The Wire is an urbanistic enquiry too

They say “It’s not television, it’s Hbo”, but when you talk about The Wire is more like “It’s not Hbo, it’s even better”. Considering the quality of the writing, the value of the drama, the strenght of the plot, the series seems more like a vivid and grimey painting – near to literature – of the US society of the last decade, from the “post 9/11″ period to the financial crack of 2008.
But if this TV show is mostly a portrait of a society, it is also a map of an urban environment: in his case, the city of Baltimore (notably put for the first time on the once So-Cal-dominated series map, much like The Sopranos did with New Jersey).
Just like the characters are connected to each other and every action, as in the ancient epic or tragedy, has a cost for everybody, so are the locations.

The first season of the show starts at the Pit: a square, located in Baltimore’s suburbia, where a new organization of young and black drug dealers is pushing cocaine and crack, while sitting on a sofa literally placed in the middle of the square.
From there, the screenplay drives us through a lot of different locations, all connected by The (same) Wire. From the Pit to the Grand Jury, from the student buildings to TV and media centers, from the harbour to the prisons, from the police department to greats lawyers’s offices, from the crack addicts squats to middle class flats: everything in The Wire seems shaded by the same corruption that makes hard to distinguish what right or wrong are.

But the point here is not merely a moral question, the point is that, in The Wire, the city appears clearly for what it is: an organic Social Network in which commercial, political, criminal informations and goods are passed through, like it happens in a DNA chain, making a difference not only for the single point, but for the whole chain.

As noted by James Harkin in his recent book Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We are, The Wire is one of the most accurate enquiries over an urban environment – if you think at them as a network of exchanges. But it’s more than that, The Wire gives us a map to orientate ourselves in a modern city. And not in a prototype or just a city of the future, but the cities as we already know it: an urban conglomerate of chinese boxes where the money, their movements, their transfers, their rehabilitation from dirty money to clean and disposable money makes everything happen – from the planning of the instruction system to the renovation of urban areas, from transportations to media topics.

As a result of all these blind effects, The Wire shows his “omniscient” follower the daily reterritorialization of Baltimore’s “moral” geography.

As declared by screenwriter David Simon, the series’ deus ex machina, in a 2007 interview with The New Yorker: “The Wire was never a cop show. We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city”.
For this and for several other reasons, we can say – along with a lot of other magazines and websites – that The Wire is not only the most outstanding TV show of the decade near to his end, but that it promises to become, even in the next years, an influential critical tool for social and urbanistic thought.

@'Y mag'

(Thanx Stan)