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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 10: Saying Goodbye to My 13 Favorite Wire Scenes

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 5:04 PM ET

Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz were online on March 6 to chat about The Wire. Read the transcript.

Dear Jeff,

For my final entry in this dialogue, I don't have anything left to say about last night's episode. So instead let me get misty-eyed for a minute and say goodbye by remembering my all-time favorite Wire scenes. I was going to list 10, but I couldn't restrain myself. The only reason I'm stopping at 13 is that I have a meeting:

1) Omar testifying in Season 2, and making a fool of Maury Levy. "I got the shotgun; you got the briefcase."

2) Bunny Colvin taking Namond and the other kids out to a fancy restaurant, in Season 4.

3) Cutty telling Avon he wants out: "The game ain't in me no more. None of it."

4) Kima's ghetto version of Goodnight Moon at the end of Episode 7 a few weeks ago.

5) Omar and crew's fabulous heist near the end of Season 4, followed by Omar's selling the drugs back to Prop Joe.

6) Bodie and Jimmy's meet in the garden at the end of Season 4, just before Bodie's murder, when Bodie gives his "This game is rigged" speech. Bodie says, "I feel like the little bitches on the chessboard," and Jimmy murmurs, "Pawns."

7) Snoop buying the nail gun in the opening scene of Season 4.

8) Stringer Bell's funeral-home meetings in Season 3, particularly his efforts to enforce Robert's Rules of Order. "Do the chair know we gonna look like some punk-ass bitches out there?"

9) Bunny persuading Wee-Bey to let him adopt Namond at the end of Season 4.

10) All of Hamsterdam.

11) Stringer and Avon looking over the Baltimore skyline, reminiscing about their good old days, each knowing that he just had betrayed the other.

12) Carver sitting in his car, punching his steering wheel, after dropping Randy at the group home.

13) Bunk and Jimmy solving a murder with just the word fuck.

Jeff, it's been a joy and a revelation to talk about my favorite TV show with you. Let's meet again in 2017, when David Simon and Dominic West, fallen on hard times, team up to make All Wired Up: The Wire's Hawaiian Holiday Special!

David

P.S. I'm going to see a Pogues concert tonight. God, I hope they play Body of an American in tribute to The Wire.

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 10: Saying Goodbye to My 13 Favorite Wire Scenes

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 5:04 PM ET

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor. Andy Bowers is the editor of Slate V. Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. Melinda Henneberger is a Slate contributor and the author of If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians To Hear. David Plotz is Slate's editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at . John Swansburg is a Slate associate editor. June Thomas is Slate's foreign editor. You can e-mail her at .

Entry 1: Photograph of Tristan Wilds by Paul Schiraldi © HBO. Entry 8: Photograph of Clark Johnson, Brandon Young, Michelle Paress, and Tom McCarthy by Paul Schiraldi © HBO. Entry 21: Photograph of Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, Jamie Hector, Method Man, and Robert F. Chew by Paul Schiraldi © HBO 2008. Entry 27: Photograph of Lance Reddick by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 42: Still of Wendell Pierce by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 52: Still of Tristan Wilds by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 57: Photograph of Sonja Sohn, Wendell Pierce, and Dominic West by Nicole Rivelli © 2008 HBO. Entry 61: Still of Lance Reddick by Paul Schiraldi © HBO 2008.

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Remarks from the Fray:

I hope Goldberg and Plotz move on to discussing the idea that the press is complicit in allowing the inner-city (especially black inner-city) to decay by not paying attention to the problems that caused its sharp decline. Maybe newsroom characters feel cliched, but shouldn't we discuss how they enter into the "War on Drugs"?

--tsell89

(To reply, click here.)

So far as we've seen most of the newspapermen are indeed stock characters, but that's nothing to worry about. Except for a few leads each season, very few characters have conflicting motives. Think Clay Davis, Mayor Royce, Herc, Horse, Burrell, Rawles, Weebay, Chris Partlow, Snoop, the school administrators, even Marlo.

The strength of the show isn't in the complexity of the characters; it's in the multi-layered coherent vision, the way these somewhat two-dimensional characters all affect one another. Granted, that's a formula for pedagogy, but what saves the show (and not only saves it but really does make it the best show ever) is the one thing that fools everyone into thinking that Snoop, with her paucity of lines and sole motivation of kill-everyone-Marlo-tells-me-to, is a great character -- namely, style.

All the characters have great style, great lines. It's what makes the show fun as well as edifying. And from what I can tell, the newspapermen are going to have as much style as anyone. "Stay hungry. Good things come... when they come." C'mon.

--jamessal

(To reply, click here.)

I don't doubt that the busyness of the first episode had a lot to do with the retards at HBO deciding to cut the Wire from 13 episodes to 10 for its final season but I know Simon will make it work in spite of his bosses stupidity.

As far as Jeffrey's weak defense of the Sopranos, give it up man. The show lost its way after 3 seasons, so the claim that the Sopranos was on longer is not much of an excuse. Of course it is probably true that the Sopranos was a victim of its own massive popularity, while the Wire has been able to stay on course precisely because nobody was watching. Maybe if David Simon had gotten all the money and all the ball licking from critics that David Chase received he would have turned into a hack writer as well.

--sir biff

(To reply, click here.)

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