The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

Really, haven't all the polls just been leading up to this moment?

Really curious about the results of this one. I went for The Sopranos.

The proper food picture for the wire would be lake trout

Check your head Whiney we already did this poll: Who is HBO's KING DAVID?

Xpost. OTM!

Never got the appeal of the Sopranos. Never saw much behind it, really. The Wire is the best show I've ever and probably ever will see in my life, though.

I'm voting for the Sopranos because i think that the character development is more intense than any show in the history of television, and maybe only beats the The Wire in that because it doesn't have 7 billion characters to slog through in every ep

I don't get people who don't get The Sopranos.

anyone who votes sopranos doesnt know shit about shit

I watched the Sopranos in real time as it aired, with long gaps, while I watched five seasons of the Wire recently over a couple of months so they both feel totally different to me. Right now I have to say the Wire.

most otm thing nabisco ever said was when he observed that half the time the sopranos was just spinning its wheels - lotta great moments, sure, but way too much filler

Half the time? Get real. I disagree, regardless.

sopranos is just better, sorry.

both awesome but the wire at it's worst >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> sopranos at it's worst

superfluous apostrophes amirite

Score one for Pretty Tony

i've only seen season 3 and 4 of sopranos vs. all of the wire, so i'm saying the following with a v. limited perspective.

way too many characters on the sopranos just annoy me--tony (half of the time), janice, a.j., uncle junior, especially paulie (wtf?), others. i think i have a thing against italians and their speech patterns though, so whatever. i like what i've seen of the sopranos more than all the italian mob movies i've ever seen though, whatever that means. like, i kind of hate godfathers i and ii and goodfellas. boooooriiing.

the wire otoh has a v. special place in my heart. i think it's more overtly dramatic than the sopranos, with character development that leaps over the nuances of the sopranos, but it just feels more.. relevant? contracting jobs (who the fuck cares) vs. drug wars, etc. i don't know.

oh boy, ix-nae on the 'speech patterns' comment above which sounds a little weird. i think what i'm getting at is in the italian-americans vs. native-americans on columbus day episode. i.e. i don't care about your bowling-shirt-wearing noveau-riche bada-bing jfk-loving blabla when there are sweeter things to talk about.

also i'd rather see d. west or l. reddick or lester or kima or omar or marlo or d'angelo get half-naked and laid over another half-bald fatass or nj guido scoring and then acting retarded. the combined IQs of characters on the wire >>>>>>>>>> combined IQs of characters on the sopranos.

i'm still going to watch all of the sopranos, because i like it a lot, so in re to my comments feel free to murder me and drop me into a quarry csi-style i mean pry open abandoned project apartments, leave me on the second floor, and re-staple the plywood with a nail gun you bought at home depot.

^
http://i35.tinypic.com/o7ooj9.gif

lol

i almost said goombah

http://news.filefront.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/_42222218_gall_mario.jpg

btw the pine barrens episode of sopranos may be equal to or better than anything on the wire, just for the photography.

Any TV programme is going to suffer when compared to the Wire, frankly.

and the sound design, which was written into the script!

i agree with matt's comment about the collective IQ on the wire - just about everyone on the sopranos has got almost curb your enthusiasm levels of tunnel-vision self-regard

woops xpost

wire pwns will pwn poll no competition

sopranos birthed the genre - dont say oz plz plz - but the wire perfected it w/season and series long narrative arcs

and if you vote sopraons yr a racist

i only saw one episode of sopranos and had no interest in ever seeing it again

i'm racist toward italians and new jersey though

The Sopranos had some truly great episodes. The first few seasons, in particular, were classic. But it also had so many dull and repetitive episodes and the quality went so far downhill, that it absolutely does not deserve to win. The sheer abundance of "Tony has a wacky dream" episodes, should automatically disqualify it.

The Wire, on the other hand, maybe had its ups and downs, but overall was consistently great from beginning to end.

I hope The Wire trounces The Sopranos.

Maybe I should get a new login, cause I wanna vote for both shows. I love'em both equally. I'm a lover not a hater when it comes to these shows.

btw the pine barrens episode of sopranos may be equal to or better than anything on the wire, just for the photography.

― Matt P, Saturday, November 15, 2008 7:49 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

OTM

also for the snakes

the last season of the wire was pretty awful

just putting that out there

btw the pine barrens episode of sopranos may be equal to or better than anything on the wire, just for the photography.

