Sopranos versus The Wire

The Pogues - Body of an American is the song. It's pretty fantastic.

As for the shows, having never seen the Sopranos, I think I can still safely cast my vote for The Wire as it is one of the finest television shows I have ever watched. It’s structured in so many interwoven layers of plot like a great novel or series of novels. Still, the positive buzz for the Sopranos and the fact that this is a contest between the two has made me go check out the other show.

Before seeing The Wire, I felt that television was generally inferior to movies as a format for telling stories. The commercial breaks and the episode length seemed to conspire to create a stunted form of story-telling that was incapable of showing character development. The Wire showed me that I was wrong, that television is capable of superior story-telling because it isn't confined by a 2-hour limit. There were some major changes in various characters on The Wire, and those changes felt real because they were earned over the course of seasons of television. Some characters stagnated, some grew, some went off in surprising directions. The fifth season was the weakest season, but still satisfying in terms of the payoff on those longer character stories, especially Bubs, Prez, and Cutty. Bunk never really changed, but my appreciation for him grew season by season.