Believing that trampling civil rights and brutalizing suspects is all it takes to get results or that brutal, corrupt cops are incredibly smart requires a different kind of suspension of disbelief. I make no apologies for not having it.
The corrupt cops aren't incredibly smart, only Mackey. Shane is a screw-up. Lem is probably the most moral of the Strike Team and was influenced into breaking the rules by presure from Shane and Mackey. And Ronny... he had a moustache, then he grew a beard, then he shaved it off, then he grew a beard again. He's not the most developed character, for the first few seasons he was just "that other guy".
To balance out the Strike Team there's Claudette and Dutch, two by-the-books detectives that are just as effective at closing cases as Vic, and their methods tend not to lead to screw ups that cause greater gang violence. Then there's Danny and Julien, two regular patrol officers that stick to the rules as best they can.
TheGodBen also says that Mackey's opponents were not debased or villainized.
They weren't villainised, but some of them had an agenda. Aceveda for example, he wanted to take down Mackey partly because he didn't agree with his methods, partly because he's running for councilman and feels that uncovering police corruption would be good for his campaign. Essentially, he was doing the right thing but partially for the wrong reasons.
Indeed, he goes so far to say the very title was partially ironic.
Also, the symbol of the show was a police badge breaking apart, thereby indicating that the titular shield was broken.
As I said before, it's a real shame when fans inadvertently make their show or movie sound bad by leaving out the important things.
There are fans of the show that support Mackey's methods, this is an example comment from a YouTube video that I saw yesterday:
what the STRIKE team did was right, not legal nor ethical, but right and necessary
Then there are viewers like myself that watched the show waiting for Vic to be caught and brought to justice for his actions. And I have to admit that I came to admire Vic a lot as a character if not as a human being, he was one of television's great antiheroes.
Kegg said:
Season wise I'm not yet sure how I'll rank things. Just started the fifth year and though I've heard mixed things about it I'm pretty fine with it so far. Not that keen on the new rendition of "Way Down in the Hole", mind, and I did like the previous four.
I didn't mind the theme in season 5, but that's because I wasn't a fan of the season 4 theme. The only one of the themes that I loved from the first time I heard it was season 3's, all the others had to grow on me.
That's weird. Politics and bureaucracy I actually like; The Wire less so. I think it's the level of emphasis on dry realism in the series; that sort of stuff never clicks with me. I like showy, I like splashy, I like colorful (shallow, remember?).
Sounds like The West Wing is more up your street then, it has the politics and bureaucracy but it's more theatrical and favours drama over realism. To be honest, I prefer it over The Wire, even though I feel that The Wire is the better show from an objective standpoint. Though The West Wing could be preposterous (Toby once sorted out the Social Security problem in one day) I can't help but love it.
How the show plays in Baltimore is definitely an interesting question, though.
Everything I've read suggests that people in Baltimore feel that it's accurate in the subject matter it chooses to portray (except Dominic West's accent), and that's due to the fact that the writers have an intimate knowledge about Baltimore and the subject matter: David Simon was a journalist that wrote a lot about the BPD and the criminal gangs in the city, while Ed Burns was a detective that later became a teacher.
Obviously, there are upper and middle class areas in Baltimore as there is in any city, but the show wasn't set in those locations so we rarely got a feel for life in those areas.
