Book Review
Potter, Tiffany and C. W. Marshall, Ed. The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. New York: Continuum Books, 2009. pp. v – 254. $24.95
Collections of essays meant for the fan-scholar became popular some 15 or so years ago, with the advent of the “… And Philosophy” series from Blackwell Publishing. While that series merely provided a pre-existing philosophical essay put into context by an editor to draw parallels explicitly, this collection goes a step further, with Potter and Marshall actively seeking out original essays by students and professionals in a variety of disciplines to critically examine the acclaimed HBO series The Wire. Set in the American city of Baltimore, creator David Simon’s (Homicide: A Year on the Killing Street; The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood) goal was to examine the failings of institutions (the drug market, shipman unions, the police department, public schools, and the newspaper) through the series’s five seasons. While the aim of Potter and Marshall to provide such a collection is certainly valid (scholarly studies on media, such as television shows in particular, have risen sharply as the need for more classroom texts on the subject has also risen), this book as a whole falls short of providing the type of critical essays the scholar-fan may find most useful; instead it seems that Potter and Marshall forego the choice of putting together a collection that is comprehensive in lieu of putting together one that may appeal to a wider audience. At times, the essays included do little to strictly adhere to the idea of Urban Decay and/or American Television, as seen through the lens of The Wire. This could be for a variety of reasons, and perhaps the simplest is that the editors merely did not receive the volume of essays that they expected. Tasked with having to separate the wheat from the mostly chaff, they may have ended up including too much of the latter out of necessity.
The editors begin as any collection should, with an introduction. Potter and Marshall do an excellent job incorporating Arthur Miller’s notion of the “American Tragedy,” utilizing not only Death of a Salesman, but also his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man.” While other interesting tidbits about the show are mentioned throughout the introduction, such as the blurring of boundaries in character identities, they are not original, and can be gleaned from any of the DVD/Blu-Ray commentaries of the series. Following the introduction is a memoir, which acts as a benediction of sorts, by Afaa M. Weaver. While Weaver, an accomplished poet and alumnae professor of English at Simmons College, certainly establishes some form of credibility to the collection via his reputation, it is obvious that the editors’s hands have not touched the piece. It functions as a poor personal narrative of Weaver’s childhood in Baltimore, incorporating his run-ins with the people who were the inspirations for certain characters in The Wire. Weaver fails to make this distinction, referring to his childhood cohorts by their character names, blurring the line between fantasy and reality, and making it unclear to the reader when he is discussing his past or discussing the show.
The bulk of the text is its thirteen essays on The Wire. As suggested by the editors’s original request for papers, the essays range from 4,000 to 6,000 words; in book format, between 12-15 pages. This allows the essays, or chapters as they refer to themselves, accessible to the reader, and perhaps also inexpensive to copy if an article would be useful as a hand-out in an academic setting. Potter and Marshall have split these chapters up into three sections: ‘Baltimore and Its Institutions,’ ‘On the Corner,’ and ‘Twenty-first-Century Television.’ While the aim of organization has its importance, the topics of the essays generally deal with street gangs and the minorities they consist of, police, or television. Dividing the essays as such may have been simpler and less academic, but it also would have been more useful. The longest of these is also the first, with six chapters. David M. Alff gives a brief historical view of Baltimore, framed by its earlier military battles and its more recent ‘battle’ to reform its inner city. It is one of the better essays of the collection, because Alff is able to successfully contrast the factual history of Baltimore to the history portrayed by The Wire. The two essays by Alasdair McMillan and Ryan Brooks both use the Foulcaldian notions of surveillance and discipline to intriguing ends; McMillan in his threefold character study of individual police officers, and Brooks in his discussion of what makes “good police.” These two essays also are important to the larger concerns of The Wire in that they examine the series lack of a moral center: police aren’t necessarily always ‘good’ and the “criminals” not always ‘evil.’
The second section focuses on the illegal drug trade of urban Baltimore and the characters involved in it. This section would prove most useful to scholars of ethno-cultural studies, but for a collection aimed towards media studies and the scholar-fan, this section seems to be the least useful. Potter and Marshall fail to realize that ‘urban’ does not merely mean ‘racial.’ It is this fundamental issue that seems to limit what this section could have done. This section’s bias towards the racial reeks of a prurient sensationalism of the ‘subculture’ that it tries to study. Even calling it as such continues the practice of ‘othering’ the group it is studying. I feel that it is necessary to repeat that The Wire was never about race, it was about the failure of the hierarchies in all institutions, as Simon repeats numerous times in interviews, most of which appear throughout this collection. James Braxton Peterson’s essay on corner-boy masculinity highlights, and devotes too much time to, one particular hop-hop song and how the mentality of the song is shown throughout the series. It is important to note, as Peterson never does, that while this song, “The Corner,” existed through the final three seasons of the series, it was never utilized by the producers. Jason Read’s chapter provides a view of Marx and capitalism within the drug market, specifically with the character of drug-kingpin-turned-legitimate-condominium-developer Stringer Bell. Read does well in asserting the differences and similarities between the corporate world and the drug market, and ironically notes that the realm readers expect to be more ruthless may not be. However, Read’s single end note makes one wonder how much of the essay was original thought, and how much might have been provided by a colleague. Stephen Lucasi’s chapter on familialism and anticorporatism is sadly the only essay within the collection that thoroughly examines the plot lines of the show’s second season.
The third and final section deals specifically with the aspects of media and televisual studies, and is also unfortunately the shortest. Amanda Ann Klein’s examination of The Wire as melodrama is formulaic is its approach and utilization of Linda William’s views on the subject, and relies heavily on William’s scholarship for support. Despite this, it is still informative and well-written. Kathleen LeBesco’s article on fan response towards the death of series favorite Omar Little is a curious addition to the collection, due to its heavy citation list of HBO fan forums. LeBesco fails to note the idea of discourse as performance, taking all of the posts from the internet forums at face value, and not as drivel produced by devil’s advocate provocateurs.
The collection also includes an episode list of the series, which is useful as a quick reference tool. A comprehensive index concludes the collection, and is immensely helpful in that it also indexes specific seasons and episodes, along with specific topics on the subjects it provides.
As a whole, this collection provides adequate resources for the scholar-fan of The Wire, and for those who want to teach modern television studies in a classroom setting. Potter and Marshall could have done a better job in their selection, and organization, of their essays. Instead of focusing on the easy issues of race and gang subculture (which make the collection more appealing to those interesting in said fields), it would have been a better choice to include more substantive essays on the institutions examined by the series, such as the diminished power of labor unions, the failures of public school systems, and the bureaucracy of print media and its decline. Again, the editors were limited to only those essays that were submitted to them, and a failure to include these topics may be attributed to them not being written about. Most disconcerting is the complete lack of discussion of the blight of homelessness, a major plot arc of the series’s final season, and certainly a contributing factor to urban decay. With both Potter and Marshall teaching in the city of Vancouver, a city widely noted for its problems with homelessness, it is immensely troubling that critical considerations on the topic were never tabled.