The Lost writers room sounds a lot like conversations between the Roth brothers:

DL: We have one writer, Brian K. Vaughn, who writes comic books, and then another writer, Adam Horowitz, who's like a die-hard sports fan.
CC: Yankees fan. He used to sell hot dogs at Yankees Stadium.
DL: We'll ask Vaughn an easy sports question, like how many innings are there in a baseball game...
CC: Or what is the color of the Carolina Panthers or what sport do the Carolina Panthers play...
DL: And then we'll ask Horowitz to name two of the Avengers. And they will face off, and it's fun to watch them, you know, try to answer questions outside of their specific area of expertise.

Quick hit of nostalgia: David Plotz lists his thirteen favorite scenes from The Wire. My all-time fave is number 11, but I'm not going to quote it here because it's a spoiler for season three. In the next post, Jeffery Goldberg adds "Clay Davis' magnificent turn on the witness stand earlier this season," which was indeed awesome.

Stuff White People Like weighs in:

If you need to impress a white person, tell them you are from Baltimore. They will immediately ask you about The Wire and how accurate it is. You should confirm that it is “like a documentary of the streets,” the white person will then slowly shake their head and say “man” or “wow.”

Entertainment Weekly has its own list of best moments. Slate links to recent radio interviews with cast members. And NYMag's Vulture blog has a shot-by-shot recap of the final montage.

Long, satisfying Terri Gross interview with The Wire's David Simon (web, iTunes). Spoilers for season five and previous seasons, but not for tonight's final episode.

David Simon defends season five of The Wire:

We legalized drugs in West Baltimore in season three and did so in full view of half the police department, if not the community itself. Certainly, on that basis it required as much a leap of faith as anything conjured in this season.

Remember the (very minor) point I made about Nancy Franklin last night? Well, that very same day, Joshua Clover made essentially the exact same point about Franklin's review of Gossip Girl:

Franklin does seem intimately familiar with the zip code in which the show purports to reside.... At the same time, she seems surpassingly oblivious to the culture-consuming world beyond 10028, and what's happening out there. She mentions the show's "primary purpose of marketing pop songs, which are heard throughout." Actually, we're pretty sure that an untested show on the CW isn't marketing "What Goes Around" by a non-New Yorker named Justin Timberlake, and the like. Mr. Timberlake, who comes from a land down under 72nd Street (it's called "Tennessee") may in fact, along with his staff and servants and holding company, be receiving a certain fee for his participation. We are just guessing.

This pattern (two examples is so a pattern) suggests that, to Franklin, whatever's on TV is by definition the white-hot center of the media universe, and everything else (some website, some pop song) is desperate to bask in its reflected glory.

And in case you care way, way more than you probably do: my original point was challenged (by Jossip Jirl herself) in the comments.

New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin is often pretty good (she totally gets Friday Night Lights, for instance), but her column this week reveals an amusing old-person misconception. Near the end of the piece, Franklin writes that "the CNN/YouTube debates were a great promotional device for YouTube."

According to Internet World Stats there are 1.25 billion people using the Internet. According to Alexa, 17.25 percent of them look at YouTube sometimes. That means there's a total of 216 million people watching YouTube. Meanwhile, the Republican debate was watched by 4.4 million people. If anything, the debates were a great promotional device for the American democratic process; YouTube certainly doesn't need the help.

Return of crazy Wikipedia stuff: A sitcom called Heil Honey I'm Home!, in which Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun have to cope with their new Jewish neighbors -- who could possibly have guessed that this would be canceled after one episode? "The plot of episode 1 involved Adolf telling Eva of the impending arrival of Neville Chamberlain, and begging her not to tell the Goldensteins."

Midweek readings

We wanted to do comedy that was about something, have the character articulate something about the baby-boomer generation that is now getting old and disconnected with the world. Nobody has properly articulated that.

Steve Coogan on Saxondale

The font is one of the oldest tricks in the book. You typeset text in a regular font, I think this was Rotis, and then you blow it up really big on a Xerox machine and then you shrink it down really small. The trick is to see just how much you can distress it and keep it readable. It's gotten harder to do because Xerox machines are so much better.

Chip Kidd on designing book jackets
for Amis, McCarthy, and Updike

Hansen and NBC News maintain that law enforcement and Dateline simply conduct “parallel investigations” that never influence each other. But by this afternoon, in front of Bill Conradt’s house, whatever wall may have once divided Dateline and the police has essentially collapsed.

Esquire on NBC's "To Catch a Predator"

Maybe once a week I read something about Iraq and I think, This could be a storyline from an episode of The Wire. It's partly that the war in Iraq is perhaps the only national project as misguided in conception and inept in execution as the war on drugs. It's partly the repeated images of incompatible institutions butting up against one another, and of individuals within those institutions struggling and failing to affect the situation. And then, of course, there's all the stuff from The Wire that reminds me of Iraq. (Just one example: the conflict between Stringer and Avon that's the dramatic spine of season three is a conflict between a modern capitalist culture and a premodern "respect" culture, and the way it plays out as tragedy is a perfect mirror of our tragedy in the Middle East.)

Now we learn that David Simon and Ed Burns, the geniuses behind The Wire, are making a miniseries about the early months of the Iraq War.

It's hard when someone makes one of the great works of art, because then you want their next thing to be another one. And now that they've found the perfect subject ... I can only be disappointed by this, really.

