And to think, there is a college course in this world where the main objective is not to ace a research paper or a cumulative exam, but to watch all five seasons of The Wire – in class.

As fictional Maryland State Sen. Clay Davis (D-Baltimore City) would say: sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit.

That’s what the lucky students who enroll in media scholar Jason Mittell’s course at Middlebury College get to do week in and week out, and Slate magazine points out he’s not the only one to turn HBO’s critically acclaimed series about Baltimore city life into a three-credit offering.

Courses devoted to the revolutionary show, which peels back the layers of the city from the streets to the mayor’s office, have popped up at universities from Berkley to Duke and not just in film studies departments, but in the social sciences as well.

At Harvard, sociologist William Julius Wilson uses the series to illustrate the workings of poverty, class, the government and the justice system.

“Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of [the] systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than] that of any published study, including my own,” he wrote in an e-mail to Slate’s Drake Bennett.
“What I’m concentrating on is how this series so brilliantly illustrates theories and processes that social scientists have been writing about for years.”

Social anthropologist Anne-Maria Makhulu also delves into the poignant drama at Duke to bring the many problems of American urban life closer to home for her yuppie students, which she said affects them more than reading dry essays ever could.

Mittell engages the series critically by pointing out the various ways the show is shaped, such as, “among other things, it’s a show written by white men about mostly black characters and a show about the urban poor that aired on a premium cable channel”, Bennett writes.

But most courses are devoted to studying the rhetorical strategies and the protagonists of the series that creator David Simon (a university alumnus and former editor in chief of this fine newspaper) once compared to a Greek tragedy, where the institutions take the place of gods and toy with mortals.

So perhaps one day, Omar Little, Stringer Bell and Jimmy McNulty will join the canon of famous characters next to Holden Caulfield and Huckleberry Finn.

Also, this gives us an excuse to post these videos.

F***.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.