To Be Simple 2009-01-03
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I do not suscribe to HBO. I have not watched an entire television series in over a decade. I find current and recent television to be incredibly cliche and boring. It is with that attitude that I finally caved in and bought all five seasons of The Wire. Several of my friends have been encouraging me for the past four or five years to find a way to watch this show. After seeing all the positive reviews, and getting a good price from Amazon I decided to give things a go.
Other people have done a nice job of detailing what the show is about, so I will refrain from doing that in this review. What I will say is that this is the rare show/movie that actually lives up to the hype and expectations for me. In fact, it surpasses them.
I got so hooked on this series that I knocked out an entire season every couple of days until I was finished with all seasons. This is addictive viewing to say the least! The acting is simply superb. The characters are generally well cast. There is humor, drama, action, suspense, etc. in each season. I honestly feel sorry for people that watched each season as they came out, episode by episode. I couldn't have stood the wait from week to week to see what happened next.
What I like best about this series is that the writing is so superb. It is smart, and while it may get a bit sensationalistic at times, it is grounded in reality and makes the viewer think that they are getting an actual window into observing the characters' lives. Additionally, there is none of the clear-cut good versus evil crap that saturates most shows and movies these days. In the Wire, the good guys are sometimes very bad, and the bad guys are sometimes very good. The characters are portrayed as being very human, with nobody being perfect. It is this intricacy in character development that helps make an already interesting story even better.
In closing, I highly recommend The Wire. This is coming from someone who is generally pretty cynical about television shows. There are very few shows, or movies for that matter, that have hooked me as much as The Wire.
