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The Wire: Season 1
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| Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
|
DVD
January 13, 2015 "Please retry" | — | 5 | $22.94 | $3.29 |
|
DVD
October 21, 2014 "Please retry" | New Box Art ed. | 5 | $23.47 | $3.49 |
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| Per Episode | Buy Season |
Purchase options and add-ons
| Genre | Drama |
| Format | AC-3, Multiple Formats, Dubbed, Dolby, Closed-captioned, Color, Subtitled, NTSC |
| Contributor | Larry Gilliard, Jr., Wendell Pierce, Clark Johnson, Dominic West, Idris Elba, Sonja Sohn |
| Language | English |
| Number Of Discs | 5 |
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Product Description
Product Description
From David Simon, creator and co-writer of HBO's triple Emmy-winning mini-series The Corner, this unvarnished, highly realistic HBO series follows a single sprawling drug and murder investigation in Baltimore. Told from the point of view of both the police and their targets, the series captures a universe of subterfuge and surveillance, where easy distinctions between good and evil, and crime and punishment, are challenged at every turn.
Amazon.com
After one episode of The Wire you'll be hooked. After three, you'll be astonished by the precision of its storytelling. After viewing all 13 episodes of the HBO series' remarkable first season, you'll be cheering a bona-fide American masterpiece. Series creator David Simon was a veteran crime reporter from The Baltimore Sun who cowrote the book that inspired TV's Homicide, and cowriter Ed Burns was a Baltimore cop, lending impeccable street-cred to an inner-city Baltimore saga (and companion piece to The Corner) that Simon aptly describes as "a visual novel" and "a treatise on institutions and individuals" as opposed to a conventional good-vs.-evil police procedural. Owing a creative debt to the novels of Richard Price (especially Clockers), the series opens as maverick Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West, in a star-making role) is tapping into a vast network of drugs and death around southwest Baltimore's deteriorating housing projects. With a mandate to get results ASAP, a haphazard team is assembled to join McNulty's increasingly complex investigation, built upon countless hours of electronic surveillance.
The show's split-perspective plotting is so richly layered, so breathtakingly authentic and based on finely drawn characters brought to life by a perfect ensemble cast, that it defies concise description. Simon, Burns, and their cowriters control every intricate aspect of the unfolding epic; directors are top-drawer (including Clark Johnson, helmer of The Shield's finest episodes), but they are servants to the story, resulting in a TV series like no other: unpredictable, complicated, and demanding the viewer's rapt attention, The Wire is "an angry show" (in Simon's words) that refuses to comfort with easy answers to deep-rooted societal problems. Moral gray zones proliferate in a universe where ruthless killers have a logical code, and where the cops are just as ambiguous as their targets. That ambiguity extends to the ending as well; season 1 leaves several issues unresolved, leaving you begging for the even more impressive developments that await in season 2. --Jeff Shannon
Product details
- Aspect Ratio : 1.33:1
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
- Product Dimensions : 7.75 x 5.75 x 1.25 inches; 14.38 ounces
- Director : Clark Johnson
- Media Format : AC-3, Multiple Formats, Dubbed, Dolby, Closed-captioned, Color, Subtitled, NTSC
- Run time : 13 hours
- Release date : June 6, 2006
- Actors : Dominic West, Sonja Sohn, Larry Gilliard, Jr., Wendell Pierce, Idris Elba
- Dubbed: : French, Spanish
- Subtitles: : Spanish, French, English
- Language : English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Unqualified, Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
- Studio : HBO Studios
- ASIN : B0002ERXC2
- Number of discs : 5
- Best Sellers Rank: #16,246 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #745 in Mystery & Thrillers (Movies & TV)
- #2,804 in Drama DVDs
- Customer Reviews:
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Top reviews from the United States
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I watched the first episode of 'The Wire' when it first aired, and decided that I didn't like it. To me, it looked like an unfortunate combination of "Lost", "Sopranos" and "Oz". "Lost", because as the viewer, you know the characters are never going to succeed, either in getting off the island or getting Baltimore off drugs. I figured there would be a pattern of episodes where the police gain some traction in the drug war, and then the drug dealers would rally, and then the police would come back, et cetera, ad nauseum. "Sopranos", because I assumed there would be many bacchanalian scenes where the evildoers revel in their unlimited access to wealth, power, and women. "Oz", because it looked relentlessly bleak and violent. I'm not knocking any of those shows, it just seemed to me like 'The Wire' was taking the worst parts of all three.
I reluctantly tried the series again because my friends kept raving about it. And here I am, five years later, to say the hype is true. 'The Wire' may well be the best television ever.
'The Wire' is first and foremost, a superbly crafted story. As others have said, the season is really one long narrative with thirteen separate chapters. This frees up the television medium considerably. Episodes are not themed, do not uniformly end with shocking twists, and don't adhere to any formula of "primary plotline interspersed with two minor plotlines." The acting is brilliant, the dialog is razor-sharp, and view of corruption and poverty is unflinching.
Before seeing this show, I have always said that "Homicide (Life on the Street)" was the best television series ever made. 'The Wire' includes many of the same elements, but the format - long story arcs and no censorship - take it much further than Homicide ever went.
