OMG Vulture, you read my mind

So, I go to Vulture last night and what do I find? An article titled "When did you realize tv could be art?"

Hollaback girl! I was stoked just reading the title. This is what I set out to accomplish - convincing the world that some tv shows are better than most of the shiite I see in the Chelsea. And they (tv shows) reach a larger audience, have a bigger impact, respond to and critique culture better than the Chelsea shiite. I was even more excited to read the article, Seitz claiming that the "refusal to tell [him] who to root for" is what made him realize Hill Street Blues is art, not tv. I've never seen HSB, but I have seen The Wire, and I had the same reaction for precisely the same reason.

Have you ever read Diderot on aesthetics? He was critiquing art during the Rococo movement and he hated how meaninglessly ornate it was. He compared it to a bad play which uses plot twists for shock value but are ultimately vapid.  Good art, like good theater, should be more about the the slow and purposeful cultivation of an idea. Diderot really liked painters like Greuze, where even the smallest details supported the immersion of the subject in a particular moment: the mother listening to the Bible is so absorbed she neglects her unraveling sleeve, the pot on the stove, her unruly child. (Ok, these paintings are mad cheesy, and Greuze was never a good artist. But can't you see where Diderot's going with this? Good narrative art cannot rely on spectacle)

I think I must have been devouring all five seasons of The Wire at the same time I was watching Seasons 4 and 5 of Lost, and the contrast is the two shows is telling. It was around Season 4 when I really started getting frustrated with Lost, not solely because they didn't resolve any "mysteries" but also because they sacrificed character development for sensationalist but meaningless plot twists and turns. (Like when Kate was on a boat headed home and then she turns back for Sawyer or Jack, I don't remember which one - see I can't even keep the characters straight).

The Wire never sacrificed characters for plot. Characters felt believable all the way to the end of the series. (Fuck that, just to the end of Season 4. Season 5 was kinda shiite and not just because I have a personal dislike of journalists). There were no good guys or bad guys like in typical cops shows, everyone was equally flawed and redeemable. (And the balance of good and bad wasn't cheesy and predictable like in that awful fucking kitsch shit movie "Crash.") They could believably change and grow as characters. Ellis Carver in seasons 3 and 4.  Pryzbylewski in season 1. They changed in reaction to the plot and events in their lives. In Lost, the character's personalities changed just because they needed to make something sensationalist happen and so they did random shiite that was supposed to make our jaws drop. Yeah, that wasn't my jaw hitting the floor, that was my faith in the writing.

But the Wire didn't fuck up like that. Give me the Wire over Jeff Koons any day.