― Matt P, Saturday, November 15, 2008 12:49 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

YES

i mean, not objectively awful, but a pretty big drop-off.

yeah i hated the last season for the most part but the rest of the seasons made up for it. now i can't actually remember if i've seen the sopranos because i don't know how i would have seen it. i just remember something about bears and i'm not sure when or where i watched it but i got bored.

i didnt see the last season of the wire tbh, but i didnt see the last season of the sopranos either

sopranos is funnier, possibly more great moments (in a visceral sense) than in wire, but wire suits me more i guess. mainly the thing i never 'got' wrt the sopranos was how relatable the characters were supposed to be - like, that's supposed to be the strength of the show, right? how human and understandable and universal these subhuman monsters were? idk, i never felt any connection with any of them, and the only characters i had affection for were the funny ones (paulie, ralphie before he killed the stripper, furio before he turned into a puss). the incredible savagery of these ppl stuck with me a lot more than their humanity. that was probably the point to some degree, but it wasn't fun to watch imo~

agreed on s5 wire - tho i thought the last few eps were good

they werent supposed to be likeable! i mean, they were supposed to be charming on the surface, i guess, but they all plumbed the death.

i guess there's something i like more about the sopranos' storytelling, it was more ambitious, more theatrical in a way, than the wire, which was very good at being straight-up layered journalistic narrative but was maybe too unwavering in its tone, or something. and ya, i thought the plain-jane look it had, the unobtrusive cinematography, had something going for it, but i want more sometimes.

also nobody on the wire can touch gandolfini, or falco for that matter. not even close.

(again, that's a format thing, as none of the performers on the wire had nearly as much screen time due to its total ensemble-ness)

thats true ^ but the sopranos just got soooo redundant is the main problem i have

and the wire was so much greater in scope - portrait of an american city ffs!

i guess there's something i like more about the sopranos' storytelling, it was more ambitious

― s1ocki, Saturday, November 15, 2008 11:07 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is just completely insane

xxxpost, yeah, but no one ever can anyone touch Omar.

thats true ^ but the sopranos just got soooo redundant is the main problem i have

ugh yes, this really drove me nuts by season 2 - so many episodes felt like artificial ways of extending the show's lifespan, it made me feel like i was being fucked with - w/the wire every episode felt like it had a porpoise~

http://www.chinahearsay.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/Porpoise1.JPG

the fact that the wire always seemed more ambitious to me was a big point in its favor, but i think i see where slocki's cummin from\

The Wire (the first season of the Sopranos is really the only one that to me competes at this level.) I am feeling lately that Mad Men is getting to this level of TV as well.

Not so much the characters being failures in and of themselves, though I note you excluded Massive Genius which was pretty cringe even at the time, and yes Dutton and Cobb are good in their roles. It's more it being such a short list (you could include Meadow's college boyfriend too I guess, though he kind of epitomizes the instrumentality of featuring racialized characters to show white racism), and Dutton's one-episode appearance iirc -- and I may not recall correctly! e.g., does he return? -- being centered around Tony's actions and responses

xp

tbc I'm not reductively saying "the sopranos was racist". It's just in being asked to compare these shows -- something I find kind of tiresome in 2025 -- this is an obvious point of contrast that doesn't reflect very well on TS

btw if for some reason you want to refresh your memory on depictions of police brutality in the wire: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1625&context=uclf

Definitely a short list, I agree. You could say the same thing of Scorsese's films, though, right? Tony does exist in something of a closed universe--even when he's a guest at the private golf club, he's a specimen in a jar.

there is way more brutality depicted that Prez's, come on. but yes its critique is structural / systemic. it also clearly has a take on who the bad guys are, and it's not kids selling drugs on the corners is it.

it's not totally clear who they are, like idk? or like it mixes systemic critique with a story so the specific bad guy characters are weirdly incidental? senior cops or politicians or whatever. hard to really nail stuff which is fine cos it's a TV show but guess this goes back to wondering what its vaunted realism is for or against. the sopranos may be more amoral but given some others here also reckon it has a longer tail i would argue it's cos it asks questions that kind of loom over time whereas the wire was mired a bit more in trying to he journalistic in a more of the moment way.

xpost i do think it's worth considering the idea that like the sopranos shows a bunch of people being racist, second or third gen immigrants who see themselves as superior to other races or ethnicities in america. with meadow's bf I think it's really clear Tony is being racist and you're not supposed to be cheering him on. like the show is about a closed group of myopic people, that doesn't mean you can't learn things from that as a leftist, and it's specifically highlighting that it's that sort of group.

I went through a period of working for my uncle, who wasn't a crime boss but as close as you can get to being one legally. And we had a fractious relationship and I think at one point he probably did want to murder me. And I'm a big nosed mofo like Christopher Moltisanti. Coincidences!