HBO has also shown an admirable restraint in the depiction of violence. 'The Wire' is a violent show, but most of it takes place off-screen, and some of the most memorable scenes are almost finished before you notice them. In one scene, a dealer stops at a shady-looking convenience store for a late night snack, and literally everything in the store, including the owner, is protected by a bullet-proof sheet of glass. In another scene, children from the projects leave for school with a small bag of chips for lunch. The lucky ones also get a juice box.
I don't know if this show is qualitatively better than the Sopranos, but personally, I enjoy the Wire more. I would say the Wire is less ambitious in scope, but what it does, it does better. Unlike 'Sopranos' 'The Wire' is plot-driven, which means the characters must serve the story. However, character-driven or not, I got tired of being inside Tony Soprano's head after a few years. Tony is after all a banal, violent man. This may be a realistic depiction of a mafioso, but it does begin to wear. 'The Wire' performs that miraculous trick of depicting boredom, pettiness and venality with actually being boring, petty or venal. People and places are ever so slightly larger than life. It's gritty enough to keep it real, while fantastical enough to keep you enthralled.
Finally, the series had the guts to do what almost no other show does: end. The final episode in the season actually brings everything to an incredibly satisfying (though not necessarily neat) conclusion.
I hope I've brought at least one more viewer on board to this truly excellent series. A few last notes:
- Buy or rent the DVDs. You are going to be lost without subtitles.
- Be aware that the dialogue includes an incredible amount of profanity. If that offends you, you will hate this series, all the pros notwithstanding.
- As others have warned, the DVD menus contain spoilers. Be careful not to read the plot summaries at the start of every episode. You can't skip them, so just close your eyes and keep pressing "play." Also be aware that some of the commentary contains spoilers for following seasons.
- A lot of people have said that the good guys aren't so good and the bad guys aren't so bad. This is true. However, don't be fooled into thinking that the show is simple moral relativism. A corrupt cop may beat up a suspect; a high level drug dealer might commit a murder. The show is about many things, primarily about individuals versus the institutions they serve. It also makes a lot of interesting statements about the nature of information - what the cops can glean from the criminals, what the criminals figure out about the cops, what the cops hide from each other. To paraphrase the series tag line, everyone is listening carefully.
- On top of everything else, this show is funny!
It is not a crime mystery. The bad guys are apparent and in a sense eternal. It is not a morality play. The righteous do not prevail. They win some and lose some and by the end it's tough to tell the score, and even hard to identify the righteous. It is not an action/adventure, though there is plenty of action and adventure to keep our attention.
Instead, the series is a portrait of the American city at the beginning of the 21st century with Baltimore as the paradigm. It uses the struggle to establish the rule of law as the principle dramatic vehicle. Each season the crime/enforcement theme is supplemented by sub-themes from other aspects of the urban institutional environment, the industrial economy, the political system, the educational system, the press, the other traditional pillars supporting the city. The failure of the city is intimately tied to the failure of each of these pillars, and the series makes it clear that this nexus of failure occurred within the memory of the older adults who populate the tale, those old enough to have seen their children reach adulthood.
The compelling power of The Wire is it portrayal of the human scale consequences of the failure of the city, the consequences on individual lives and the microcosms of urban life, the corner, the stoop, the office, the shop, the classroom, the courtroom, the bar, the home, the family. The impact isn't static and passive, it is dynamic and adaptive and smart. When the system doesn't work, when it has failed catastrophically, those caught in the mess carve out new rules, make new institutions, find new solutions. They aren't stupid. They're creative and energetic and hard working and ambitious. But they're also not wise. The solutions they create to short term immediate problems make things worse in the long term.
The great mystery is how all these different mutually supporting systems could have failed at once, with such catastrophic consequences. The series offers a number of candidates. Corruption is offered as partial explanation, but not simply the petty corruption of money and greed, though certainly it plays a role. There is also the corruption of ambition for power and status, and the corruption of evasion and cowardice. But perhaps the most insidious corruption of all is the corruption of righteousness, the reckless oblivion induced by the belief that a noble goal justifies ignoble means.
Drugs are clearly presented as another source of decay. An experiment in controlling drug related crime that actually works (in fiction at least) is quashed after a brief flirtation because it offends the ideals of the community. It is hard to know what conclusions to draw from this but in the real world I watch Colorado and Washington state with interest.
Measurement is an odd villain of the piece. Statistics and testing, we are told, are obstacles to law enforcement and education. I found this to be sadly superficial. Certainly managing the numbers rather than managing the processes is foolish and corrupt, but that is a failure of bad management, lazy and superficial supervision, rather than a consequence of measurement. Feelings and Caring and Commitment are weak substitutes.
In the end the urban mandala has spun through a cycle, archetypes are reincarnated, innovations are banished, and the beat goes on. All that changes is that the viewer has had a chance to gain a better understanding of the state of things. We are not offered any glimmer of hope that the dynamics of the urban environment can improve.
Top reviews from other countries
Watch in awe as you see the underlying connections between politicians, kingpins, street-corner dealers, school kids, ranked police officers, beat-walking cops, dockyard workers, unions, and more. While the prospect of following this all may seem as entertaining as reading through a college-level poli-sci text book, this series fills the screen with real-feeling characters that have story arcs, flaws, redeeming qualities, and motivations that make you attached to how their stories will play out.
On a micro level each character is just fun to watch, like being in on a joke.
On a macro level this show is orchestrated through five seasons of brilliant narrative that will change how you view society.



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