“ The Wire is not a formal outlier,” Williams writes, “It is TV in the most basic rhythmic sense of the dialectic between flow and segment, part and gap” (p. Through fits and starts, Williams demonstrates, Simon marshaled a relationship between materials and form, converting the putative constraint of television’s segmentation and flow into rhythmic procedures that could enable the “multi-sited ethnography” (Williams’ term is more satisfying than the more often used “cognitive mapping”) of the neoliberal city via the genre of police procedural. She begins by tracing the development of Simon’s style through his features for The Baltimore Sun, his work on Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–1999) and the HBO special The Corner (2000). In perspicuous prose, Linda Williams cuts through the torrent of scholarly commentary on the series to show that the provenance of The Wire’s penetrating and panoramic vision of urban injustice is in fact located in codes of genre, televisual seriality, and the melodramatic, rather than tragic, mode. Simon has described The Wire (2002–2008) as a realist tragedy, and much critical discourse has ascribed a sui generis status to the program that attempts to distance it from the morass of network crime TV. One of On The Wire’s many accomplishments is to rescue the HBO series from creator David Simon. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014.
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