LeeMobile

There are some things that you experience in life that set the bar so high, that is so enjoyable, that you know that it has ruined you for the rest of your life.

It’s like the time in your life when you first enjoyed a beautiful cut of perfectly cooked steak after living a lifetime eating only hamburger.  Hamburger will never taste and look the same ever again.  Mangled random bits of beef no more, you now demand some sweet filet mignon.  The bar is raised, now that you know how good charred beef can be.

Well, that very experience is happening to me right now.

Lately I haven’t been watching as much TV as I used to.  Mostly due to the fact that a lot of the shows out there are complete trash.  Of course there are a few shows that I find really great, like Breaking Bad, Dexter, and I must give a nod to Battlestar Galactica (but on a lesser extent).  At least those are a few gems in the rough that keep me entertained when I’m hankering for some TV time.

But I’ve stumbled onto a cop show called “The Wire”.  It’s kinda old in that it’s been out for 5 seasons now (with the 5th being the last).  I can’t believe that I haven’t come across it before, but being that it’s on HBO it’s a little obscure.  Also, the fact that it’s another “cop” show might turn most people off.

Cop show - been there, done that.  With the flurry of cop shows out there, it’s easy for something like the Wire to get lost in the sludge of mediocre.  With more CSI and Law & Order spinoffs than you can actually watch, it just seems like one cop show is just like the next, but with slightly different formulas.

But the Wire is different.  It doesn’t follow a formula for every show.  Instead, it’s like a mini-series stretched out over 5 seasons full of gritty realism, superb acting, dark humor, social satire, and elements of the human condition.  It’s hard to describe because there’s no show quite like it.  It’s sort of like The Sopranos in that it shows a world of crime that most of us aren’t involved in.  It’s only “sort of” like the Sopranos though, because the Wire outclasses it in every way.

Anyways, the Wire to me is the best TV series … ever.  Not this year, or last year, or in the decades of TV that I haven’t seen before I was born.  I will boldly say that there is probably no show that has ever existed that is better than The Wire.  With the way that TV is going right now, I’m pretty confident that there will never be a show that will be better.

For that reason, for better or worse, television will never be as enjoyable as it was before I watched this show.  Everything else pales in comparison, and it’s a comparison I can’t not make when I watch TV.  Regular TV tastes like a cheap McDonald’s cheeseburger after dining on this fine cut of beef.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.