On The Wire by Linda Williams (review)

According to many commentators, we have witnessed a renaissance in television series and writing during the first part of the twenty-first century. Critically acclaimed series like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Breaking Bad have captivated wide audiences with complex narratives, multidimensional characters, substantive themes, and unconventional iconography. Yet it is almost impossible to talk about this “revival” without discussing David Simon’s The Wire. A five-season series that aired from 2002 to 2008, The Wire offers a poignant, even devastating look at the overlapping strands, (broken) institutions, personas, and forces that make up Baltimore—the police, the school system, drug dealers, corner boys and girls, addicts, local government, labor unions, and journalists. Since the show’s conclusion, The Wire has become the subject of many academic discussions and panels, edited volumes, and university courses on race, class, and urban life. Linda Williams’s recent book, On The Wire, masterfully attempts to make sense of the show’s appeal and its relationship to visual and literary genres. Or as she puts it, “The project of this book is to understand to what I had been converted” (2).

To some extent, On The Wire demonstrates and extends Williams’s ongoing fascination with the “melodrama of race,” or the ways in which racial difference has been represented, reproduced, and often simplified within the genre of melodrama (e.g., Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Birth of a Nation). While the book has several aims, the main goal is to “take[] up the most common praise given The Wire—that it is a modern tragedy—and turn[] it on its head” (4). While many people including creator David Simon insist that the institutions in the show resemble the gods of Greek tragedy, Williams contends that the show is best understood as an exceptional melodrama. By making this move, Williams intends to trouble both the common assumption that tragedy has a monopoly on depth, substance, and realism, and that melodrama is reducible to its clichéd expressions: “pounding music, pathetic victims, leering villains, florid acting, and the triumph of virtue in badly motivated happy endings” (107). By locating The Wire within the ambit of melodrama, Williams also demonstrates that while the series is brilliant and exceptional, it is also a product of traditional televisual forms and journalistic genres. David Simon’s creation may be new, but like most forms of novelty it remixes the old.

Williams develops her argument in three parts. In part one, Williams traces the origins of The Wire to David Simon’s career as an “ethnographic journalist” for the Baltimore Sun and his contributions to television series like Homicide and The Corner. Crucial for Williams is Simon’s disdain for rifle-shot journalism, the kind of reporting that focuses on “narrow[] stories and individual problems” rather than the inter-locking systems and institutions that produce, enable, and constrain the behaviors and actions of individuals (this distinction is of course developed and parodied in season five of the series). While rifle-shot journalism divides the world into heroes and villains, the good cops and the evil criminals, Simon’s pre-Wire pieces, writings, and books attempt to show the nuances, complexities, and structural constraints that mark law enforcement as well as the drug game. This strategy is visible in season one of The Wire as we experience the striking parallels and affinities between the world of the detectives and the sphere of the streets. For Williams, it is also important to underscore Simon’s transition from newspaper to television writing. If the rifle-shot emphasis of the Sun does not allow for nuanced, contextualized, and layered analyses of Baltimore, urban life, and dysfunctional institutions, then perhaps the television series form (with its ability to develop characters and narratives and to juxtapose multiple facets and perspectives) enables Simon to show the complexities of race, class, law, and politics absent in other discursive domains.

Part two of Williams’s riveting text develops the crux of her argument. As mentioned above, Williams argues against popular sentiment that The...