On The MASA

Elasticity of demand
Reflections on The Wire

By John Kraniauskas

Can’t reason with the pusherman
Finance is all that he understands

Curtis Mayfield, “Little Child Runnin’ Wild”

David Simon and Edward Burns’s TV series The Wire (HBO, 2002–08) opens with a killing and builds from there, over five seasons and sixty hours of television. What it narrates is the present life of a neoliberalized postindustrial city, from the perspective of the bloody ‘corners’ of West Baltimore, USA. The Wire is a continuation of Simon and Burns’s earlier series The Corner (HBO, 2000), a quasi-anthropological reconstruction of real lives, directed by Charles S. Dutton. In fact, in many ways it is a combination and development of two previous TV series: NBC’s cop show Homicide (based on Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, 1991) and The Corner (based on Simon and Burns’ book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, 1997). Read more...>