The 100 greatest quotes from The Wire

A YouTube compilation of "100 greatest quotes" from the HBO series The Wire. As Aaron Stewart-Ahn on Twitter said, "Perhaps the closest US TV has ever come to a landmark novel."

• [Tdawwg]

  Much as Moby Dick is the closest that American literature has come to a long-running landmark soap opera!

  Seriously, wouldn’t y’all chuck all of Whitman and Emerson and some other dusty old American farts for one more season of McNutty et al.? I sure would!

• [Anonymous]

  The most profound work of art of the 21st Century. Watching it was like was like being back in 1836 when Dickens was first serialised. If any of our digital culture survives in the centuries to come, kids will have to study this in school.

• [danielwcarlson]

  Sweet! Thanks for the pickup. That guy’s done other videos for us, and we were honored to be the ones to debut it:

  http://www.pajiba.com/guides/the-100-greatest-quotes-from-the-wire.php

• [Zadaz]

  Context must be everything. I don’t watch TV and the whole video (or the first third that I watched) just seemed like a bunch of people trying to sound clever but simple being vulgar and trite.

  Or is that the point?

  • [remmelt]

    Yeah, it’s pretty close to life like that.

• [Jardine]

  “Perhaps the closest US TV has ever come to a landmark novel.”

  What about Babylon 5? The Wire was great, but the story seemed to be planned one season at a time.

• [Anonymous]

  Context is everything. When you understand how these quotes fit into the storylines, they make perfect sense.

  There are those who love The Wire and those who haven’t seen it yet.

• [arkizzle / Moderator]

  “What about Babylon 5?”

  R e a l l y ?

  /Head tilted to a furiously inquisitive angle

• [Moriarty]

  So no comment on the absurd dismissal of all American literature?

  (And yes, the Wire is probably the most important work in its medium.)

• [Anonymous]

  what’s with the assumption that TV is of an unshakably lesser literary class than novels (and specifying US TV, at that)? The Wire is excellent, important, transcendent, all that, but I wouldn’t just write off all the rest of the great material US TV has produced.

• [millionpoems]

  > a landmark novel

  Seasons-on-dvd have made this more than typical pundit-hyperbole, though the genre-error is still a little grating — serial drama and long prose fiction complement each other but they’re not the same. I’ve heard this claim before and since, though — about Mad Men, The Sopranos, Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, Hill Street Blues…

• [f sharp a sharp infinity]

  Man, when the credits roll on that last episode on the first run through… Sheeeeeeeeeeeit. One day, someone’s gonna invent something where you can wipe your memory of a show so you can start over fresh.

  @Jardine – only if you mean in the sense it was physically written season at a time. Read some of David Simon’s interviews – he had very clear sense of where most of the series was going. And connecting it all was the city of Baltimore – never really changing and always full of one part hope, nine parts despair. You can definitely debate what the greatest show in TV history is, but it seems to me a solid fact that the Wire did something unprecedented in television and did it brilliantly < /fanboy >.

• [arkizzle / Moderator]

  “So no comment on the absurd dismissal of all American literature?”

  Who absurdly dismissed all American literature?

  • [Moriarty]

    Ah, I misread. I thought it was “the closest the US has come to a landmark novel.” Which would have been silly. Though in my defense, I’ve heard almost as silly things from people (that is, British academics) who really ought to know better. But I’ll be quiet now.

• [ian_b]

  SPOILER ALERT…
  [this comment has been ROT13'd - (rot13.com or rot13.org to decypher)] -arkizzle

  V ybirq gur qenzngvp qrnguf (Jnyynpr, Onexfqnyr, Fabbc), ohg V nyfb ybirq gur noehcg, frafryrff, naq haqrefgngrq qrnguf, yvxr Bzne. Fbzrgvzrf na vzcbegnag punenpgre jbhyq qvr naq vg jbhyq arire or fubja, vg whfg tbg n cnffvat zragvba. Vg chg gur tevz ernyvgl bs gur tnzr vagb sbphf. OGJ, Jurer jnf ZpAhygl’f vzcrefbangvba bs gur ‘frevny xvyyre’? Gung fghss jnf pynffvp.

  • [arkizzle / Moderator]

    Sorry Ian, it’s too good a series to let spoil :)

    That said, I agree with what you say about Bzne: it was done perfectly and probably felt truer-to-real-life than the others. Just a slack-jawed.. oh!

• [ian_b]

  fair enough. I guess I would have been upset too if someone told me that McNulty was a Cylon.