The Wire
a television series created by David Simon
HBO, 23 DVDs, $249.99
The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television
edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall
Continuum, 254 pp., $75.00; $24.95 (paper)
The Wire: Truth Be Told
by Rafael Alvarez, with an introduction by David Simon
Grove, 581 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Set in post–September 11 Baltimore, the HBO series The Wire—whose sixty episodes were originally broadcast between June 2002 and March 2008 and are now available on DVD—has many things on its rich and roaming mind, but one of those things is Baltimore itself, home of Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, and Billie Holiday. Baltimore is not just a stand-in for Western civilization or globalized urban rot or the American inner city now given the cold federal shoulder in the folly-filled war on terror, though it is certainly all these things. Baltimore is also just plain itself, with a very specific cast of characters, dead and alive.
