Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Washington
- New Jersey
- Baltimore
- Chapter Three Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC 1993–1999)
- Chapter Four The Corner (HBO 2000)
- Chapter Five The Wire (HBO 2002–2008)
- Earth
- Odessa
- Baghdad
- New York
- New Orleans
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Five - The Wire (HBO 2002–2008)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Washington
- New Jersey
- Baltimore
- Chapter Three Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC 1993–1999)
- Chapter Four The Corner (HBO 2000)
- Chapter Five The Wire (HBO 2002–2008)
- Earth
- Odessa
- Baghdad
- New York
- New Orleans
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For 35 years, you've systematically deindustrialized [American] cities. You've rendered them inhospitable to the working class, economically. You have marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade. Then you've alienated them further by fighting this draconian war in their neighborhoods … It's all over except for the tragedy and the shouting and the wasted lives…What's the solution?…The solution is to undo the last 35 years, brick by brick…My intent is to tell a good story…about what it feels like to live in the American city.
David SimonJoseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness opens in a city, London, whose moral contamination is reflected in a language drained of redeeming warmth. A port city, it is a place whose civilities have been traded for greed. It offers itself to the world as a place of distinction whose history is to be celebrated, the site of national endeavour. There is, though, another current flowing, and always has been. There are dark stories to be told of its past, and darker still to be told of its present. The shadow of slavery reaches back into the London fog, cruelties perpetrated in the name of trade. Deeds committed in a distant land leave their residue so that for the narrator of this story, as for the storyteller within it, there is a bleakness that seems to embrace even the natural world. To approach the heart of the city is to see the sun become ‘a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men’. The place itself becomes monstrous.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Viewing AmericaTwenty-First-Century Television Drama, pp. 191 - 254Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013