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general interest
On The Wire
linda williams
Linda Williams is Professor of
Film Studies and Rhetoric at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Her books include Screening
Sex and Porn Studies, both also
published by Duke University Press;
Playing the Race Card: Melodramas
of Black and White from Uncle Tom
to O. J. Simpson; Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing
Film; and Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy
of the Visible.” In 2013, Williams received a Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and
Media Studies.
“I must admit initially being skeptical of Linda Williams’s
thesis that The Wire is best understood as melodrama.
But after reading her convincing and compelling analysis,
I not only came away with new insights into a series
that I knew very well, but have fully revised my notions
of how serial melodrama applies to contemporary television.
This vital book is essential reading for scholars
and viewers of both The Wire and television drama
more broadly.”—JASON MITTELL, author of Television
and American Culture
“Linda Williams’s kaleidoscopic study compellingly
considers The Wire as art, as rhetoric, and as political
intervention. Her absorbing argument for the series
as ‘institutional melodrama’ upends conventional
discussions not only about this narrative but about
the broader practice of contemporary television drama.
We understand The Wire not as tragedy, not as a novel,
not as a piece of journalism; rather, we see and feel
the show at the intersection of home and the world,
as the orange couch in the courtyard of the low rises.”
—SEAN O’SULLIVAN, author of Mike Leigh
Many television critics, legions
of fans, even the President of the
United States, have cited The Wire
as the best television series ever.
On The Wire
In this sophisticated examination of
the HBO serial drama that aired from
2002 until 2008, Linda Williams,
a leading film scholar and authority
on the interplay between film, melodrama,
and issues of race, suggests
what exactly it is that makes The
Wire so good. She argues that while
the series is a powerful exploration
of urban dysfunction and institutional
failure, its narrative power
LINDA WILLIAMS
derives from its genre. The Wire is
popular melodrama, not Greek tragedy, as critics and the series creator David
Simon have claimed. Entertaining, addictive, funny, and despairing all at once,
it is a serial melodrama grounded in observation of Baltimore’s people and
institutions: of cops and criminals, schools and blue-collar labor, local government
and local journalism. The Wire transforms close observation into an
unparalleled melodrama by juxtaposing the good and evil of individuals with
the good and evil of institutions.
SPIN OFFS
A Series Edited by Lynn Spigel
also by Linda Williams
Screening Sex
paper, $27.95/£17.99
978–0–8223–4285–4 / 2008
Porn Studies
Linda Williams, editor
paper, $27.95/£17.99
978–0–8223–3312–8 / 2004
4
TELEVISION
August 272 pages, 60 color illustrations paper, 978–0–8223–5717–9, $23.95/£15.99 cloth, 978–0–8223–5706–3, $84.95/£55.00