Representations of Education in HBO's the Wire, Season 4
2010; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0737-5328
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoThe Wire is crime drama that aired for five seasons on Home Box Office (HBO) cable channel from 2002-2008. The entire series is set in Baltimore, Maryland, and as Kinder (2008) points out, Each season The Wire shifts focus to different segment of society: drug wars, docks, city politics, education, and media (p. 52). The series explores, in Lanahan's (2008) words, an increasingly brutal and coarse society through prism of Baltimore, whose postindustrial capitalism has decimated working-class wage and sharply divided haves and have-nots. The city's bloated bureaucracies sustain inequality. The absence of decent public-school or meaningful political reform leaves an unskilled underclass trapped between rampant illegal drug economy and vicious war on drugs. (p. 24) My main purpose in this article is to introduce season four of The Wire--the education season--to readers who have either never seen any of series, or who have seen some of it but not season four. Specifically, I will attempt to show that season four holds great pedagogical potential for academics in education. (1) First, though, I will present examples of critical acclaim that The Wire received throughout its run, and I will introduce backgrounds of creators and main writers of series, David Simon and Ed Burns. The Wire: The Best Show on Television (Ever) The Wire drew much critical acclaim, being described as the most aggressively experimental program on (Kehr, 2005); as of most demanding and thought-provoking series ever to grace (Lowry, 2006); and as a masterpiece that is of great achievements in television artistry (Goodman, 2006). This kind of acclaim is exemplified by Jacob Weisberg (2006), who, in frequently-cited column, described The Wire as surely best TV show ever broadcast in America, adding: No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray social, political, and economic life of an American city with scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature. Weisberg's comparison of The Wire to great literature derives from vision of series creator, David Simon, who conceived show as a visual novel (Rothkerch, 2002), and this novelistic quality has been remarked on by many who have written about series, such as Lanahan (2008), who described what Simon was doing with series as follows: Simon was writing televised novel, and big one. Innumerable subplots came and went, and main characters disappeared from show for several episodes at time. Nothing ever resolved itself in an hour, and there were no good guys or bad guys. All were individuals constrained by their institutions, driven to compromise between conscience, greed, and ambition. Facets of their characters emerged slowly over time. They spoke in sometimes-unintelligible vernaculars of their subcultures. All of this made unprecedented demands on viewers and provided immense reward to those who stuck around. A at failure of our social institutions drives The Wire, but ideas that fuel it are hidden several layers down. (p. 24) (2) David Simon and Ed Burns are originating sources of what Lanahan describes as righteous anger and passionate ideas--and sources, too, of deep knowledge and multilayered experiences that manifest themselves in what Weisberg (2006) described as realistic portrayal of the social, political, and economic life of an American city. Simon--the show's creator, producer, and chief writer--grew up in Washington, D.C., attended University of Maryland, and became crime reporter for Baltimore Sun, where he worked from 1983 until 1995. In early 1980s, Simon met Ed Burns, who would eventually become his main collaborator on various projects. …
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