Abstract

The Wire builds a vast, novelistic, and sociologically informed portrait of the interlocking institutions which comprise the post-industrial American city in the era of mass incarceration. It has therefore been an object of both high praise and intense controversy amongst sociologists. This is due largely to The Wire's own sociological ambitions, as it sources many of its insights, narrative conventions, and aesthetics from sociology's own cultural history. The Wire dramatizes practices of surveillance associated with policing, urban governance, and social science so as to render visible the complicity of such institutions in the (re)production of mass incarceration. However, as a series which is itself deeply invested in ideologies of visibility, The Wire has trouble transcending the self-same cultural contradictions it critiques.

Keywords: The Wire, urban sociology, police procedural, post-industrial city, realism and naturalism, social reform and surveillance

A Surprising Debate1

In the summer of 2008, the journal Dissent published a debate between, on one side, a group of respected sociologists – William Julius Wilson amongst them – and, on the other, activist John Atlas and political scientist Peter Dreier. The debate is interesting not so much for any kind of theoretical disagreement or methodological innovation it yielded, but rather for the issue it addressed: the verisimilitude of an HBO television series. Such an object would seem strange given the professions of the participants who took part in the debate. That is, unless one is familiar with the series they were debating: The Wire.

Originally running over five seasons from 2002 to 2008, The Wire attempts to reconstruct the nitty-gritty of life on the streets, on the docks, in the schools, and amongst the political and journalistic elite of contemporary Baltimore. It deploys an unobtrusive televisual style by judiciously deploying, if not quite completely eschewing, the use of editing techniques such as montage, non-diegetic music, and flashbacks. Featuring an ensemble cast of mostly African Americans – thus more accurately representing the actual demographics of the city it reconstructs – it tediously traces out the lives of its characters as they negotiate intersecting institutional contexts such as street gangs, the criminal justice system, and failing inner city schools.