David Simon, formerly of The Wire and The Baltimore Sun, noticed an underreported Baltimore shooting involving a police officer and decided to investigate it himself. What he found is not good news for the citizenry.
Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.
I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.
In other Simon news, apparently he’s doing a pilot for HBO for a show called Treme, “post-Katrina-themed drama that chronicles the rebuilding of the city through the eyes of local musicians”. The cast will include Clarke Peters and Wendell Pierce, who played Lester and Bunk on The Wire.
And speaking of The Wire, the latest issue of Film Quarterly has several articles devoted to the show. Only one article is online so you best send Lamar out to the newsstand for a paper copy. (thx, david & walter)
If you liked Planet Earth, you should probably check out Nature’s Great Events. Narrated by David Attenborough and currently airing in the UK on BBC1 and BBC HD, the series consists of six 50-minute shows, each of which features a large-scale annual event, like the spring thaw in the Arctic Circle and the sardine run along the coast of South Africa. The series was shot in HD using many of the techniques seen in Planet Earth.
If you’re in the UK, you can check out the first three episodes on the BBC site. In the US, Discovery will be airing the show sometime in the spring under the title Seasons of Survival (apparently Nature’s Great Events isn’t dramatic enough for the American audience). No word on whether Attenborough’s expert narration will also be replaced as it was in Planet Earth.
In the meantime, some HD clips of the show are available on YouTube. This slo-mo video of a grizzly bear shaking the water off its fur is fun to watch but this too-short clip of an extraordinary coordinated attack of dolphins, seals, sharks, and birds on a massive school of sardines is the gem.
(via we made this, who call the series “mind-blowingly good”)
Football season is over but if you still want your fix, Mark Bowden wrote an interesting piece for The Atlantic about how NFL games are presented on TV. The camera operators and directors seem as talented and under pressure as the players on the field.
The television crews don’t just broadcast games, they inhabit them. They know the players, the teams, the stats, and the strategies. They interview players and coaches the day before the game. They brainstorm, anticipate, plot likely story lines, prepare graphic packages of important stats, and bundle replays from previous contests to bring a sense of history and context to the event. They are not just pointing cameras and broadcasting the feed, they are telling the story of the game as it happens.
Just this morning I was thinking about how successful the instant replay rule has been for NFL broadcasts. TV instant replay predated its use by the referees, but now the review process has some weight behind it and provides extra drama, particularly in exciting moments of the game. The Santonio Holmes touchdown catch in the final moments of the Super Bowl is the perfect example. From the perspective of “telling the story of the game”, the catch was amazing. But what the review process does is delay the release of tension for a minute or two…it’s a mini-cliffhanger inserted into a sport that doesn’t have any natural cliffhanging moments. Showing the replays over and over while the ref makes his decision also brings the viewer into the story itself, as though he is playing the part of the reviewing referee. (thx, john)
UC Berkeley is offering a class called What’s so great about The Wire?
Discerning critics and avid fans have agreed that the five-season run of Ed Burns and David Simon’s The Wire was “the best TV show ever broadcast in America”—not the most popular but the best. The 60 hours that comprise this episodic series have been aptly been compared to Dickens, Balzac, Dreiser and Greek Tragedy. These comparisons attempt to get at the richly textured complexity of the work, its depth, its bleak tapestry of an American city and its diverse social stratifications. Yet none of these comparisons quite nails what it is that made this the most compelling “show” on TV and better than many of the best movies. This class will explore these comparisons, analyze episodes from the first, third, fourth and fifth seasons and try to discover what was and is so great about The Wire. We will screen as much of the series as we can during our mandatory screening sessions and approach it through the following lenses: the other writing of David Simon, including his journalism, an exemplary Greek Tragedy, Dickens’ Bleak House and/or parts of Balzac’s Human Comedy. We will also consider the formal tradition of episodic television.
They’re skipping season two? Shameful. (via unlikely words)
After catching up with seasons 1-4 of the series over the past few months, this is the first episode of Lost that I will be seeing live. Exciting! To commemorate, I’ll be liveblogging the first episode of season five, set to begin here in about 10 minutes. Don’t worry, spoilers will be minimal. Check back frequently for updates.
11:55 pm Ah, there we go. Just under an hour.
11:06 pm Come on Wikipedia…it’s six minutes after the show ended and you haven’t updated the pages for the new episodes yet.
10:56 pm Yes, by all means, don’t show her face. Christ.
10:55 pm Wait, was that the Tardis?
10:54 pm Hurley can always eat.
10:53 pm Sayid is a vampire. Didn’t see that one coming. Cheap attempt to capitalize on Twilight, True Blood, and Let the Right One In vampire maina.
10:50 pm “You’ve got more issues that Life magazine.” TV is so bad.
10:47 pm I made a mistake earlier. Locke is not a Cylon, he’s a replicant.
10:44 pm Well, Hurley, when you put it like that, it all just seems really absurd.
10:43 pm “If the news thinks you’ve done something, then everyone does.”
10:40 pm Dharma, Dharma, Dharma, Dharma, Dharma, Dharma, Dharma.
10:32 pm Ooh, Time Elves! They were riding the Smoke Monster!
10:28 pm I was just thinking…someone needs to kill Neil. Then someone did! And that fire to fire thing just after the water to water transition? Nice. Now do earth and wind.
10:23 pm Wait, was that Lt. Daniels?
10:22 pm Get your own I Love My Shih Tzu t-shirt. It *is* all about shirts. (Here’s another one!)
10:15 pm Caviar sandwich!
10:13 pm Hurley is in the background of every shot. Spot him if you can.
10:10 pm Water to water cut scene? Brilliance reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And now it’s Weekend At Sayid’s!
10:08 pm Wait, who the hell is Neil?! (No, seriously.)
10:06 pm Intense shampoo? Fuck you.
10:02 pm Boooo! Not her. Boo. No more advice from dead people.
10:00 pm I’m really tired of these initial shots of headless people. Pan up, for God’s sake.
9:58 pm SFJ: “9:54 PM: This is impossible to spoil. We are going in circles.” You got that right. (For those of you unfamiliar with TV lingo, that’s called a crossover, folks.)
9:50 pm She’s dead, right?
9:49 pm Why is Sawyer so angry all the time?
9:45 pm Weird Capital One commercial totally rips off Nintendo. Lawsuit.
9:44 pm I liked this series the first time I saw it…when it was called Star Trek: The Next Generation.
9:43 pm Oh right, it’s not supposed to make sense. Look, there’s someone who we know is dead! (Or do we? (Yes, we do. (Or do we? (Etc.))))
9:42 pm How does he still have the compass? Why doesn’t he just give Richard a big hug and drag him along?
9:40 pm Compasses point north.
9:38 pm Tune in next week for “Name! That! Time!” (I can name that time in 2 scenes, Bob.)
9:31 pm Watch out for the knives!!! Oops, too late.
9:26 pm God, I hope this means we get to see Nikki and Paolo again!
9:24 pm Wait, I have to do this for *two hours*?
9:21 pm SFJ is also liveblogging. He says, “IT IS ON.”
9:19 pm Locke is a Cylon.
9:12 pm First commercial is 12 minutes in (Frost/Nixon trailer). Only 12 minutes? Also, I love the Lost titles…short and to the point.
9:09 pm “I guess we’ll never know.” You got that right, pal. You never even explained about the polar bear!
9:07 pm Jack and Ben in a hotel room together? Is Lost doing its own slash fiction now?
8:53 pm This clip show is a bummer. The show’s producers are way too conscious of how the audience perceives the show.
Socials & More