Pre­vi­ous to watch­ing The Wire, I’d seen the entire Sopra­nos series 2.5 — 3 times. I’d heard a lot of peo­ple talk­ing about The Wire being as good or bet­ter than The Sopra­nos, so I thought the best way to fig­ure it out was to watch The Wire.

Hav­ing seen the entire series, I’m going to give the nod to The Sopra­nos as the bet­ter series. Here are my rea­sons (Spoiler alerts galore)…

– I found the sit­u­a­tions more plau­si­ble in Sopra­nos. In the Wire there were two instances where the body count went through the roof. The first was when the Far East­ern immi­grants were found dead, and the other was when Marlo started pil­ing up the bod­ies. I lost count of the num­ber of bod­ies they found when they started going house to house (~20? ~30), but I imag­ine that there would be more of an uproar. Granted, I’m a lib­eral liv­ing in Seat­tle, so maybe I’m wrong on that, but I stand by it. Also, when the Fat Cop (Lands­man?) let Bub­bles go, say­ing he’d suf­fered enough — that seemed highly unlikely. That guy was a jerk to every­body he came across, and that was the only instance he showed any human­ity. The story arc of Omar both­ered me a bit too. He was a very calm, cal­cu­lated man, and I don’t believe he’d let him emo­tions get the bet­ter of him to the point of being killed by a child. Most of the other char­ac­ters I would have believed, but not Omar, our mod­ern day Achilles.

Speak­ing of implau­si­ble sit­u­a­tions, I don’t see how Omar Lit­tle would sur­vive rip­ping off drug deal­ers. Every slinger with a gun would be out after him, and I don’t see it work­ing out that well for him.

In the Sopra­nos, there were very few instances of such implau­si­bil­ity. There was the scene with the Russ­ian guy that got away and was com­pletely for­got­ten, but I didn’t find that to be over the top. Maybe the scene were the Strip­per was beaten to death, but only maybe.

- There were more stronger sea­sons of The Sopra­nos than there were of The Wire, and I think the last episode of The Sopra­nos was par­tic­u­larly strong. From con­ver­sa­tions with many peo­ple, I may be the only per­son par­tic­u­larly fond of the end­ing of The Sopra­nos, but I did think it was bril­liant. Sea­son One of The Sopra­nos was fan­tas­tic too — much bet­ter than first sea­son of The Wire (which was also very good — just not as good.)

- There were bet­ter, stronger (as in more devel­oped) char­ac­ters in The Sopra­nos. Tony and Carmela were very well devel­oped, as were more minor char­ac­ters, such as Dr. Melfi, Christo­pher and Adri­ana. There were some strong char­ac­ters in The Wire, specif­i­cally Omar and Bub­ble. I really like the Omar char­ac­ter, espe­cially how his char­ac­ter was exceed­ingly badass macho but also openly gay. I don’t watch much TV, but I don’t recall a char­ac­ter such as his on TV. Bub­bles was also a very well done char­ac­ter. I didn’t par­tic­u­larly enjoy the McNulty char­ac­ter. It seemed like he was all over the board — sober some­times, drunk oth­ers, but with­out any sort of back story to flesh out these changes. I found the Marlo char­ac­ter to be a bit under­de­vel­oped (where did he come from, why wasn’t he stopped ear­lier by other drug deal­ers), but I did find him to be a ter­ri­fy­ing char­ac­ter — the most out of either show. A true psy­chopath (wit­ness the scene with the Secu­rity Guard, who ended up dead later.) The Sopra­nos had sev­eral char­ac­ters that were hard core, start­ing with Tony Sopra­nos (the scene were he ended Christo­phers life…), but also his mother and sis­ter, Lit­tle Ral­phie, etc.

- I think peo­ple were more able to get behind The Wire because of three things. There was a clear theme every sea­son (News­pa­pers, Schools, etc.), all of which were “press­ing social issues.” And since each sea­son was so clearly delin­eated, there was a more clearly defined story arc. If you were to come into sea­son four, you could be up to speed and enjoy the sea­son on it’s own, and then there was a clear pay­off at the end of each sea­son. I felt like The Sopra­nos didn’t have as much of a demar­ca­tion from sea­son to sea­son, and that it ben­e­fited from a longer con­tin­ual view­ing. Lastly, there tended to be the inno­cents in each sea­son — teach­ers! reporters! kids! blue col­lar work­ers! — that made it easy to root for. The Sopra­nos didn’t tend to have sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ters — maybe a few, but only a few.

That’s why I think The Sopra­nos was a bet­ter TV than The Wire.