TV Club

Week 2: Templeton Needs a Big Story and McNulty’s Selling One

David,

It’s not only actors on The Wire who have a tendency to show up in dispiriting commercials: The guy who played Agent Harris on The Sopranos now appears as a chef in a Campbell Soup commercial, and—if you don’t mind me saying so—looks like a fuckwad.

And speaking of fuck, you’re right, that scene between Bunk and Jimmy possesses Raging Bull-quality fuckedness. (Have you ever seen the Flintstones version? Hysterical.)

Where are Simon & Co. going with the parallel fraud plots? It seems to me that he’ll have to merge them. Stephen Glass needs a big story, and McNulty’s selling one. I can’t imagine McNulty having trouble closing the deal; Scott is dying for the story that gets him to the promised land of the Washington Post metro section. Ordinarily, I’d predict that Scott gets chewed up in the process, but isn’t David Simon’s main complaint against his one-time bosses at the Sun that they protected a Pulitzer-bound fabricator, rather than expose him? I feel like I’ve read about this complaint of his a dozen times already.

You’ve noticed, of course, that more people write about The Wire than actually watch it? The magazine articles never stop coming.

Jeff