The Wire 101

We're currently working our way through five seasons of Battlestar Galactica, (first pass for her, second for me) which believe it or not was one of the best series to hit TV in the past decade. After Battlestar I think it'll be time to revisit The Wire.

From The Baltimore Sun...

When a noted Harvard sociology professor recently announced he was planning a course based on the HBO series about Baltimore's urban dysfunction, the university became the latest in a string of prestigious schools to study the drama.

Harvard professor William Julius Wilson plans to teach his course in fall 2010. "As a sociologist, an expert on urban poverty, and the author of the book that David Simon said helped frame Season 2 ["When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor"], my enthusiasm for the show is extremely high. "The students in the class will watch and critique selective episodes of 'The Wire' along with assigned readings on urban inequality, including two of my books that are based on research in the inner-city black neighborhoods of Chicago, that relate to the specific episodes."

Colleges including University of California, Berkeley; Middlebury College; and Duke University are among those that have offered courses on the show.

At Berkeley, film studies professor Linda Williams called her course "What's So Great About 'The Wire'?" Plenty, she says. During the class, she held the show up to such classic writers as Dickens, Dreiser and Balzac. "I was following the lead of David Simon ... who has pointed to great novels and called his show a visual novel," Williams explained. "I really believed it was the best thing I had seen and maybe not just on television."