I am a big fan of The Wire and I’d go so far to say it’s the best TV show ever. It may be a little sadistic on my part, but the program leaves me drained and disturbed at the end of an episode thanks to the complexity of its multiple storylines and the number of characters. There is also the challenge of following the localized black dialect that the program tries to represent as truthfully as it does its other details.

The show is set in the Baltimore ghetto, “Yo” is both a salutation and the third-person singular pronoun; “feel me,” means “listen to what I’m telling you”; and the use of “b*tch” has mostly replaced the N-word.

The cops have their own language as well, in which a capable officer is “good police,” bystanders caught in the crossfire are “taxpayers,” and young boys up to no good are called “hoppers.”

The Wire won much love from critics but not much in the way of ratings. Maybe being trapped inside a “black, drug-dealing, gangbangers head” isn’t a nice comfy place to be hanging…

I encourage you all to watch this excerpt on the rules of playing chess, ghetto style.

 Feel me. Richard Spielberg.

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