Wire” writer/producer Ed Burns, a police detective turned teacher. “The only thing I can say about it is, when you step into that classroom after being 20 years in the street, you think you are pretty tough; and you find out real quickly that you are not. It’s a very stunning change of who you are.
And it tests things that nothing else in my life tested,” Burns said at a July press event for “The Wire.” “But it’s also the greatest thing in the world to teach.” For Harrell and his parents, who joined him at a recent lunch at a Michigan Avenue restaurant, the strong language in the “Wire” scripts wasn’t an issue, because the writing was of such high quality (and besides, as Harrell notes, Randy never curses).
“The way it’s written, it’s not really a cop show,” notes Harrell, who played Young Simba in the Chicago production of “The Lion King” and who’s working on an R B album for Virgin Records. “Most [cop] shows are like, ‘He’s the murderer, we’re the good guys, we’re going to bring him down.” Everything is more complex on “The Wire,” and, having seen the entire fourth season, I can say that the education of Randy and his friends will be one most resonant, emotionally involving television stories of the year.
“It’s not about education as you’re thinking about education,” Burns says in an interview on the HBO Web site. “Everybody is going to get educated. It’s just a question of where.
Some people get educated in the classroom, some people get educated in a boxing gym, some people get educated on a corner.” Photo: Maestro Harrell, who plays Randy Wagstaff on HBO's 'The Wire,' which returns Sept. critically acclaimed is like saying the Bears are having a pretty good season -- it’s an understatement, to say the least.
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