The second season, or "chapter" as they prefer to call it, of HBO's excellent series The Wire concluded tonight. Much of the investigation wrapped up, some of the bad guys got away, and some of the not-so-bad died off.
At the heart of this seasons story line was the character Frank Sobotka, who runs the IBS union on the docks. Sobotka is a man fighting hard to save the union, whom he says has been "dying every day for the past twenty years." He helps lift containers off of the cargo ships for a local smuggling ring as a line of extra money. When thirteen girls are found dead in one of those cans, the season kicked off.
Unlike many police dramas, The Wire spends a lot of time developing characters like Frank Sobotka who aren't necessarily bad guys, but on the wrong side of the law. Frank's concern is the union and the port. He wants desperately to return the port to its glory days and make it more competitive, and he's vested a lot of time and effort into that. But in all his years with the union, he has (of course) neglected his family. His son, Ziggy, and nephew, Nick, are also central characters to the story arc. Ziggy is a strange kid, and has gone through some interesting twists this season. Both he and Nick see the smuggling money going on around them and want a taste. Nick goes much further than Frank does away from the good side of the law, but his character is never a villainous one. He is, however, impressed by the money and magnitude of operation employed by the smugglers, and soon gets involved with selling drugs for them.
As I wrote earlier, I really appreciate how the HBO original series system works (and this probably applies to other original cable content as well - at least, pay channel content). Free from having to time episodes around ratings sweeps, free of commercial interruption (on the premium channels anyways), and free to do a shorter season that is likely to run all at one time, I think we're delivered with some very compelling stories. Time format seems pretty open as well - many of the 'hour' long shows sometimes clock in at 45-50 minutes (a lot of Sopranos episodes run in this time frame). While it's probably not encouraged for a show to go over their limit, except in special situations (like a Finale), the operational freedom to use a shorter cut, if it makes sense, again seems to deliver a better story. In any case, the character growth and emotional connections in The Wire were excellent in their portrayal. The story arc and overall timeline were enough to allow them all to be present, subtle, and honest. I only hope that sometime soon I can have the chance to watch the entire first season, in order, instead of the bits and pieces I've eked out over the past year.
With The Wire and Project Greenlight wrapped up for the season, and the summer Finale of Sex and the City coming up, we're in for two new all new series on HBO. The first is Carnivale. It seems similar on the surface to Something Wicked This Way Comes, a film I remember loving and fearing (but little else of). 1934, Dustbowl, Oklahoma, a traveling Carnival, an apocalyptic fight between good and evil as a result. At first, I wasn't terribly interested. But recent trailers have me very intrigued.
Also new is K Street, which was finally revealed today. This new series from George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh looks to be a real-time political "reality" show. In the trailer given today, Clooney stated that the intent is that they'll pick something out of the paper Sunday morning, spend two or three days filming/interviewing it, and cut it together into a show to be displayed the following Sunday. It's primary focus seems to be the political consultants in Washington DC. James Carville and Mary Matalin both seem to be very involved. I don't recall the others who spoke on the trailer. But it definitely looks interesting. And it's nice to finally know what this show is about, since there's still no section for it on HBO's web site.
And I have to say, I've become rather addicted to Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Project management and communication continue to be a personal fascination, and one that I have covered many times in this weblog as I've gone through many tests of assorted bug trackers and document management systems, trying to find "the right one." For the time being, we've settled on Roundup, a standalone bug tracking application written in Python. Roundup is , not terribly difficult to customize, and is fairly flexible. And very fast. The application itself is very agnostic about its storage layer, and in our current setup we're still using basic DBM storage, which was very easy to set up and use. We've made some customizations in our instance (without touching the base code - always a good thing to avoid):
There is something to be said for the personal journaling experience of weblogs in a project, and this may make sense for some teams. I think it's just important to do the journaling - whether its in a CVS change log, a weblog, or an issue tracker. Or perhaps, a combination of the three. No matter how clever you think you are at solving a problem today, there is always some point in the future where you'll ask yourself "now why did I do it that way?" It's nice to have an answer.