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The Wire: adventures in a modern city

July 15, 2010 by Mariabruna Fabrizi Leave a Comment

 

We are always a bit sad when a TV show we enjoyed so much comes to an end. There are so many reasons to watch The Wire, we are only going to scrape the surface, here.

The way investigations on drug dealing are conducted using wiretapping is the guiding thread along the five seasons of this great 2002 to 2008 TV show set in Baltimore, Maryland. Investigations methods and processes are only a pretext to describe a complex universe of individuals and organization closely interlaced, where every choice is determined by the chain of command.

When you connect the dots, the whole picture reveals to be the city of Baltimore itself.

 

 

We get to know the city through the streets, within the apartments, behind the cars during police chases, through the eyes of the witnesses, from the docks to the financial districts, under the highways, inside the courthouse. Following the characters throughout the seasons will eventually show that the extreme poverty of west Baltimore can be only a few steps away from the new real estate speculations close to the harbor: you just need to follow the money.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1ABR4UpDSU

But there is one more reason which keeps The Wire so topical today: have an equivalent of the recent Italian anti-wiretapping law passed in Us, this entire series would have simply not existed.

Related: Wish you weren’t here: a guided tour through The Wire’s East Baltimore,
The (real) Avon Barksdale story. DVD trailer

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SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
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