The Wire Urban Decay and American Television [Paperback]

The first collection of critical essays on HBO'sThe Wire- the most brilliant and socially relevant television series in years

The Wireis 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 Wirepresented several overlapping narrative threads, all set in the city of Baltimore. The series consistently deconstructed the conventional narratives of law, order, and disorder, offering a view of America that has never before been admitted to the public discourse of the televisual. It was bleak and at times excruciating. Even when the show made metatextual reference to its own world as Dickensian, it was too gentle by half.

By focusing on four main topics (Crime, Law Enforcement, America, and Television),The Wire: Urban Decay and American Televisionexamines the series' place within popular culture and its representation of the realities of inner city life, social institutions, and politics in contemporary American society. This is a brilliant collection of essays on a show that has taken the art of television drama to new heights.

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- Aafa Weaver, Baltimore before The Wire
- C.W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter, 'I am the American Dream': Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction
A. Baltimore and its Institutions
- David Alff, Yesterday's Tomorrow Today: Baltimore and the Promise of Reform
- Peter Clandfield, We ain't got no yard': Crime, Development and Urban Environment
- Alisdair McMillan, Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural