AVC: If you reflect on the really great entertainment achievements of the decade, you have to turn to The Wire and Arrested Development and The Sopranos before you really think about movies much.
PO: Definitely, and it’s across the board, in all genres. Science fiction on television, situational comedy on television, animation on television, with stuff like The Venture Bros.… TV even has its sort of Buñuel surrealism with Tim And Eric, so all the innovative stuff that was happening in cinema during that second golden era during the late ’60s, early ’70s, it’s happening on TV, on all levels. Every genre is being re-thought. Just like the late ’60s, when they rethought the Western with The Wild Bunch. Or they rethought science fiction with 2001. Well, now it’s happening on TV with Deadwood and Battlestar Galactica. Everything is being taken apart and looked at again. And then The Wire. What’s brilliant about The Wire was, it starts out as a cop show, and just becomes its own genre of “This is about an entire city.” It’s almost like… what did James Joyce say about either about Dubliners or Ulysses? If Dublin were ever destroyed, you could rebuild it from the books. If Baltimore were ever wiped out, you could rebuild it by looking at The Wire.
- Patton Oswalt interviewed by Scott Tobias
“Though you probably wouldn’t want to.”, Oswalt did not add.
It’s awful, but I would rebuild it if we could get another Stringer Bell.
How it be: I mean, I defo like Omar best, right, but if I’d to sleep with one of ‘the bad boys of TV’s Wire’, I can’t imagine seeing past String.