Abstract
Described as “arguably the best drama in the history of television,”1 “one of TV’s most spellbindingly personal dramas,”2 and “America’s most brutal, realistic and groundbreaking television drama,”3 The Wire, which began on Home Box Office (HBO) in 2002, wrapped up its fifth and final season in January 2008. During its tenure, the drama grappled with issues of law enforcement and the drug war, working-class strife in the face of widescale industrial and therefore employment decline, political corruption, shortcomings within the public education system, and the diminishing impact of the print media. While exploring such critical issues The Wire did not necessarily end each episode and season tidily but rather emerged as a catalyst for the interrogation of social and policy issues that plague many U.S. cities. This chapter seeks to accomplish two goals. First, we describe and comment on the show’s placement and significance in contemporary popular culture. Second, we offer a sociohistorical analysis of the urban landscape in which the show is set, hoping to spur further engagement among readers and viewers with those issues—and their roots—under critique in the show. While the many accolades from critics and lay people encourage some scholarly exploration, the purposes of the show and its complex theses drive this piece. Similarly, because the show engaged these complex themes through the moving image, it opened a broad range of discussion points related to the media worthy of commentary.
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Notes
Ien Ang, Della Couling, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1985).
Adrienne L. McLean, “Media Effects: Marshall McLuhan, Television Culture, and ‘The X-Files’,” Film Quarterly 51:4 (Summer 1998): 2–11.
Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, eds., Quality Popular Television (London: BFI, 2003).
John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987).
George Gerbner, “Towards ‘Cultural Indicators’: The Analysis of Mass Mediated Public Message Systems,” AV Communication Review 17:2 (1969): 137–148.
E. M. Rogers and J. W. Dearing, “Agenda-Setting Research: Where Has It Been, Where Is It Going?” in James A. Anderson, ed. Communication Yearbook 11 (1988): 555–594
M. McCombs and D. L. Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (1972): 176–187
Bernard C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)
Jannette Dates, Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1993).
Jessica Sewell, “Sidewalks and Store Windows as Political Landscapes,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 9 (2003): 85–98.
Richard Curtis, “The Improbable Transformation of Inner-City Neighborhoods: Crime, Violence, Drugs, and Youth in the 1990s,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88:4 (Summer 1998): 1233–1276
Slaves were permitted in some cases to hire their own labor out and pay their masters a percentage. This feature is suggested by historians to be more common to urban slavery patterns. Harold A. McDougall, Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 25.
McDougal, Black Baltimore, 46–55; Neverdon-Morton, “Black Housing Patterns,” 102; Kenneth Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940–1980 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 91.
Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. and Mark Naison, “Epilogue: African Americans and the Dawning of the Postindustrial Era” in Henry Louis Taylor and Walter Hill, eds., Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial City, 1990–1950 (New York: Garland, 2000), 280–282
Griggs v. Duke Power and the Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
See W. Edward Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994)
Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo Mama’s Dysfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in America, (Boston: Beacon, 1997).
Elvin J. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel, “Gentrification, Segregation, and Discrimination in the American Urban System,” Environment and Planning A, 36 (2004): 1215–1241.
James D. Ward, “Race, Ethnicity, and Law Enforcement Profiling: Implications for Public Policy,” Public Administration Review 62:6 (November-December 2002): 726–735.
Richard Harding, “Private Prisons,” Crime and Justice 28 (2001): 265–346.
For an examination of American Indian biographies and melodrama, see Gregory S. Jay, “‘White Man’s Book No Good’: D. W. Griffith and the American Indian,” Cinema Journal 39:4 (Summer 2000): 3–26.
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© 2009 Zachery Williams
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Smith, R., Smith, D. (2009). The Wire: Media Placement and Postindustrial Landscapes. In: Williams, Z. (eds) Africana Cultures and Policy Studies. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622098_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622098_5
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