For those of us intelligent and tasteful individuals who miss HBO’s The Wire — which was egregiously snubbed by the Emmys this year, yet again — let me suggest something of a surrogate.
It’s called Generation Kill, (9 p.m. Sundays, HBO) a seven-part mini-series about the Marines of First Recon Battalion during the initial 40 days of the Iraq War.
The show, which runs about an hour and a quarter, has the same visceral, hyper-real feel of The Wire. GK is based on a book by Evan Wright, who was embedded with the Marines as a reporter for Rolling Stone. Its executive producers include David Simon and Ed Burns (yes, from The Wire), who also do a fair share of the writing.
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2008.