THE MORNING LIST
Attention, our selection of the week is aimed at the most specialized series fans: those who revere David Simon (The Corner), appreciate ambitious binational productions (Giri / Hajj) or who know how to taste the biting but terribly effective humor of Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm).
“The Corner”: in the Baltimore drug ghetto
David Simon (The Wire, Treme, The Deuce) is not a man in the seraglio of television. Born in 1960, he spent his time, from the age of 22, in the streets and police stations of one of the country’s deadliest cities, Baltimore, as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun.
When his story Homicide (Baltimore, in French) is adapted by Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson (for NBC, in 1993), he participates in it and discovers the potential of television series. This is how, after co-writing with former police officer Ed Burns The Corner in 1997 (The Corner, Editions Florent Massot, 2011), he adapted it himself as a mini-series for HBO in 2000. It will be the laboratory of The Wire…
The result of more than a year of investigation into the drug ghetto of Baltimore, a former industrial city with a predominantly black population, The Corner crosses accounts of reality and fictionalized stories. David Simon conceived his script as if it were a documentary filmed in a hurry: the camera often sticks as close as possible to his characters to probe their veins and their hearts. Because once is not custom, it is the drug addicts who see themselves here propelled on the front of the scene – and not the police officers or the drug dealers. Martine Delahaye
The Corner, mini-series created by David Simon. With TK Carter, Khandi Alexander, Sean Nelson (EU, 2000, 6 x 60 min). On OCS on demand.
“Giri / Haji”: a stylized British-Japanese crime drama
The weariness of the taciturn Japanese inspector Kenzo Mori is perhaps not due (only) to the two very old parents who share his apartment, nor to the gentle recriminations of his wife. His youngest brother, Yuto, who was held to be dead in a bullet-riddled car, may well be the man in London who just stabbed a sword in the back of a Yakuza chief’s nephew. The assassination is obviously immediately followed by reprisals against the powerful rival gang. From the first sequences of Giri / Haji (“Duty / Shame”), the truce concluded for several years between the gangs of the Japanese capital comes to an end.
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