Robert Mays: I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this scene — it's somewhere between five and 15. When it comes to my experiences with TV, the only feeling that approaches the first trip through The Wire is vicariously living through the first time of others. My college roommates love to give me shit about plenty of stuff (mostly my dish-cleaning and rent-paying deficiencies). The one I never minded was their imitation of me as I watched the pilot with them, the eagerness with which I waited for that final exchange:
“If Snot Boogie always stole the money, why’d you let him play?”
We've already recapped Day 1 of Smacketology for you earlier this morning, but let's take another opportunity to address our reader feedback. Say what you will about the seedings, the individual matchups, the apparent and crazy-making oversights in our Field of 32, but our Wire bracket has certainly gotten you talking. (If by "talking," you mean "cyber-ululating with grief about outrageous miscarriages of tournament justice" and "@-replied death threats to everyone associated with Grantland in any discoverable capacity.") This was, of course, to be expected. The Wire's universe contained literally millions of characters (the show was nothing if not sprawling in its unparalleled dramatic scope), so narrowing that down to a mere thirty-and-two contestants was an impossible task, akin to keeping McNulty off the sauce, getting Bunk away from cigars, or separating Landsman from a suspiciously battered copy of Irish Lasses. We get it. The stats were juked.
