Darren Hughes’ website Long Pauses has for many years been a fresh resource for criticism of art house and classic films. It is always welcome when an astute writer branches out, and along with a beautiful redesign of his blog, Hughes’ recent post, The Wire, “Moral Midgetry”, on HBO’s amazing show The Wire,shows how criticism sharpened on the cinema can open up television in similar ways. Darren’s post is nice and concise, and I don’t want to take too much away from it, so instead I’ll pull the quote from French director Chris Marker that opens the entry:
“But to tell the truth, I no longer watch many films, only those by friends or curiosities that an American acquaintance tapes for me on TCM… . I feed my hunger for fiction with what is by far the most accomplished source: those terrific American TV series like Deadwood, Firefly, or The Wire … There is a knowledge in them, a sense of story and economy, of ellipses, a science of framing and of cutting, a dramaturgy, and an acting style that has no equal anywhere, and certainly not in Hollywood.”
— Chris Marker