Wire/Sopranos and 2+2

2+2 (forumserver.twoplustwo.com) is of course mostly known as a poker forum, but they have subforums for just about every topic imaginable.  I have over 4,000 post on the various boards, mostly in the Brick & Mortar section, but spring up now and then in the other forums as well, often as a lonely "statist" in the politics section, where belief in any form of government gets routinely shouted down.  In order to prime this new blog, I am reprinting probably my favorite post that I ever wrote on the forums, within a debate over the relative merits of two modern classics of television in 2008:
 
The Wire is the greatest story ever told on television.
The Sopranos is the best ever use of the television medium to tell a story.

The Wire is an amazing show, but the story is so good that it would have been an amazing series of novels, or comic books, or radio plays, or live performances. I think the scripts and the acting and the direction are all great, but that is mostly because they perfectly realize the vision of the storyteller, and not because they add to it.

The Sopranos only works exactly as it should as a television show. It is enhanced by the constraints of a series of hour-long blocks of video. The story stakes its success (and occasional failure) much more on the acting, the cinematography, and the individual episode director's vision.

The brilliance of the final scene of the Sopranos could not have happened in any other medium. You see scenes that are similarly suspenseful in The Wire, but that is because the story in The Wire is at an inherently suspenseful point. By contrast, the suspense in that scene in the Sopranos had much more to do with how people dealt with the constraint of the TV medium than anything in the story.