-Spoilers, obviously. Most of this post will be about what I’d forgotten from my original viewing of the show. (I suppose a lot of this show’s fans are not posting here any longer–Matt, Pugeye, Alpha Hammer, etc.)

-It was in December 2013 and January 2014 that I did this show for the first time, and this time around 10 years later I blew through it almost as fast.
-Season ranking: 4, 2, 3, 5, 1. This is close to what I would have said in 2014, but with the last two reversed.

-Going into the fifth season the first time I recalled Alpha Hammer (who openly admitted that he thought the show was “too dry and clinical” and that he’d never finished watching it) saying that said fifth season was universally regarded as the show’s worst. It’s only 10 episodes long, it aired two years after the previous season and half of it is set in a newspaper. The big weakness with it isn’t hard to spot: nobody at the Baltimore Sun amounts to a very interesting character. The only thing I even remembered about the newspaper scenes from the first time around is that one of the people there is Gale from Breaking Bad!! You’d think that former crime reporter David Simon would be able to come up with better stuff for the newspaper since this was his old gig, and certainly he’d have a lot to say, but what he says about newspapers going down the toilet circa 2008 isn’t anything you weren’t hearing anywhere else.
…that being said, I wouldn’t have changed my opinion if I’d only watched the first four or five episodes of season 5, but that wasn’t going to happen, and I do feel that the season picks up a good deal of steam in its second half. McNulty’s fake-serial-killer subplot is usually denounced as one of the small handful of things that this painfully realistic show did that wasn’t painfully realistic, but I feel that the way it unravels, with all the other characters gradually realizing what’s going on, adds genuine suspense, and plus you have scenes like Omar’s death and whatnot. The 90 minute series finale “-30-” is also one of the show’s best episodes, wrapping things up well while showing that things really aren’t wrapped up.
-By contrast, I’d now have to say the first season is the least gripping. D’Angelo Barksdale and Stringer Bell were compelling characters from the outset, and I’d forgotten all about the nasty ambush on Kima Greggs, but the first season is the one that’s the most built around humdrum police work–which is, of course, a really dumb criticism of The Wire, because that’s precisely the point of the whole thing.

-Best episodes remain the last two episodes of season 2 (“Port In A Storm”/”Bad Dreams”), the season 4 finale (“Final Grades”), and now the series (season 5) finale. This hasn’t really changed from the first time around. Season 4 is the best mostly because of the kids, and it’s stunning to think how the show’s best season features almost nothing of McNulty, the show’s main character. Instead, the main character in season 4 is Roland Pryzbylewski, who prior to season 4 is one of the weakest characters. How many other shows have done this? (I suppose the actor must have done a pretty good job, because season 4 Prez-the-teacher seems like a significantly different character than the trouble-making dumbass from earlier seasons.)

-The three scenes that I thought were the show’s best have all diminished a bit in some way, and it has to do with how I misremembered them:
1)The death of Bodie, which I thought was the show’s best scene, now seemed a little awkwardly set up. It’s still a powerful scene, and perhaps the show’s most meaningful death, because Bodie seems to be finally coming on to realizing what “the game” is…but it almost had me yearning for a little more drama, like wishing he’d been killed by someone we actually know, or something. (I think I had been prepared for the scene by a Youtube video listing the nastiest deaths on the show; Bodie’s was ranked #1.) But again, that’s the kind of thing you can criticize about The Wire knowing that nobody would listen, and you couldn’t really blame them, either.
2)The final walk of Frank Sobotka, although a good summation of the “everyone has their hand in everyone else’s pocket” theme, and still a reasonably powerful scene, didn’t gut-wrench me like the first time around, because I don’t think I was quite as taken with Frank as a character this time around. (This too was prepared for me, but it was on this board, where Paul C piqued my curiosity by saying “the end of season 2 is gut-wrenching, and you hardly see anything!”)
3)The scene where two of the kids from season 4 are sitting in a car with one of their younger brothers, tearfully saying goodbye to each other. Not only did I misremember this scene as being a lot sadder and more tearful than it actually was, but it isn’t even in season 4, it’s in season 5.

