Wierd TV Transition

I have been catching up with the third season of Deadwood and its anticlimatic, pre-mature ending. I have always liked this show because of the language and their effort to make the show like a play. The language is hard to get back into after a year (we don't have HBO so I wait for the DVDs), and once you get to the third disk or so you are in full stride and can decipher almost everything.

Enter, The Wire. After I finished the last of the Deadwood episodes from season 3, I loaded up the third season of The Wire (which I also really like) and the language transition was really interesting. It took me about 15 minutes to adjust but there were many similarities between the two shows. In Deadwood, the use of "fuck" amongst the flowery language has been seen as a way for old west characters to seem both educated and tough at the same time. In The Wire it is mainly used as a way to express toughness and as a substitute for a lack of language. If characters in Deadwood need to be descriptive they can do it without the "F word", but in modern day, the characters in The Wire (and many teen to twenty somethings today) cannot express themselves with word substitutions so the use curse words and the word "like". It is not an occasional insertion to maintain toughness, but a complete lack of vocabulary and creativeness.

I see this everyday in high school, and if the kids swore like Deadwood, occasionally to maintain dominance, I would be better with it. But I see it everyday as a lazy way at communication that takes no effort, no application, and no creativeness.

The violence in both shows is based on reality. The old western town of Deadwood's violence is well documented, and The Wire is based on real accounts from Baltimore just like the show (and book) Homicide: Life on the Streets.

Great TV in my opinion and they keep me waiting for the next season's DVDs.