The Sopranos vs. The Wire (aka The Greatest Debate in the History of Debates)

The Wire is ending on Sunday, capping off one of the great TV runs that no one really watched. Literally, no one watches the show. It's just me, various TV critics across the nation, Bill Simmons and Jason Whitlock, and a couple of people on a few message boards on the internet. And because I've never met these people, I'm half convinced that they don't really exist, and I'm just talking to myself about a TV show that no one else watches.

The big question that most people seem to be talking about when it relates to the end of The Wire isn't "How is it going to end?" because for the most part, people seem to have a general idea of where the show is headed. The big question is "What's the Best TV Drama Ever, The Wire or The Sopranos" (Deadwood also gets thrown into the discussion, specifically on The House Next Door, but I'm reserving judgment on that because I haven't gotten into that show yet).

To me, it's like the Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson debate. You can't go wrong with choosing either one, and when talking about the greatest shows of the decade you can't discuss one without mentioning the other. I'm probably more vocal about how much I love The Sopranos (and by probably, I mean definitely), but the truth is I love The Wire just as much. They're the two of my three favorite shows ever, the other being Arrested Development, which is a comedy and harder to compare, so I won't talk about that.

(Although, with The Office coming back next month, I think a Arrested Development vs. The Office topic is something I'd have to think about. And I will say that many of the things that are great about The Sopranos and The Wire also apply to Arrested Development, except AD of course wasn't dramatic at all.)

So which one is better?

The Case For The Wire

I stumbled into The Wire like a lot of people did. I knew that the show was critically acclaimed, and it was on HBO which made me give it the benefit of the doubt, but I caught an episode of season 2 about 4 years ago to try and get into it and I was completely confused. Right from the first couple of scenes, I could tell right away this wasn't a show you can catch halfway in. I ended up buying the DVD of the first season over two years ago, watched the first episode, and immediately stopped watching for like 5 months because the episode didn't grab me all that much.

I decided to make an effort to watch The Wire before the fourth season started, and it was being billed as possibly the final season so I figured I needed to get into it before it started. I re-watched the first episode, then forced myself to watch the rest of the first disc. I ended up finishing the first season in like a week and ordered seasons 2 and 3 the next day, and ended up killing those in two weeks. I was hooked, and reading other people's experience with the show, that's usually how it happens. You watch the first disc of the first season, and by the end you're like Bubbles (the resident drug addict of The Wire), fiending for the next installment.

The best thing about The Wire is that it is remarkably consistent. There are literally no bad episodes whatsoever. Every single scene is important. Even seemingly the most insignificant character has a purpose. Like Lester Freamon says, "All the pieces matter". Even the weakest storyline on the show, this season's newspaper angle, serves as important piece to the overarching theme of the show, how various systems contribute to the downfall of an American City.

The world of The Wire is incredibly diverse, and through it's five season run you see the angles of the War on Drugs and the downfall of Baltimore through various subjects, the Police, the Street, the Politicians, the Docks/Unions, the Schools, and the Media. Each group has such a large cast of characters that there could be a separate spinoff show for each subject. Yet the show never feels rushed, it never seems like the show marginalizes any character, everyone who appears serves some sort of purpose. It's the only show where the supposed "hero" of the police, Jimmy McNulty, could virtually disappear in the 4th season and the quality actually gets better. It's the only show where a gay man, the immortal Omar Little, is it's most badass and popular character. It's the only show that has a predominantly black cast and is mostly about the prosecution of young black men, but it doesn't ever feel like they're battering you over the head about race or injustice.

And unlike The Sopranos and most serialized TV shows, it feels like David Simon, Ed Burns, and the team of writers knew what they were doing all along. The show never meanders. Not to give away any spoilers, but the foreshadowing, execution, and payoff to virtually every single storyline throughout the course of the show is just amazing. These guys knew exactly what story they wanted to tell, they knew how to tell that story, and they were able to tell that story. And aside from the newspaper storyline (which is the only time The Wire seems very heavy handed and self-serving), the themes and message they're trying to get across never seems forced. Instead of just generalizing and saying "The system is broken, these guys are evil", The Wire clearly makes it's case for why things are the way they are, why people do what they do. It's been called bleak and depressing, but although it does show why and how the system doesn't work, there are pockets of optimism there, that things aren't totally hopeless. And again, it always shows why.

A lot of critics and message board residents (the people who may or may not exist) talk about how they openly weep after some scenes. I've never ever gotten that from this show, because the only thing that makes me cry is the thought of being chased by werewolves. But there are a lot of scenes that just stick with me. I can rattle them off the top of my head, Bodie and Poot confronting Wallace, Ziggy sitting in his car, Omar and Brother Mouzon's faceoff, Avon and Stringer by the waterfront, Snoop asking Michael how her hair looks. And there are a ton more that I'm not mentioning.

It isn't as accessible or as popular as The Sopranos, and that's part of it's charm. If/when you watch it, and grow to love it, it's like being part of a secret club where everyone is smarter than everyone else. And it's true. I think that if you watch The Wire, you automatically become ten times smarter than a person who doesn't watch it. That's not just opinion, that is scientific fact.


The Case For The Sopranos

I'm convinced that The Sopranos is the most misunderstood popular show of all time. Most people love it, but they don't misunderstand what the show is about, and even I might be misunderstanding what David Chase tried to accomplish. It is the most accessible show that HBO has ever had, and the most popular, but at the same time it was perhaps the most frustrating. And I don't think that's a bad thing. What I like most about The Sopranos is that it's a show where not everything is spelled out, where you have to think and interpret different things for yourself. And what is so neat about The Ending is that it completely encapsulates what the show was, completely maddening but always fascinating, and part of the fun is just thinking about what it means.

