The Dark Corners of America: David Simon and Ed Burns’s The Wire.

Abstract

This article underlines the aspects that render The Wire one of the most interesting proposals in contemporary American fiction and tries to sketch a few of the manifold lines that entwine in its construction: the tradition of Realism, the social portrait, the tragic calling, the novelistic elan, the mechanisms of cinematographic thriller or the masterly playing with the specific features of TV storytelling. The aim is proposing a prismatic reading of what could be considered one of the most important series in TV history.