-While I agree that a lot of the big deaths (Bodie, Wallace, Omar, etc.) are still very powerful, the death that is going to stick with me the most this time might be that of the poor innocent woman stocking potato chips in the grocery store who Chris Partlow guns down so he can frame Omar. What an absolutely HEARTLESS scene. I did not remember this scene, and also did not remember that there is a scene in one of the earlier seasons where a stray bullet from a street firefight kills a little kid in an apartment. These are the most heartless scenes on the show, and I’m not forgetting Michael B. Jordan’s death in season 1. Oh, and finally, the death of Proposition Joe is a nasty one too.

-It is interesting how some of the show’s biggest villains don’t really loom in your memory the way they would in a more dramatic show. The Greek isn’t terribly interesting at all, and Avon Barksdale, the head honcho in earlier seasons, is easily overshadowed by Stringer Bell. Finally, there’s the takeover by Marlo Stanfield, who isn’t a terribly interesting character at all, being a cold-eyed psycho. (I may not be able to fault the actor for this–Jamie Hector still has a career.)

-Things that could have been cut from the show with little-to-no loss, IMO: 1)Anything involving McNulty being drunk or whoring around with women (I certainly had forgotten that he got involved with the blonde cop from season 2.) Ditto for Carcetti, who we briefly see hooking up with some woman who might as well never be mentioned again;
2)The dumb, brief love triangle between McNulty, Pearlman and Daniels (replete with bizarrely softcore sex scene);
3)Anything involving Kima Greggs’ troubles with her lesbian girlfriend or her kid;
4)Any scene with Leo Fitzpatrick from Kids, who seemed really out of place.

-The show’s worst moment isn’t hard to spot, but it’s bizarre in that it involves arguably my two favorite characters from the show: it’s when Omar shoots Brother Mouzone, who promptly and embarrassingly does nothing whatsoever to realistically act in any way like a person who has just been blasted with a shotgun. I liked Mouzone, a bit cartoonish for this show though he may have been (this is precisely why his detractors hate him), and had forgotten that he basically disappears after season 3.

-One other badly flubbed scene is the death of Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, whom I mistakenly thought survived the show. She has to give this kind of little speech to the character that kills her, and it’s in this scene that you’re reminded that she’s being played by someone who wasn’t asctually an actress.

-Although these are not the most powerful scenes on the show, the ones I rewatched the most on Youtube in the past decade are the funniest: Stringer knocking over his microphone and yelling “I will punk your ass right here!” at Poot, who asks “do the chair know we gon’ look like a buncha bitches?”, and the little kid Kenard, who says “package up my ass, gump.”

-Good Lord was James Ransone a bad actor. Ziggy Sobotka was an annoying,. stupid, character the first time around, but this time I honestly found myself stunned that his actor went on to any sort of career at all; I saw Ransone in It: Chapter Two and I guess he’d somewhat improved by then (awful movie, though), but here he makes Dana Ashbrook from Twin Peaks look like Sir Ralph Richardson. He almost ruins one of the better seasons of the show, and he’s the only seriously bad performance I can think of from the entire cast, and I’m not forgetting Steve Earle. To think, the character doesn’t even get killed!!

-My original rating for the show–four stars out of five–would probably still hold, but this has admittedly always been a show that I respect more than I enjoy. So think of it as a five-star show in terms of respectability, but maybe a three-and-a-half-star show in terms of how much I actually enjoy watching it. I have no problem whatsoever with the show’s enormous critical stature–this is a super-realistic attempt at showing why things never get better in inner cities, and few dramatic TV shows have ever had a more noble or valid purpose than that. But all the same, I’m kind of glad I didn’t buy the DVD sets or make it a point to binge the show year after year. See you in 2033-34?