For those of you who are new to this series, you are about to enter into a complicated, complex, messy narrative. This is not your run-of-the-mill television series: this is not Glee, this is not Seinfeld, this is not The Closer. You will be thrust into a story that has three distinct story lines: 1. The efforts of the Baltimore police to take down a drug dealer named Marlo Stanfield and his organization; 2. The mayoral race between the incumbent and an ambitious young white city councilman ("white" included here only because Baltimore, as you will quickly see, is a predominantly black city); 3. The way four middle school boys navigate their way through school and the world they live in--the poor West Side of Baltimore. What will interest us, among many things, in our discussion of this series is how these three distinct stories come together: how they become, in effect, one story.
That's just for starters, though. This is the fourth season of the series, so much has happened before it begins. We'll be talking about this, too, whenever anything is not clear because of what has happened previously in the series (there will be a lot of this at first: less as we go on). But to get you started on the background of this season, please watch the following recaps and read the synopses of the seasons here on Wikipedia. Doing this will help. So...
Season One:
Season Two:
Season Three:
Now that you have both read the synopses and viewed the recaps, I would like you to answer the following questions here on the blog:
1. Your reaction to what you have read and watched--in particular, what jumps out at you about this show from this introduction to it? What grabbed you--what intrigued you?
2. What jumped out at you from today's conversation in class? Any particular point or comment or concept that stayed with you, that got you thinking?
3. Finally: here is the opening of Season Four which introduces us to Snoop and her partner Chris Partlow, killers for Marlo Stanfield, drug king of West Baltimore. What is your reaction to this scene? How does it get this season going in terms of the theme of education?
Write a couple hundred words answering these three questions. Be sure to have them done by the beginning of school tomorrow. Tomorrow we will begin the season.