Hard to pick which LocalGarda posts itt need to go in the username/post thread.

Definitely a short list, I agree. You could say the same thing of Scorsese's films, though, right? Tony does exist in something of a closed universe--even when he's a guest at the private golf club, he's a specimen in a jar.

― clemenza, Friday, June 6, 2025 12:15 PM (fifty-one seconds ago)

for sure, you could say the same of tons of white artists! and I'm not some purist, I love, e.g., Preston Sturges and Buster Keaton. in my defense, I was responding to what I mistook to be a much broader claim from LocalGarda than he was actually making.

re: who the bad guys are. yeah that's a fair response, esp since I used the term "bad guys" when I think the "villains" in the Wire are mostly abstractions like the set of policies called "the war on drugs" or social psychological phenomena like the culture of policing. Finding that dramatically unsatisfying is understandable, though I personally enjoyed it *because* it's mixed with a pulpy story

I don't know about a lot of characters we're supposed to respect being cops - Lester, Kima and Daniels (sort of)? Kima and Daniels had their own foibles (Daniels had been a dirty cop at some point, Kima is running the McNulty path of ruining her personal life).

It does portray brutality neutrally or even positively (in the first big raid, Kima - the only good cop we've seen so far - beats the shit out of a kid and there's never a second glance at it) but that doesn't strike me as promotion on the part of writers so much as a reflection of reality and how the cops see themselves. If Kima beat the shit out of that kid and then faced career repercussions or found herself staying up all night because of dread and guilt that wouldn't be the writers taking a moral stand on brutality it would just be a fairy tale.

Hard to pick which LocalGarda posts itt need to go in the username/post thread.

:)

the thing that always grinded me most about McNulty wasn't just the American Irish cliched bullshit. It's just the actor is that landed gentry he fucking grew up in a motherfucking castle. He is like one of these staright lineage to the Norman Conquest motherfuckers. Just talk in a posh accent - you aren't allowed to be an actor.

Maybe it’s where I live but, I will regularly re-watch The Wire when something happens IRL that reminds me of it, and I will measure how the show matches up with reality. The Sopranos is less relevant to where I live, but it does remind me a little of where I grew up, which was significantly Italian.

I actually focus a lot less on the procedural cops now that I have seen it 5 times (some episodes way more than that). They kinda feel like something that was included to make the show more marketable, like the gratuitous sex scenes. The port plotline holds up a lot, as does Hampsterdam, and the homeless stuff actually is ok … the newspaper storyline got in the way tbh… there have been enough shows and movies about newspapers tbh.

As in I am not trying to convince anyone that The Wire is better. But I like it a lot because I have lived for over 25 years in a broken city with a high homicide rate, a port, problem schools, headline-grabbing racism and gentrification, lots of drugs and homelessness… oh and laughably dysfunctional government. Plus there is Omar …

Interesting posts. I'm now thinking do I like the Sopranos cos of being Catholic. And Irish. Unlike McNulty. I'm confused.

Simon's core thing about policing strikes me as totally transparent in the show and is in fact explained explicitly and at some length in his books. He thinks there was an era in Baltimore when cops were more likely to engage meaningfully and helpfully with the communities they policed, and actually knew things about the people and events inside them; then came vast policy changes, fueled by the drug war and the rise of statistics, that incentivized police to only hop out of their cars to rack up meaningless arrests or assert their own dominance over the people around them, and incentivized the department as a whole to chase or manipulate statistics in whatever way best served people politically. I mean, this stuff is very aggressively all over The Wire, and so its law-enforcement "heroes" are always the ones who want to do "real police work," understanding and targeting the people driving the violence, even as every structure around them pushes them to just round up enough kids off the corner to keep the numbers looking good.

As for whether The Sopranos can be a bit narrow — I don't know that I consider that necessarily bad, but I will say that my least-favorite stretch is the half-season focused on tension between Ralphie (who is of course psychotic) and Tony (who at that point is being racist about Meadow's boyfriend), because the show feels animated by a highly parochial power struggle between two people who are both awful, in a boring way. The end of the season manages to pay this off by asking great questions about whether these people want their children to follow them into this culture or abandon it for something else — but for a while there it really does provide some tedious and depressing television that leans into the narrowness of their world.

Oh also just a note on police brutality in The Wire: when the show does eventually provide a bad-guy brutal cop — Walker, the guy who breaks Donut's fingers — it feels a little too obvious and cartoonish to fit the show! You actually get a better sense of brutality from the routine practice of lining up and humiliating teenagers on corners.

