The Corner - Episode 1

(I know there's some stupid fucking website stamp on this stolen image, but google image search has changed itself apparently to make it harder for me to find appropriate copyrighted material to use in unread blog posts... you'll have to deal with this.)


When I signed my multi-year personal obligation for content to TV Makes You Retarded, I originally was like, "Oh snap, I'm gonna rewatch stupid HBO series from Netflix and do the stupid meta-scientifical nonsense I've always wanted to do but been afraid to do, since the internet feeds on immediacy and doesn't give a fuck about some old shit." And this is what I still intend to do. But intentions and deliveries are always two completely different shits, especially with a mad genius lethargic minor league drug addict genetic alcoholic chicken farming piece of shit like myself. It is really really really hard to deliver on everything you plan on delivering to the internet when you're busy searching through the porn spambots on craigslist casual encounters to find a Filipino transsexual to help you give your mistress her first double penetration experience. (Really, transsexual is the only way to go in such a situation, because the real thing feels so much better than a dildo, but you don't want to have another dude banging on your girlfriend that your wife doesn't know about.)
Well, it turns out in not paying attention to my stupid queue, and not watching the first one, I ended up with both discs of The Corner HBO mini-series without even really knowing what the fuck it even was, other than some shit that was on HBO and came highly recommended by artifical intelligentsia programs by my previous likes and star-ratings. Turns out that Roc aka Charles Dutton grew up a drug addict in 1980s Baltimore or something and did a pseudo-documentary mini-series that was basically a trial run for The Wire. In fact, upon watching the first episode and realizing how much The Wire came from this (end credits showed all the same dudes and jews and brainstems were involved in this as that), I am very surprised the internet has not told me about this The Corner before.
Let's face it, large chunks of the internet are dominated by white guys who grew up as part of the hip hop generation and have opinions for you. And for this bulging demographic, The Wire is usually the standard show they are like, "Oh man, best TV show ever, nothing has ever been more realistic," even though most of these guys have never been in a ghetto ass environment like that more than two or three times, and those were usually to buy weed with a black guy they worked with at some sort of restaurant they worked at during their college years. Also, that demographic loves to be the type to be ultra-more down than anybody else and know the super obscure great hotness that nobody else is ultra-down enough to know about yet. That would be The Corner. Except it isn't.
The first thing I was struck by was how this is basically the Every Black Person Who Ever Was In The Wire casting competition. I was having a great time figuring out who was who to match up, like "Where did I know that guy from?" The obvious one was Lester Freeman, who plays a junkie in The Corner. He does not work at all as a junkie because he's going on these well-enunciated soliloquies, and it doesn't work. He works perfect as Freeman, and in that show, your average TV watching faggot would likely think, "Man, this Lester Freeman dude is a great fucking actor." But in The Corner, he really middling, and not very good.
Other guys I noticed were Clay Davis' limo driver (who plays a junkie in The Corner) and Lt. Daniels first wife - the black one (who plays a junkie), and the one that tripped me up because of his unmistakeable voice which I recognized before I could match the characters was that guy who was the campaign manager for the white politician asshole in The Wire (he plays a junkie in The Corner).
The main junkie is played by T.K. Carter, who I don't recognize but the name is familiar as fuck. He either was the black guy on Designing Women during a scab year of contract dilemmas or he used to be on The Steve Harvey radio show back when I worked with black people and we'd listen to that at the jobsite. But he does a great fucking job being subtle about things, just generally being a good fucking actor.
Basically the story is this - main junkie dude (named Gary) used to have it all - a Benz, a job, an old lady, a house of his own, all types of good shit, but then he got cracked out and now is fucked and lives in his parents' basement again. His former old lady and him had a kid who now is 15 and starting to feel the draw of the streets, so could fuck his own life up right quick.
You see, Baltimore used to have it all too - black people with corner stores where the jews who ran it were good dudes and hired local kids, flowers on the sidewalks, black dudes singing doo-wop in groups on the corner, but then it all went to shit. This seems to be blamed on crack, which "changed the game" as is said a few times. But now everybody is back to heroin (referred to mostly as "heron" in street vernacular because there is no "I" in heroin since it takes your soul), which to me seems worse. In my lifetime of experiencing fucked up people, heroin junkies tend to be much more depraved and apt to do really screwed up things for drugs or money than crackheads. There's a certain amount of comedic relief even to crackheads, because they are so crackheady. But heroin junkies... oh man.
Which this is the problem I had with the first episode of The Corner. The junkie dude is just now getting to a deeper part of his addiction, to where he gets arrested for the first time. But he is supposed to be a junkie, but with morals. His parents still let him live in the basement, and his 15-year-old kid still talks to him and even hooks him up sometimes. This is not a heroin junkie, at least not as far as I've known.
But hey, it's TV, so it's not supposed to be real, even if this is a faux documentary to try and be real. It's realness is the realness of the streets, and how we've all gone to hell. Which we have of course. But at least they make nice TV shows about it so we can enjoy, in the comfort of our own homes in front of our big goddamned TVs, how realistic this hellish life we all are ultra-down with and completely understand truly is.
I look forward to the second episode though. My wife hated The Wire because it was too depressing since everybody sucked, and she liked this better but foresees the same thing happening. I mostly am anxious to see who shows up first - Prop Joe or Omar - and whether their character will be a junkie or a junkie. Being I have not actually looked at TV Makes You Retarded Yet, I will simply assume that the common reviewing/recapping method is to give it a power viewing ranking from 1 to 123, with an up-to-ten plus-or-minus factor in the three categories of Awesomeness, Introspection, and Need-To-See-Itness, which would be a 92 (pretty good, kept me interested as fuck), plus 7 (seeing the realistic suckiness of black people in the ghetto is always great to me, because I used to really like DJ Quik music, but it could really use some titties, being it's HBO, and me liking titties), plus 8 (very serious, which you shoulda known with Charles Dutton involved, because that motherfucker is nothing but serious, which I guess being a black hunchback from Baltimore will do to you), and plus 10 (duh... semi-obscure pre-cursor to The Wire... for one or two threads, you could be the coolest person in your favorite message board).