The progression of each of the main characters, from Tony to Junior to Christopher to Meadow, is fascinating to watch. The show is the story of Tony Soprano. The Mafia story is the hook, but in reality the show is less a Mob epic and more a character story about a paranoid, charming, evil man. The characters become so well developed and evolved that the tone of the entire series is completely different at the end from how it starts out. Although some would argue, rightly, that the great theme of the show is how people can't change no matter how hard they try, going from the final season back to the first season is jarring, much like how it's weird to compare pictures of a president from the beginning and end of two terms.

Like The Wire, every season can be summarized in a sentence. Season 1 is Tony as a father, Season 2 is Tony as a brother, Season 3 is Tony as a father, Season 4 is Tony as a husband, Season 5 is about Tony as a cousin and mentor, Season 6 is about Tony as a friend, and the final season strips Tony down to his true self, Tony as a bitter, evil man. It's preferable to watch the show from the beginning, but each season can stand on its own, which is one reason why The Sopranos gained in popularity as the show progressed. New viewers could jump in at any season, but it was also a show that was very self-referential and lived in its own universe, and rewarded longtime fans and viewers who paid attention.

Each season has it's own arc, and every episode builds towards a dramatic conclusion in the final episodes, but the great thing about The Sopranos is that most episodes are able to stand on their own while building on the larger picture. The two most popular episodes, "College" and "Pine Barrens" have actually very little to do with the overall plot of each season and the series. Both episodes, and many of the classic Sopranos episodes, are more like watching a movie than a TV episode. "College" alone was better than any of the Academy Award Best Picture nominees of 1999. Of all the TV shows I've seen, The Sopranos is the most cinematic. Even the infamous final scene builds like a short film.

You can't write about The Sopranos without talking about the final scene. Despite the cries about "not knowing how it ends", the show actually has a lot of finality about the arcs of each of the main characters. By the end, we know who these characters are and we know why they ended up the way they are. For all the complaining of what we don't see what happens to Tony, we actually DO see what happens to a guy like Tony Soprano. He either ends up rotting in jail, getting killed in a violent hit, or alone or marginalized. All those things happen to the other mob bosses in the final season.

The brilliant part of the ending is that the audience gets put inside Tony's shoes. Watching the ending, as it happened, was the most intense ten minutes of scripted TV I've ever sat through. Like Tony, we were looking at the door to see who was coming next. Like Tony, we thought everyone looked suspicious. Like Tony, to us, even the most harmless situation (Meadow parking the car) seemed like potential danger. Like Tony, we don't know how it's all gonna end. And maybe the most clever part of all (intentional or not), like Tony, after it all happened, we didn't bother with the whole examination and thinking part unless we really wanted.

I just thought of that last analogy literally as I was writing that paragraph, and that's what I love the most about The Sopranos. The most rewarding experience about the show is just thinking about it. I haven't watched or even thought about The Sopranos since last summer, but just writing about it just makes me think of the different ways to look at certain scenes and moments. That is David Chase's great accomplishment with his series: Getting me to think.

Comparing the The Wire and The Sopranos

Plotwise, The Sopranos is not as structurally sound as The Wire. A lot of people who praise The Wire at the expense of The Sopranos like to point this out, but it's like comparing apples and oranges. The Wire was more plot driven and The Sopranos was more character driven. That's not saying The Wire didn't build some fantastic characters, or that The Sopranos didn't have a great storyline, but the stories were told differently.

Both shows don't seem like traditional TV shows at all, because both creators took a different approach to creating television. David Simon wanted a more novelistic approach to TV, where all 60 episodes were like a chapter in a book. Whereas David Chase approached The Sopranos as a giant movie series with 86 sequels. This lead to the most obvious quality difference, where The Wire was more consistently great and while The Sopranos had downpoints, it also had the more outstanding stand-alone episodes.

Acting-wise, no one on The Wire comes close to James Gandolfini and Edie Falco, who were consistently the best actors on television for the entire run of The Sopranos and turned in iconic performances as Tony and Carmela Soprano. However, there are some awful actors on the show, most notably Robert Iler as AJ (but in all fairness, he did an incredible job in the final season). There aren't any powerhouses on The Wire on the level of Gandolfini, Falco, or Michael Imperioli, but there aren't any weak links at all.

Both shows were a critique of America during the Clinton-Bush era, The Wire being more focused on society and The Sopranos more focused on the individual. Both shows are definitely a thinking-person's TV, neither spelled things out explicitly. The Wire requires the audience to pay very close attention to detail because literally everything they do on the show is important. I can't and won't and don't do anything else when I watch (and I'm the best multi-tasker on the planet), even if I've seen the episode already. The Sopranos is an easier show to watch and get into, but it also requires analysis and interpretation to really enjoy it, which I think makes it a more rewatchable show. I made a joke earlier, but I really do think people who sit down and really WATCH these shows become smarter.


The Verdict

At gunpoint, I'd pick The Sopranos over The Wire, but that probably has more to do with personal preference than whether it is actually the better show. Like Bird-Magic, Mantle-Mays, Johansson-Alba, Coke-Pepsi, it really depends on what you look for as a fan. There are no wrong answers, there are only right answers. Everyone gets an A!