Hardwired: HBO’s The Wire and the Hardboiled Detective Tradition » Writing Program » Boston University
Hardwired: HBO’s The Wire and the Hardboiled Detective Tradition
The first season of HBO’s serialized crime drama The Wire has been called a milestone in the evolution of television drama, and the show has been discussed in academic essays and conferences as well as in the popular media. In fact, whole books and even university courses have been devoted to the analysis of its sociological and ethnographic implications (Bramall and Pitcher 86). Critics have praised The Wire for seeming “to challenge a dominant regime of representations” (86)—especially in the inclusion of women, minorities and gay characters—and for making “contemporary social life more comprehensible” (88). However, these critical analyses do little to account for the popularity of the show. After all, ethnographic studies rarely command the kinds of ratings needed to sustain a television series for five seasons, so The Wire must indeed be something more. Moreover, more than a decade after the first season of The Wire premiered in 2002, it is clear that the show has not had the profound influence over the nature of popular television in America that some critics predicted. Indeed, not a single show has tried to imitate either its style or its subject matter. Why, then, does The Wire stand out from the mainstream, even after its own success, as if it were something new and different, and yet engage audiences so compellingly, as if it were cast in a guaranteed formula for success? The Wire is, in fact, cast in a tried-and-true format, and yet it is one not commonly associated with contemporary television entertainment: the form of the “hardboiled” detective novel most closely associated with the 1930s and 1940s.
Rhetoric of Detective 