The Wire: urban decay and American television

"I am the American dream": Modern urban tragedy and the borders of fiction / C. W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter

Baltimore before The Wire / Afaa M. Weaver

I. Baltimore and its institutions

1. Yesterday's tomorrow today: Baltimore and the promise of reform / David M. Alff

2. "We ain't got no yard": Crime, development, and urban environment / Peter Clandfield

3. Heroism, institutions, and the police procedural / Alastair McMillan

4. "The narrative production or "Real police" / Ryan Brooks

5. "I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase": Lawyering and ethics / Lynne Viti

6. Posing problems and picking fights: Critical pedagogy and the corner boys / Ralph Beliveau and Laura Bolf-Beliveau

II. On the corner

7. Corner-boy masculinity: Intersections of inner-city manhood / James Braxton Peterson

8. Stringer Bell's lament: Violence and legitimacy in contemporary capitalism / Jason Read

9. Networks of affiliation: Familialism and anticorporatism in black and white / Stephen Lucasi

10. Barksdale women: Crime, empire, and the production of gender / Courtney D. Marshall

11. After the Towers fell: Bodie Broadus and the space of memory / Elizabeth Bonjean

III. Twenty-first-century television

12. "The Dickensian aspect": melodrama, viewer engagement, and the socially conscious text / Amanda Ann Klein

13. It's all connected: Televisual narrative complexity / Ted Nanniceili

14. Dislocating America: Agnieszka Holland directs "Moral midgetry" / Kevin McNeilly

15. "Gots to get got": Social Justice and audience response to Omar Little / Kathleen Lebesco

Episode list.