Features
Friday, February 4 2011
HBO or TV: Or How 'The Wire' Is Not a Novel
Although many fans, critics, and scholars have compared some television series to novels -- though perhaps none more than HBO's The Wire -- Cynthia C. Scott challenges the analogy
Wednesday, September 8 2010
'The Wire' As American Noir
The Wire’s intentional difficulty and rigor -- along with academia’s ongoing love affair with cultural studies -- might very well explain its emerging as a centerpiece in a growing number of courses at many colleges and universities in the United States.
Wednesday, January 20 2010
Fast Train to Nowhere: Watching 'The Wire' Aesthetically
Every scene, no matter how seemingly throwaway, no matter how seemingly unimportant, contributes to a larger vision, a complex set of patterns and narratives. Which is why The Wire is both totally fascinating and utterly unrealistic.
Tuesday, January 13 2009
Off the Radar - The Top 30 DVDs of 2008
Oddly enough, while the major studios continue scratching their heads over how to sell yet another new format (Blu-ray) to disinterested consumers, several outside distributors made sure that this would be a digital year to remember.
Monday, August 25 2008
Women and 'The Wire'
Why the most intelligent show on TV, a compelling exploration of the circumstances and institutional pressures that make people who they are, gets an "F" in Gender Studies.
Columns
Wednesday, October 5 2011
Beyond Jodie Dallas: TV's 10 Most Important LGBT Characters
Several "best" or "favorite" LGBT TV character lists have popped up in recent years, but they don't always include the most important LGBT characters. So, we pay tribute to the ten(ish) most significant LGBT characters in US television history.
Tuesday, June 21 2011
Reality, and Then Some, as Conveyed in 'The Wire' and 'Oliver Twist'
The spoonful of sugar that The Wire employs in relating its harsh theme is all wrapped up in that medicine's themes of fatalism. The humor employed in Oliver Twist highlights the opposite: the needlessness of the system that allows orphans to starve to death.
Reviews
Friday, August 15 2008
The Wire: The Complete Fifth Season
The dense mythology, painstakingly created over five novelistic seasons, has enough drama packed inside to be easily spun out for the next five, ten, 15 years.
Sunday, January 27 2008
The Wire
In David Simon's indictment of American capitalism, numbers -- say, crime stats and school test scores -- no longer have an epistemic value, they don't refer to any external reality.
Monday, December 10 2007
The Wire: The Complete Fourth Season
The 4th season DVD shows why The Wire is the best show on TV.
Wednesday, September 20 2006
The Wire
This is the consequence of America's broken systems: a young boy staring into the darkness, wondering what else his future might bring.
Blogs
Monday, July 19 2010
New Jurisdiction: How Will the Dark, Brooding 'Luther' Fare Stateside?
Airing on BBC America later in the year, the BBC's recent dark crime series, Luther, deserves to do as well stateside as it's doing here in the UK.
Tuesday, June 22 2010
"Toy Wire" Mashup Trailer for the Greatest Concept That Never Was
Toy Story 3 proved itself to be both a critical and box office smash this past weekend, breaking records as Pixar Studios' highest-grossing opening weekend…
Thursday, February 11 2010
The Wire - Five Seasons in Five Minutes (video)
The Wire routinely made our TV top 10 lists year after year while it was on the air and it's one of the shows we…
Friday, August 28 2009
You Can Make This Stuff Up: The Do-It-Yourself Nature of HBO’s 'The Wire'
So much of The Wire is about watching the characters make things up. Beginning with season one, Lieutenant Daniels, the detail he supervises, their purpose…