It's based on this book, which I haven't read. The bad news is that it's only seven episodes. My big hope is that it'll become open-ended, and that, just as The Wire grew from a show about cops and gangs to take in the longshore union, City Hall, the school district, and soon the media, the new show, which starts from the perspective of a Marine battalion, will incorporate ordinary Iraqis, militia fighters, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Iraqi Parliament, the Kurdish peshmerga, reporters with both the western press and Al Jazeera ... like I say, I can only be disappointed.

Terrific Sopranos appreciation by Geoffrey O'Brien in the NYRB.

Astute analysis of The Sopranos -- the whole thing, not just the last five minutes -- by New York's Emily Nussbaum.

And it was no wonder we, as an audience, identified with Melfi. She was—hard to remember, but it’s true—a perfectly decent therapist. She handled Tony’s transference gently; she gave him tools to cope with his mother and uncle (tools he used to consolidate power, but still). She even saved a life, that of Meadow’s child-molesting soccer coach. Instead of ordering the murder, Tony stumbles stoned into the family rec room, stunned with the effort of not killing, moaning to his wife, “Carmela, Carmela, I didn’t hurt nobody.”

Back then, this scene struck me as the show’s iconic moment—a bravura sequence in which the decision not to commit violence was as thrilling as any bloody hit. In a drama built on gore, it was thrilling. Though Tony continued to collect envelopes, order hits, screw goomars, it seemed like evidence that he could be a different man.

And then something in Chase's vision went black.

Very smart close-reading of that final Sopranos scene.

Very vague Sopranos ending spoilers ahoy

Here's my take on this Sopranos thing, now that everybody else has had their say. The Sopranos was never about plot development or resolution. Almost every episode introduced story elements that were never mentioned again, let alone resolved. The world of The Sopranos is largely non-cumulative: events don't tend to build on each other. (The exception is that most seasons included a guy who didn't fit, who caused problems for Tony and the crew, and who wound up dead.) I like a good solid narrative resolution, which is one of the reasons The Sopranos will never mean as much to me as The Wire. But it's not fair to criticize the ending for failing to do the thing the show has always refused to do.

The scene from the last episode that sticks with me is the one with A.J.'s shrink, when Tony starts talking about his mother and Carmella gives him that look of exhausted disbelief. It reminded me of the pilot, when Tony went to Dr. Melfi for the first time. At the beginning, it seemed like The Sopranos was going to be about a guy who goes into therapy and has to confront who he is and what he does, and who begins to undergo a wrenching process of change, with all the concommitant effects on his life and the people around him. That could have been a great show. But it's not the show we got. (I blame Melfi, who was a consistently terrible shrink: platitudinous, pointlessly confrontational, irrelevant.) Tony's lack of progress in therapy was a microcosm for the show as a whole: the same stuff happens over and over again, and nothing changes, and there's no progress except people dying. Remarkably, it was still a pretty good show.

Ledes we never got past:

Really, the most that can be said of a great film is not that it is like a great book. Film is its own literature; and whereas I understand the comparisons of The Sopranos to the masterpieces of the realist novel, and I myself have not been immune to the hyperbolic impulse in praising this magnificent enterprise, it strikes me that the achievement of The Sopranos is not so much that it puts you in mind of Balzac or Dickens, but that here on television, for most of a decade, were tales that could stand in the company of Fassbinder, and Kieslowski, and Mike Leigh, and Chabrol.

From Leon Wieseltier's paean to The Sopranos. Really, the most that can be said of a great television program is not that it is like a great film.

It was twenty years ago today ...

... that i watched a BBC documentary entitled It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, about the making of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember coming home from school and sitting on my parents' bed with my dad, glued to the screen as George Martin played the original master tapes of the album to show how the different parts were layered and various commentators explained how the songs were sequenced to create the impression of a continuous, thematically coherent work. Today, on the twentieth anniversary of that formative childhood experience, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic. I'm not sure if there's been a falling-off in quality or if I'm just getting old, but somehow today's documentaries about defunct pop groups can't compare to the classics of my youth. The documentaries of 1987 had an innocence, a feeling of possibility, that I'm not sure we'll ever recapture. I feel sorry for today's kids, having to listen to things like this weekend's Radio 2 documentary, in which "multi award winning engineer Geoff Emerick heads back in to the studio to demonstrate the innovative techniques employed for the recording at Abbey Road studios back in 1967." It's just not the same.

An open letter from The Office's B. J. Novak: "I bet I'll really like The Wire when I get around to watching it. It sounds great. In the meantime, please SHUT UP ABOUT HOW MUCH I AM GOING TO LOVE THE WIRE. I have a lot to do, and I have a long Netflix queue."

Crazy stuff you can find on Wikipedia (first in a series): Is 90 percent of all television actually set inside the mind of an autistic boy? Why yes it is, according to the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis.

Fresh Air interview with Friday Night Lights exec-producer Peter Berg, which confirms two things I'd suspected about the show: (a) the actors are usually ad-libbing (something that's especially apparent in the scenes between Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, who make me think Yeah, this is how married people talk), and (b) the people making the show really, really care about what they're doing.

Interesting: What NBC's Thank God You're Here gets wrong about improv.

What did you do this week? I added a few thousand words to my novel, and removed some of the words that were already there, for a net gain of perhaps a thousand words. Also I walked the dog a lot, because Tali was out of town, and I watched Friday Night Lights, which I haven't posted about because I've been waiting to come up with something to say about it beyond "This show is surprisingly awesome." My friend Ty, on the other hand, got this guy out of jail. So there you go.