TV Club

Week 6: Stop Sending Me YouTube Spoilers!

Dear Jeff,

Actually, can you wait a second?

Dear Readers,

Please, please, please do not send me (or your friends) any more YouTube clips showing purported scenes from upcoming Wire episodes—particularly that monster spoiler showing you-know-who shooting you-know-who at the you-know-where. I don’t know if the clips are real or if they’re canny misdirections, and I don’t care. Either way, they’re aggravating! If they’re genuine, I hope David Simon finds the guy who’s been posting them and sends Snoop after him.

OK, Jeff, I’m back.

As I was writing my last entry, and thinking about how the murder of Stringer Bell capped Season 3, I remembered a fantastic story that Wire screenwriter and crime novelist George Pelecanos told at a panel I moderated during last year’s Filmfest D.C. According to Pelecanos, the original version of the Stringer murder script had Omar urinating on Stringer’s corpse. But Idris Elba, the actor playing Stringer, was quite unhappy about the pee scene and complained about it. (Although, as Pelecanos pointed out, Elba himself would not have been pissed on. There would have been a stunt double taking the stream.) Ultimately, Pelecanos said, the show’s creators cut the pissing part.

David