‘

The Wire is not TV’

The Wire and Seriality
• Distinctive serial structure – each of the 5 seasons deals with a particular social issue and
segment of society: organised drugs (1); unions (2); city government (3); schools (4);
media (5).

• Uses the serial format for systemic or social analysis – no ‘solution’ to the social issues
examined.

• The Wire doesn’t individualise or personalise social issues (like the sitcom does). The
narrative doesn’t focus on individual cops and criminals but on the culture that creates
and destroys them.

• ‘Centrifugal complexity’ – a vast narrative that pushes characters outwards across a

social system rather than establishing depth.

• (See Jason Mittell, ‘The Qualities of Complexity: Vast Versus Dense Seriality’)
‘Broadcast literature’
• The complex serial format of The Wire is likened to the epic novel – vast
narrative structure and a large ensemble of characters. Episodes function like
chapters.
• Specifically compared to the realist novels of Dickens, Balzac, Austen, Tolstoy,
Eliot.
• From this perspective The Wire is valued as “not TV”
– it is understood and legitimated
as literature.
• (See Marsha Kinder, “Re-wiring Baltimore: the
emotive power of systemics, seriality, and the
city”).
The Wire and Realism
• Realism – an aesthetic mode that aims to show life “as it is”. Focuses on the everyday,
the average, the commonplace.

• Realism is not just “realistic” – it has the objective of not idealising life in romantic or
dramatic terms.

• Realism employs stylistic verisimilitude.

• The Wire draws on the formal qualities of neo realist filmmaking – location shooting, non-
professional and character actors (not stars), conventions of non-dramatisation and wide
framing (not close-ups and shot/reverse shots).

• Eg Season 1 opening sequence: demonstrates “metanarrative”: the plot lines mask the
real story – which is the systemic analysis of the American city.