(Also I'm sorry, I should not say Ralphie is "psychotic," that is not the appropriate word)

Felt this discussion was teetering on the edge of policing questions like you describe, and as you say it seems like the Wire is sort of pro-police as a public service? There is a left argument along those lines.

In terms of narrow, I agree, I just don't really feel who a show features equates to what it's about, but we prob discussed that already.

because the show feels animated by a highly parochial power struggle between two people who are both awful, in a boring way.

Ain't that America, home of the free

Was going to say--turns on CNN--that sounds familiar...

The Young Thug trial … it’s like a missing season of The Wire

"It's just like in real life" not a convincing counter argument to "it's boring" imo.

There is no counter argument to someone saying something is boring!

lol that's fair, but you can explain why you don't find it to be so, what is appealing or interesting about the dynamic to you, etc.

I think nabisco gave an interesting and even handed account there of how he feels about the show and just don't see how finding a certain situation dramatically inert is supposed to be changed by turning on the news and seeing that there is an equivalent situation happening irl

How is it "dramatically inert" if:

The end of the season manages to pay this off by asking great questions about whether these people want their children to follow them into this culture or abandon it for something else — but for a while there it really does provide some tedious and depressing television that leans into the narrowness of their world.

The "tedious" part is in the eye of the beholder. I think the discomfort in the show slightly manipulating the viewer to root for Tony, who is nearly as bad as Ralphie, when Ralphie is actually probably correct in accordance with the rules of the game, is interesting.

I just loved the timeliness of the phrase "a highly parochial power struggle between two people who are both awful, in a boring way" in connection to Trump/Musk--messaged it to friends last night.

Sop s2 e7 when Chris is forced to choose between the outside world (Alicia Witt and screenwriting) and Tony’s world and he chooses the latter

the show slightly manipulating the viewer to root for Tony, who is nearly as bad as Ralphie

100% agree that Ralphie's function in this stretch is to work the show's usual viewer-complicity-with-Tony thing, tempting you to see him as the defender of some moral line or code (just as people within the show keep wanting to). You could say there's similar stuff in The Wire, with its suggestion of new generations of gangsters growing steadily more sociopathic and rapacious, until Marlo makes the last batch feel like they're on the side of good. But that alone isn't enough of a dramatic engine to move things, either — as always with that show, it's mostly interesting in terms of how you see different characters navigate the changing systems around them. With Sopranos I think it really is that sense of narrowness that makes this stretch of episodes non-fun for me; I can never feel very invested in their organization in and of itself. But like I said, the stuff about children that follows strikes me as some of the richest stuff the show ever did, specifically because of how it questions that narrowness and how the characters feel about it.

Tl/dr

I guess, for me, the stuff with the kids in the Sopranos seemed hollow in comparison to the narrowness of opportunity other kids in America face … like in Season 4 of The Wire. when watching this arc of the Sopranos, I felt like shouting, “Cry me a fucking river! These are white kids from upper middle class families who can get middle class jobs.”

I always thought the show was aware of and sometimes calling attention that. Both Tony and (especially) Carmella would regularly offer reality-checks to their kids.

there was not a single moment where I thought AJ or Meadow were meant to evoke any feeling but disdain

profiting from the horrors without even taking part and sharing that moral responsibility is the greatest sin imaginable to the gods of the Sopranos universe

These are white kids from upper middle class families who can get middle class jobs.

Oh but this is exactly the kind of question I mean! Some of these guys' children are raised in nice suburbs and sent to nice schools; Meadow goes off to Columbia and adopts the habits of an upper-middle-class Ivy Leaguer (and dates a posh biracial guy). This is an ordinary conflict you see all the time with people who get wealthy, or upwardly mobile immigrants — worrying that the kids have lost touch with your background and values and become like other people you never liked — but then in this case it's totally blown up by the mob stuff, because what some of them are facing is: would I rather my kid followed into my little world, like I followed my father into it? Wouldn't I maybe love and respect them more if, instead of becoming wealthy oncologists or whatever, they kept the traditions of the family business, and excelled at it? Do I envy the next guy along, whose kids are helping murder people or being good mob wives? I mean, IIRC this is the season that ends with (1) one of the next-generation "kids" who wants in to crime doing it in such a disastrous way that they end up killing him, (2) Junior singing Italian opera at the wake, and (3) Meadow, who kinda knows what happened, heckling him and leaving. They don't just commit crimes to get ahead; it is, for them, part of this extremely specific culture they actually prize and halfway resent and disdain their own children for not embracing or being suited to.

