Louis Theroux in Philadelphia - Sunday

Skarjo wrote:An actual documentary will always hold more clout than a fictionalised show. As I've said, though I've never watched The Wire itself, and though I'm aware of other shows than have fictionally brought real issues to light, to say that a documentary brings nothing new to the argument nor illustrates things that people were not otherwise aware of is not true.

satriales wrote:I enjoyed this but I also felt I'd seen it all before in The Wire. I guess it just shows how realistic The Wire really is.

Skarjo wrote:An actual documentary will always hold more clout than a fictionalised show. As I've said, though I've never watched The Wire itself, and though I'm aware of other shows than have fictionally brought real issues to light, to say that a documentary brings nothing new to the argument nor illustrates things that people were not otherwise aware of is not true.

If you haven't seen The Wire then you wouldn't understand, but it's like no other show. The creator of The Wire was a homicide detective for twenty years so he knows exactly what it's like on the streets, and the characters are based on real people and played by actors who have experienced that life. IMO The Wire did a better job of showing what life on the streets is like, but to be fair they have had several seasons worth of episodes to do that and Louis Theroux only had an hour.

Merry Chistmas, Noobs! wrote:Philadelphia needs Sheriff John Burnell.

Herbi wrote:

satriales wrote:I enjoyed this but I also felt I'd seen it all before in The Wire. I guess it just shows how realistic The Wire really is.

Skarjo wrote:An actual documentary will always hold more clout than a fictionalised show. As I've said, though I've never watched The Wire itself, and though I'm aware of other shows than have fictionally brought real issues to light, to say that a documentary brings nothing new to the argument nor illustrates things that people were not otherwise aware of is not true.

If you haven't seen The Wire then you wouldn't understand, but it's like no other show. The creator of The Wire was a homicide detective for twenty years so he knows exactly what it's like on the streets, and the characters are based on real people and played by actors who have experienced that life. IMO The Wire did a better job of showing what life on the streets is like, but to be fair they have had several seasons worth of episodes to do that and Louis Theroux only had an hour.

Um, no he wasn't.

He was a journalist.

Hangung Uh Bauble wrote:FX still show it dont they? Dvds are pretty decently priced aswell.

Herbi wrote:

satriales wrote:I enjoyed this but I also felt I'd seen it all before in The Wire. I guess it just shows how realistic The Wire really is.

Skarjo wrote:An actual documentary will always hold more clout than a fictionalised show. As I've said, though I've never watched The Wire itself, and though I'm aware of other shows than have fictionally brought real issues to light, to say that a documentary brings nothing new to the argument nor illustrates things that people were not otherwise aware of is not true.

If you haven't seen The Wire then you wouldn't understand, but it's like no other show. The creator of The Wire was a homicide detective for twenty years so he knows exactly what it's like on the streets, and the characters are based on real people and played by actors who have experienced that life. IMO The Wire did a better job of showing what life on the streets is like, but to be fair they have had several seasons worth of episodes to do that and Louis Theroux only had an hour.

Um, no he wasn't.

He was a journalist.

DAVID SIMON: I think what you sense in The Wire is that it is violating a good many of the conventions and tropes of episodic television. It isn’t really structured as episodic television and it instead pursues the form of the modern, multi-POV novel. Why? Primarily because the creators and contributors are not by training or inclination television writers. In fact, it is a little bit remarkable that we ended up with a television drama on HBO or anywhere else. I am a newspaper reporter by training who wrote a couple long, multi-POV nonfiction narratives, Homicide and The Corner. The first became the basis for the NBC drama of the same name; the second I was able to produce as a miniseries for HBO, airing in 2000. Both works are the result of a journalistic impulse, the first recounting a year I spent with the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, and the second book detailing a year spent in a drug-saturated West Baltimore neighborhood, following an extended, drug-involved family. Ed Burns, my coauthor on The Corner and co-creator on The Wire, was a homicide detective who served in the BPD for twenty years and, following that for seven years, a seventh-grade teacher at a Baltimore public school. The remaining writers—Richard Price [Clockers], Dennis Lehane [Mystic River], and George Pelecanos [The Night Gardener]—are novelists working at the highest level of the crime genre. Bill Zorzi covered state and municipal politics for the Baltimore Sun for twenty years; Rafael Alvarez, another Sun veteran, worked as a merchant seaman and comes from two generations of port workers. So we are all rooted in a different place than Hollywood.