Studies of Long-Form Television, Part 1: THE WIRE

Last Updated: May 26, 2012 - please scroll right down
Erlend Lavik on 'Style in The Wire', April 2012


Jason Mittell, 'Serial Boxes: The Cultural Value of Long-Form American Television' [a Presentation given at the 'Serial Forms' conference in Zurich, June 2009] Also read Mittell's text about this presentation

Film Studies For Free begins a little series of entries that ... is... not ... on ... Film Studies ... as it is ... most narrowly ... defined. GASP! Choke. [Recovers characteristic composure].

It was inspired not only by that great, film and media studies, disciplinary leveller that is the DVD, but also, and especially, by Jason Mittell's hugely ground-breaking, open peer-reviewed, online, 'book-in-progress': Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, as well as by the publication today of Erlend Lavik's first online video essay, above, on the American television drama series The Wire. These are both, in their own ways, impressive and very in-depth studies that merit a wide viewership/readership, as do the other excellent resources listed below on this legendary television series.

If FSFF is missing any important, openly accessible studies, do please leave a comment to that effect with a link. Many thanks.

• Esther Addley, 'Unravelling The Wire: Academics dissect social science of cult TV show', Critical Studies in Television Online,November 27, 2009
• Rowland Atkinson and David Beer, 'The Ivorine Tower and The Wire', Network, Summer 2001 (also see here) 
• Stephen Armstrong, 'Under The Wire', Critical Studies in Television Online, 2009 (?)
• Susan A. Bandes, 'And All the Pieces Matter: Thoughts on The Wire and the Criminal Justice System' (October 4, 2010), Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2011; University of Miami Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2011-19
• Simon Barker, 'From soft eyes to street lives: The Wire and jargons of authenticity', City, 14: 5, 545 — 557
• David Bordwell, 'Take it from a boomer: TV will break your heart', Observations on Film Art, September 9, 2010
  
• Alafair S. Burke, 'I Got the Shotgun: Reflections on The Wire, Prosecutors and Omar Little (October 21, 2010). Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Forthcoming; Hofstra Univ. Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-33
• I. Bennett Capers, 'Crime, Legitimacy, Our Criminal Network, and The Wire', Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 8 (2011) 
• Mark Chou, '"We like them bitches on the chessboard": Tragedy, Politics and The Wire', CTheory.net, January 20, 2011 
• New Dark Matter Journal - Issue: The Wire Files [4], April 2011 Editorial: ‘All the pieces matter’ – introductory notes on The Wire by Ash Sharma; “B5—it got all the dinks”: Schools and Education on ‘The Wire’ by Lawrence Blum; Short Circuiting the Power Grid: The Wire as Critique of Institutional Power by Sophie Fuggle; Who Loves Ya, David Simon? by Jane Gibb and Roger Sabin; The Life and Times of Fuzzy Dunlop: Herc and the Modern Urban Crime Environment by C.W. Marshall and Tiffany Pot; The Politics of Brisket: Jews and The Wire by Keith Kahn-Harris; White Negroes and The Wire by Daniel McNeil; Casting The Wire: Complicating Notions of Performance, Authenticity, and ‘Otherness’ by Lisa W. Kelly; A man’s gotta have a code: Identity, Racial Codes and HBO’s The Wire by Todd Fraley; No Such Thing as Good and Evil: The Wire and the humanization of the object of risk in the age of biopolitics by Angela Anderson; The Wire: Investigating the use of a Neoliberal Institutional Apparatus and a ‘New Humanist’ Philosophical Apparatus by Sara Taylor Commons; “Thin Line ‘tween heaven and here” (Bubbles): Real and Imagined Space in The Wire by Linda Speidel; The Subversion of Heteronormative Assumptions in HBO’s The Wire by Hillary Robbie; The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Serial Narrative on The Wire by Erika Johnson-Lewis;  “These Are Not Your Children”: The Wire’s eighth graders and their fate at Edward Tillman Middle School by Georgia Christgau; Common Ground: The Political Economy of The Wire by Judd Franklin
• Andrew Dignan, 'The Wire and the Art of the Credit Sequence', The House Next Door, September 22, 2006
• Sophie Fuggle, 'Short Circuiting the Power Grid: The Wire as Critique of Institutional Power', darkmatter Journal 4 (2009)
  
