The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television

Description

The Wire is about survival, about the strategies adopted by those living and working in the inner cities of America. It presents a world where for many even hope isn't an option, where life operates as day-to-day existence without education, without job security, and without social structures. This is a world that is only grey, an exacting autopsy of a side of American life that has never seen the inside of a Starbucks. Over its five season, sixty-episode run (2002-2008), The Wire presents several overlapping narrative threads, all set in the city of Baltimore. The series consistently deconstr. Read more... Content: "I am the American Dream": Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction / C.W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter -- Baltimore before The Wire / Afaa M. Weaver -- I. Baltimore and Its Institutions -- 1. Yesterday's Tomorrow Today: Baltimore and the Promise of Reform / David M. Alff -- 2. "We ain't got no yard": Crime, Development, and Urban Environment / Peter Clandfield -- 3. Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural / Alastair McMillan -- 4. "The Narrative Production or "Real Police" / Ryan Brooks -- 5. "I Got the Shotgun, You Got the Briefcase": Lawyering and Ethics / Lynne Viti -- 6. Posing Problems and Picking Fights: Critical Pedagogy and the Corner Boys / Ralph Beliveau and Laura Bolf-Beliveau -- II. On the Corner -- 7. Corner-Boy Masculinity: Intersections of Inner-City Manhood / James Braxton Peterson -- 8. Stringer Bell's Lament: Violence and Legitimacy in Contemporary Capitalism / Jason Read -- 9. Networks of Affiliation: Familialism and Anticorporatism in Black and White / Stephen Lucasi -- 10. Barksdale Women: Crime, Empire, and the Production of Gender / Courtney D. Marshall -- 11. After the Towers Fell: Bodie Broadus and the Space of Memory / Elizabeth Bonjean -- III. Twenty-first-Century Television -- 12. "The Dickensian Aspect": Melodrama, Viewer Engagement, and the Socially Conscious Text / Amanda Ann Klein -- 13. It's All Connected: Televisual Narrative Complexity / Ted Nanniceili -- 14. Dislocating America: Agnieszka Holland Directs "Moral Midgetry" / Kevin McNeilly -- 15. "Gots to Get Got": Social Justice and Audience Response to Omar Little / Kathleen Lebesco -- Episode List. Abstract: A collection of essays on a show that has taken the art of television drama to different heights. Read more...