The Wire

1. Situating The Wire

Chapter 1 Situating The Wire 9 I think you need a lot of context to seriously examine anything. Gus Haynes, “Unconfirmed Reports” The Wire’s critical acclaim is based on its social realism. For example, Jacob Weisberg proclaims, No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature. . . . The drama repeatedly cuts from the top of Baltimore’s social structure to its bottom, from political fund-raisers in the white suburbs to the subterranean squat of a homeless junkie. . . . The Wire’s political science is as brilliant as its sociology. It leaves The West Wing, and everything else television has tried to do on this subject, in the dust. What is obscured by such hyperbolic praise, however, is the degree to which The Wire achieves such success through its sophisticated engagement with television as a medium as much as 10 Chapter 1 through elements drawn from literature. Building on Raymond Williams’s idea that we experience television as flow, a fluid movement across segments of programs, advertising, news, and the like, John Ellis argues that television is best understood as a mode of working-through in the psychoanalytic sense. Television , he argues, “can be seen as a vast mechanism for processing the raw data of news reality into more narrativized, explained forms” (55). One of the things that distinguishes television from film, Ellis contends, is the more open-ended structure of television narratives, a characteristic most evident in the never-ending plotlines of genres such as soap operas but present also in the resolved narratives of episodic police dramas in the sense that each week one returns to view the same detectives solving the next crime. This openness is for Ellis “television’s distinctive contribution to the modern age—a relatively safe area in which uncertainty can be entertained (and can be entertaining)” (64).1 Such analyses lend weight to the idea that a television series could fill the gap in contemporary culture left empty by the failure of news media. Television is already a medium that blurs the line between fiction and reality, and the packaging of difficult themes as entertainment may enable some viewers to confront them. Drawing on Justin Lewis’s study of television audiences , The Ideological Octopus, David Morley argues that “the world of television fiction in general is much closer to most people’s lives than that presented in the news” (141), in large part because they feel the characters in, for example, soap operas face personal dilemmas and moral issues that readers connect with their own lives. Conversely, “the world of television news is much more remote in all senses; it is a socially distant world populated by another race of special or ‘elite’ persons, the world of ‘them’ not ‘us’” (141). Thus, rather than seeing The Wire’s transformation of pressing social issues into fictional form as a trivialization, I suggest that we see its revising of the police drama as a way to make the largely middle-class viewers 11 Situating The Wire of HBO2 feel connected to the world of economically disadvantaged inner-city residents, what Simon calls “the America left behind . . . that portion of our country that we have discarded” (Alvarez 9).3 Police Television The series’ dependence upon—as much as divergence from— the established tradition of police drama is significant for understanding this ideological work. Police dramas are simultaneously reflections of and contributions toward shaping contemporary attitudes about criminality and state power, as Stuart Hall et al. established in their groundbreaking volume Policing the Crisis (1978). The critical, at times cynical vision of the police department dramatized by The Wire would not have been possible without the crime drama that came before. As Sophie Fugle notes, The Wire’s “refusal to grant closure, or even to suggest what form such closure might take” not only distinguishes it from earlier police dramas but at times constitutes a direct attack upon their simplistic visions of the causes of—and solutions to—criminality. At the same time, however, the series owes a significant debt to earlier dramas.4 For example, Naked City (ABC 1958– 63) depicted crime as emerging from social rather than moral problems, although it nonetheless retained a perspective that privileged the individual rather than the system as the locus...