The Wire: The Complete Third Season

Product Details

The heat is on in Baltimore. The drug war is being lost, bodies are piling up, and a desperate mayor wants the tide turned before the election. But the police department hasn't got any answers. With the demolition of the Franklin Terrace towers, Stringer Bell and the Barksdale crew have been forced to improvise. But no matter how hard McNulty and the detail try, the dealers always seem to be one step ahead of the game.

DVD Features:
Audio Commentary
Episodic Previews
Episodic Recaps
Other
Audio Commentary:Five audio commentaries with creatorDavid Simon, director Joe Chappelle, writers Richard Price and George Pelecanos, and producers Karen L. Thorson and Nina K. Noble
Interviews:Q&A with David Simon and Creative Team, Courtesy of the Museum of Television & Radio Conversation with David Simon at Eugene Lang Collete, The New School for Liberal Arts

• ISBN13: 0026359277627
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

With volatile issues of Baltimore city political reform as its narrative focus, the third season of The Wire superbly maintains the series' astonishingly consistent status as the greatest "novel for television" ever created. While the Baltimore police department's wire-tapping investigations continue to monitor the intricate and now legitimately fronted drug ring of Russell "Stringer" Bell (Idris Elba, smooth as ever), detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) continues his loutish ways, navigating through a series of shallow sexual conquests while doing some of the best cop-work of his career. Stringer's ex-convict partner Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) is back in the picture and bent on eliminating a drug-dealing competitor named Marlo (Jamie Hector), and Baltimore P.D. Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin (Robert Wisdom) tries his own defiantly independent brand of street justice by essentially legalizing drugs in "Hamsterdam," where isolated sections of the city are established as open drug-dealing zones, utterly without the knowledge or approval of Colvin's superiors. As city councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen) plots his own ruthlessly ambitious strategy for the mayor's seat, Baltimore officials, McNulty's wire unit, and the entire Baltimore P.D. stand poised for the inevitable fallout from street-level and executive-level manipulations of power.

Of course, this is just the tip of a very large iceberg, as The Wire continues its labyrinthine yet tightly controlled chronicle of over 50 characters, major and minor, who are all flawlessly woven into the fabric of these 12 remarkable episodes. For season 3, series creator David Simon continued to recruit a top-drawer lineup of reputable writers (including novelists Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos) and directors (including Ernest Dickerson, Tim Van Patten, and Agnieszka Holland), and by the time a major character is killed in the season's penultimate episode (arguably the series' finest yet), it's clear that The Wire has earned its crown as the most ambitious and intelligent crime drama in the history of American television. DVD extras are excellent, as usual, including five illuminating episode commentaries (an absolute must for devoted fans of the series), a Q&A session with cast & crew moderated by renowned TV critic and author Ken Tucker, and a classroom conversation with Simon that delves deeper into the creative process of the series. Having deservedly earned its renewal for a fourth season (out of a projected five, according to Simon), The Wire delivers surprises aplenty (keep a close watch for startling revelations) while proving, yet again, that cable-TV is the place to be for anyone seeking respite from the relative mediocrity of mainstream network programming. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews ::

The weakest season to the greatest show ever made. (Caution: spoilers) - John Post - Russellville, AR USA
I started watching The Wire in the Fall of 2009, buying the first season a few months before in an impulse buy fueled purely off word of mouth. I popped in the first disc to Season One, having no clue that I was about to undertake one of the most enthralling and engaging storylines ever told on any medium.

The first season was transcendent, the second season was even better. I bought the third season and anxiously awaited the third season in the mail, anticipating (from the cover) that Avon Barksdale would get out of jail and the conflict would resume between the Barksdale faction and the Major Crimes unit of the Baltimore PD.

But what I got most out of season three was disappointment. The writers turned Barksdale into a caricature, a character bent on revenge who, from the street-smart ringleader we saw in season one, should know better. I've tried to talk myself out of this point in a desperate attempt to justify Barksdale's need for revenge on Stanfield and his crew. It's obvious the major traffickers in The Wire are obsessed with status and reputation--we see it in season five when Chris had been hiding Omar's defiant challenge to Marlo to meet him in the streets, just to have Marlo throw a tantrum when he finds out that Omar had been calling him out--but it still didn't ring true with me. I watched the drug dealers work the corners in the first two seasons thinking, "These guys are smart, they know what they're doing, and they are way too level-headed and smart to get caught."

Of course, we see Stringer try to contain him, but that's not the real point for me. Avon never struck me as a vindictive character in the first season--maybe I got the wrong impression, I've slept a lot since then--but then he is all of the sudden hellbent on popping Stanfield? Even as a viewer, the last person who should be able to predict what will happen in a season of The Wire, I can see that he will just destroy his empire in blind rage.

Brother Mouzone, while interesting and providing some great comic relief, seems to be another caricature, a cold-blooded killer who sits in the park and reads while waiting for the people he is paid to hit. His complacency seems almost ridiculous in an environment where the most dangerous stick-up man in Baltimore was gunned down by a kid not even ten years old. I kept waiting for someone to simply walk up and shoot him--I mean, that's really all it would take, right?

Also unbelievable is Major Colvin's experimentation with legalizing drugs. Politically, it's a brilliant ploy by the writers to make a point, but not ultimately feasible to incorporate into the story.

Maybe it's my obsession with perfection that makes me consider The Wire in such absolutist terms--I was spoiled on the first two seasons. To me, everything had to feel perfect. Absolutely perfect. And season three wasn't absolutely perfect, although it's still great, and it's really not up to debate that the third season of the show requires us to take the biggest leap of faith with the storytellers. We have to take more for granted this season than any other season.

The season also picks up in media res, almost forcing the season's storylines on us in the first few episodes. The other four seasons of The Wire has an inherent momentum to it, but it's not the first episode of the respective season that grabs you by the balls. Instead, it's a cumulation of the first three or four episodes, all of them streaming together to predict the conflicts and threads that will play out in that season.

Season three makes one thing painfully obvious--the writers had decided before they started writing the season that they were taking the show in a different direction. Barksdale's downfall seemed forced to move the story to another kingpin, and the legalization of drugs seemed forced to prove points about drugs. These are not, in the grand scheme of things, cardinal sins, but they do make the season feel less...true. Because of this, season three primarily serves as a bridge between the first two and last two seasons--a season that foreshadows the downfall of Barksdale and the rise of Stanfield, and continues to delve into the nature of addiction and the inevitability of drug use in America. I absolutely love this show, but this was easily the weakest season.

Seasons Rank: 4-2-1-5-3