(My memory on this isn't great, but isn't it in fact that Tony spends the season trying to keep Jackie out of their stuff, because he had dated Meadow, and then Jackie's disastrous move is to try and replicate a type of robbery he heard Tony and his father had pulled at his age? Basically you just see this absurd dissonance inside them about whether they think "their thing" is good and worth preserving or whether it's something you'd never want your loved ones to be a part of, and their inability to reconcile or even think deeply about this stuff leads them to either consume or else abhor their own children.)

^ these are great, well articulated points. there's a parallel in the Wire too with Stringer and Avon's ultimate falling out - the suit-wearing businessman vs the gangster who just wants his corners (I'm sure there are closer analogues involving parents and children too, esp in S4-5). Does the material success that comes with being a kingpin serve the purpose of escaping the violent criminal milieu that's the only world you know, or to help your kids/friends/community escape it? Or when the opportunity presents itself are you even psychologically able to do that? or do you even want that? I think both shows engage with those questions pretty masterfully

The difficulty with The Wire is that almost none of those kids see any other likely path. The main time it comes up is when Colvin wants to take in Namond and Wee-Bey is immediately like yes, let the kid go do something better. Namond is like Jackie Jr. with a happy ending. Remembering that Jackie Jr. arc actually really makes me want to rewatch some of it: I mean, there was a period when Tony liked Meadow being around Jackie Jr., because he was one of them, and then he spends a while in a losing battle to make this kid just go to Rutgers and stop trying to be exactly what Tony himself already is (and relating to Meadow exactly as Tony relates to Carmela).

Tony sees the better path for his daughter and Jackie Jr. and in his own way tries to make that happen, but I think part of Chase's point is Tony's corrupting influence on everyone around him which ultimately causes the whole thing to fall apart.

There’s also the thing where Jackie Jr is just really dumb, the idea of him going on to great things outside the family business is a total fantasy because there’s hardly anything there. Whereas the kids on the Wire are set up to break your heart with how much potential in different areas - social skills, entrepreneurship, attention to detail, etc - gets left by the wayside as they’re routed to their bleak futures.

Thinking of Cutty and the boxing gym on The Wire vs. Tony Blundetto (Buscemi) on The Sopranos, both trying to walk the straight and narrow after prison time.

Jackie Jr.'s future was clearly as a tournament-level Scrabble player.

a friend of mine doesn’t like the wire on hardline ACAB principles. he says the fundamentally based on the flawed premise of the possibility of the existence of a good cop. when i asked him if there are any police procedurals that met his criteria he didn’t have a good answer. i haven’t watched the shield, would that count?

The Shield walks a similar line, it depicts cops who are utterly corrupt but also ultra competent at their job, and the homicide detectives are pretty much presented as "the good ones".

a friend of mine doesn’t like the wire on hardline ACAB principles. he says the fundamentally based on the flawed premise of the possibility of the existence of a good cop. when i asked him if there are any police procedurals that met his criteria he didn’t have a good answer. i haven’t watched the shield, would that count?

The best depictions of police work on TV IMO are Southland (drama) and Barney Miller (comedy). Both depict the job as pretty boring, and filled with lots of time spent sitting around bullshitting. That's broken up by showing up at the worst moments in people's lives and being relatively powerless to help.

a friend of mine doesn’t like the wire on hardline ACAB principles. he says the fundamentally based on the flawed premise of the possibility of the existence of a good cop

That's kinda silly imo, a series that shows that "good" cops still won't fix any problems and will still ultimately be used for repressive means is a better way to drive the message home than to just make them all pantomine villains from the get go.

The Shield is even worse. The criminals are portrayed as genuinely evil in a way pretty much nobody is on The Wire, so the cops seem more necessary.

We Own This City might be what he is looking for.

Yeah I don't think The Shield would appeal to someone turned off by the Wire. I never actually finished the last couple seasons, but it takes the "you may not like his methods but he gets results" cliche and pushes it into intentionally murky and uncomfortable places. Which is interesting sometimes but it also means accepting a lot of reactionary depictions of criminals and the evils of the big city, even as it shows you horrible and corrupt police behavior and suggests that after a certain point corrupt cops can't be redeemed and destroy everyone around them.

The Shield has my favorite ending to any show.

"a friend of mine doesn’t like the wire on hardline ACAB principles. he says the fundamentally based on the flawed premise of the possibility of the existence of a good cop"

This feels like an overcorrection but...does your friend like Columbo?

Season 3 "The Telltale Moozadell" has some classics. Two cops interrogating the pizza guys like an episode of Dragnet, "you're an accessory after the fact" + "Edgar Allan Poe - good writer, what a fucking nutjob."