• Nelson George, 'Across Racial Lines The Wire: How white writers successfully explored black America', Moving Image Source, July 28, 2008 
• Alasdair McMillan, 'Dramatizing Individuation: Institutions, Assemblages, and The Wire', Cinephile, Vol. 4, Summer 2008
• Jason Mittell, 'All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic', Electronic Book Review, March 18, 2011
• Andrew Moore, 'Teaching HBO’s The Wire', Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal, Volume 5, Issue 1, July 2011
• Pinewood Dialogue: Making The Wire Panel 
• Dana Polan, 'Invisible City The Wire: The cycles of urban life in television's most novelistic show', Moving Image Source, July 28, 2008 
• Kelly Quinn, 'The Heart of the City: A Conversation about The Wire', Places, 21.1, May 2009
• David Schwartz, 'Kings and Pawns. The Wire: Modern society as an elaborate chess game', Moving Image Source, July 28, 2008
• Peter S. Scholtes, 'George Pelecanos on 'The Wire' and D.C. pulp fiction', Citypages, July 19, 2006
• Helena Sheehan and Sheamus Sweeney,  'The wire and the world: narrative and metanarrative', Jump Cut, 51 (Spring 2009)
• David Alan Sklansky, 'Confined, Crammed, and Inextricable: What The Wire Gets Right', Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 473, 2011; UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 1856574
• R. Colin Tait, 'The HBO-ification of Genre', Cinephile, Volume 4: Post-Genre, Summer 2008  
• Video essays on The Wire's Credit sequences: Extra Credit, Part 1 by Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz; Extra Credit, Part 2 by Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz; Extra Credit, Part 3 by Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz; Extra Credit, Part 4 by Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz; Extra Credit, Part 5 by Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz, All at Moving Image Source, July 28, 2008
• James Zborowski, 'The Rhetoric of The Wire', Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, No.1, 2010 
• Slavoj Žižek, 'The Wire or the clash of Civilizations in one country', Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, February 24, 2012 

Huge Update on April 6, 2012 provided by Steve Bennison (thank you, Steve!)

Will sort into FSFF order and format asap...

• Kent Jones: Down in the Hole Sight & Sound May 2008
• The Wire Files: 16-article special issue of Dark Matter Journal May 2009
• Eric Beck: Respecting the Middle: Omar Little as Neoliberal Subjectivity Rhizomes Summer 2009
• Julian McDougall: Wiring the Audience Participations May 2010
• Ioana Lyerat: Between Heaven & Here Mediascape Winter 2012
• Special issue of Criticism Summer 2010 on The Wire not freely available, but the following has been very widely circulated online: Fredric Jameson, 'Realism & Utopia in The Wire', Criticism 2010 
• Marc Singer: Heroin or the Economic Logic of Late Capitalism & open thread, I Am Not The Beastmaster blog May 2008 Part One and Part Two
• Chris Wisniewski: High Visibility Reverse Shot blog
• Ben Walter: The Wire for Tourists Film Quarterly Winter 2008
• Trevor Dodge: The Wire as American Noir Pop Matters Sept 2010
• Tim Anderson: Listening for ‘The Game’ in The Sound of Young America In Media Res April 2007
• Mike Dawson: Television Special: The Wire Left Field Cinema April 2009
• Jason Mittell: Rapping Up The Wire & The Limits of Plot Summary In Media Res Jan 2009
• Jason Mittell: Teaching The Wire with downloadable syllabus, Media Commons Feb 2009
• Jason Mittell/Middlebury Course blog
• Jason Mittell: Television and American Culture Textbook website
• Drake Bennett: This Will Be on the Mid-Term. You Feel Me? Slate March 2010
• Other people’s syllabuses found by Slate
• http://img.slate.com/media/8/WireSyllabus.pdf
• http://img.slate.com/media/42/wire%20syllabus%202008.pdf
• http://img.slate.com/media/4/CaseStudyWire.pdf
• Harvard Sociology course?
• David Simon: Frank Porter Graham Lecture at University of North Carolina 2011, I hr on Vimeo

More about → Studies of Long-Form Television, Part 1: THE WIRE

John Ellis: Film and TV Studies Resources Online

Image from A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

In yet another daring raid on a university research repository - this time, one based at Royal Holloway, University of London, home to a wonderful department of Media Arts - Film Studies For Free discovered three openly accessible articles by John Ellis, author of Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (1992), TV producer, and one of the most influential academics in the history of media theory and British cinema studies.

• John Ellis, Watching Death at Work: An Analysis of 'A Matter of Life and Death'. In: Powell, Pressburger and Others. British Film Institute, London 1978, pp. 79-104
• John Ellis, Documentary and truth on television: The crisis of 1999. In: New challenges for documentary. University of Manchester, Manchester, 2005
• John Ellis, The past as television: are television programmes more than nostalgic ephemera. In: Fare storia con la televisione. Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 2006, pp. 167-172
  

FSFF then extended its search for other online research items by Ellis and found the following:

• John Ellis, 'Free Cinema', in J Ellis (ed.), 1951-1976: BFI Productions, London: BFI, 1977
• John Ellis, 'Study Aid to 'The Holy Family Album' (a half hour programme written by Angela Carter and broadcast on UK's Channel 4 on 3 December 1991 as part of the 'Without Walls' arts strand commissioned by Waldemar Janusczcak)

FSFF also wanted to share a related, and truly excellent article by a different esteemed author, which makes much good use of Ellis's work:

• John Kraniauskas, 'Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire', Radical Philosophy Issue 154, 2009

More about → John Ellis: Film and TV Studies Resources Online