Quote Originally Posted by DanAronG
What's so good about the wire. On the strength of this thread I got my hands on the first series of it, I just watched episode one and was so bored I didn't even finish it. I then tried Dexter, which was better, but still not great.
You can't do this. People like to say that they only watch stuff for the instant gratification, but you simply cannot do that. If that was categorically acceptable then nobody would have ever read Lord of the Rings or Count of Monte Cristo or Grapes of Wrath or any novel that that blows out the shallow, myopic, one-trick-pony stuff that modern westerners have been trained to prefer.

The difference is that a show like CSI (which is way more popular than Wire) uses as little detail as possible to catch audiences, but a show like The Wire does everything it can to go beyond that and capture things like art and timelessness and thematic elements and real character and story development. The difference is that what most people like is essentially cartoons or comic strips for adults. Shows like The Wire and Dexter and every other top rated show by those who know film are more like novels. They go into much detail, and almost always are considered superior products by those who simply put in the time, just like novels compare to movies

It's okay to not want to put in any time going beyond superficial gratification. Just letting you know that a show like the two you mentioned are ones made to NOT gratify superficially. If you plan on being captivated by one episode, you're doing it wrong. Just like if you plan on being captivated by the first 10 pages of a 500 page novel, you're doing it wrong

One way of putting how not even close The Wire is better than the popular cop dramas like CSI and LnO is that those shows do one case per episode, whereas The Wire starts out as one case per season (but it goes even deeper than that). They're just not even in the same ball park. I mean the first episode of The Wire only has like 5-10% of all the main characters throughout the series.

And it's not about watching actual good shows requires more brain power. It doesn't, it just requires patience. You know, the kind that you have when you read a novel longer than 200 pages and they had to build up the characters, story, and world instead of just cracking a knock-knock joke while an old guy farts on the cheeky intern and the laugh-track tells you when something funny happened.