1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910792557303321

Autore

Corkin Stanley

Titolo

Connecting the Wire : race, space, and postindustrial Baltimore / / Stanley Corkin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Austin : , : University of Texas Press, , [2017]

©2017

ISBN

1-4773-1178-5

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (viii, 241 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Texas film and media studies series

Disciplina

791.45/72

Soggetti

Television programs - United States - History and criticism

Race relations on television

Social classes on television

Television programs - Social aspects

Baltimore (Md.) Drama

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-225) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Season 1 : drugs, race, and the structures of social immobility -- Season 2 : the wire, the waterfront, and the ravages of neoliberalism -- Season 3 : drugs, space, and redevelopment -- Season 4 : a neoliberal education: space, knowledge, and schooling -- Season 5 : the demise of the public sphere--news, lies, and policing -- Conclusion : the Wire and the new dawn (maybe).

Sommario/riassunto

Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society riven by racism and inequality. In Connecting The Wire , Stanley Corkin presents the first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the entire series. Focusing on the show’s depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, he analyzes how The Wire’s creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses



the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many social “givens.” In The Wire’s gritty portrayals of drug dealers, cops, longshoremen, school officials and students, and members of the judicial system, Corkin maps a web of relationships and forces that define urban social life, and the lives of the urban underclass in particular, in the early twenty-first century. He makes a compelling case that, with its embedded history of race and race relations in the United States, The Wire is perhaps the most sustained and articulate exploration of urban life in contemporary popular culture.