‘Watch The Wire’, says the press, ‘watch The Wire’ says Charlie Brooker – hell, even Claire Bolderson tells me ‘Watch The Wire, you’d love it’, it is – they all say – the Best TV Show Ever Made. And I like a bit of Good TV. So I know I should like it, I know I would like it, only it’s several seasons in, I don’t have the dosh to buy the DVDs nor the time to watch it.
Then BBC2 start showing it from season 1, episode 1. Every night, just to make my life hell like they did with Larry Sanders. Can’t not watch it. It’s free-to-air and too damn good.
So – aside from the fact that my Humax box cuts off the last 2 minutes of everything on BBC2 when I use series-linking – I start watching (thank you bbcredux for restoring my missing cliffhangers). And I am getting hooked, even if I occasionally have to switch the subtitles on. It does require full attention and hence it does make The West Wing look like In The Night Garden.
The episode I am watching now (number 3) has – as far as I’m concerned – attained the status of genius TV with the following scene: McNulty makes a wonderfully clumsy, and rebuffed, pass at State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman, which immediately cuts to unexpected but somehow inevitable sex. The entire dialogue of the sex scene runs like this:
‘You? You? You?’
‘As if you give a shit. You’re an asshole, McNulty.’
‘What the fuck did I do?’
