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Friday, 16 April 2010 14:11
It's been two years since HBO aired the final episode of The Wire. Critics praised the TV show for its realistic portrayal of drug culture and its far-reaching influence.
But now a handful of colleges across the country -- including Harvard, Duke and the University of California, Berkeley -- offer courses built around the show.
Jason Mittell teaches one of those classes, "Watching The Wire: Urban America in Serial Television," at Middlebury College in Vermont. He's an associate American studies professor, and he thinks the show's creator, David Simon, tapped into a crucial American subculture.
Simon is exploring another subculture, post-Katrina New Orleans, in his latest series, Treme, which just debuted on HBO.
A Window Into Another World
In the pastoral New England setting of their classroom, students in Mittell's class immerse themselves in 60 hours of Baltimore's gritty underside.
Senior Ben Meader watches with his notebook open and pen poised. He's a geography major who had never seen an episode of the show but decided to add it to his final semester schedule.
"Film and media and television, they have to be regarded as important as literature in how we understand our own culture," says Meader. "I could watch the show on my own and be like, 'Oh, OK, this is an interesting show.' But in order to kind of understand why it was made, when it was made, and how it was made, is something that is really complex and something worth studying."
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