after the wire
Look, I don’t get HBO, so I’ve only seen The Sopranos and The Wire when traveling and cooped up in a hotel room. And I try to avoid being cooped up in hotel rooms. So I dwell in the fog of ignorance, okay?
But as an outsider, I find that all this attention to The Wire — Slate’s ongoing lovefest, for instance — seems oddly sudden. I mean, I’d been hearing all along that The Wire is a terrific show, but I didn’t expect apotheosis, which is what I’m getting. Isn’t this an attempt to sustain the afterglow of the last season of The Sopranos, which so many people blogged their way through? Didn’t that turn out to be so much fun that as soon as it was over people started scanning for a likely object of obsessive scrutiny, and settled (properly I suppose) on The Wire as the ideal candidate?
If so, then once this season is over, what’s next? Presumably Lost will come back to the forefront of people’s attention once it gets closer to its promised conclusion, but that’s not immediate. So where will the people who like blogging the tube go when The Wire shuts down?
Slate did a Wire chat for season 4 in late 2006 as well. This is nothing new.
— Jeff · Jan 22, 03:08 PM · #
Alan, I wonder if the growth of popularity of The Wire recently is a social phenomena that results from both its uniqueness of form and the ways in which trends cascade through a group of people. Specifically, I would argue that its attributes as a show make it particularly likely candidate to develop a long tail (a la Chris Anderson, http://www.longtail.com/about.html), with potential for more growth at the end than at the beginning.
Though I am just getting into The Wire recently (I am midway through season 1, and a new viewer mainly because of such strong recommendations for the show in the blogosphere), from my initial impressions I would argue that it has several attributes which make it likely to develop a strong tail. Specifically, I think the format of the show is more of a fit for DVD than it is for TV. The show deals with semi-complicate plots so that 1) you can’t easily miss an episode, and 2) they are more easily understood when watched back to back. Trying to watch it with long breaks in between episodes reminds me of trying to read an author like Dostoyevsky with long breaks between chapters. You have to re-learn the characters names, get back into the story, etc… and by the time you are almost through that, you are a good chunk of the way through the next chapter.
As such, given these characteristics, it would seem to me that on TV it would be likely to develop a strong, loyal, but small viewership that is able to recommend to friends/ colleagues/ or fellow readers of Slate (if you will). These new potential viewers drawn in from recommendations from friends or via the blogosphere (like myself) are then told to start from the beginning. In starting with DVD’s, they do not pick up the show in a TV setting, but rather watch it in its more compelling form on DVD. This serves to increase recommendations, leading to a growth of viewership, and results in a stronger and larger following on the tail end as compared to its HBO launch.
Just a thought.
— Peter Boumgarden · Jan 22, 08:31 PM · #
Interesting, Peter – I think this fits with what I said in my comment on the follow-up post by that other Peter (Suderman).
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 22, 10:42 PM · #
I am also a basic cable kind of girl. Every man I’ve ever dated has seen more episodes of sex and the city than I. You know what, though? I don’t think I’m missing anything.
— Jessica · Jan 23, 01:46 PM · #