In Linda Williams's study of David Simon's five-season-long television series The Wire, she offers a wide-ranging treatment of that esteemed show from a number of different analytical angles, but her recurring emphasis is on its generic status as a melodrama. This emphasis on genre is one she has used productively in other studies, including her groundbreaking studies of pornography and race: Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1999) and “Playing the Race Card”: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001). This study is divided into three parts. In the first, titled “World Enough and Time: The Genesis and Genius of The Wire,” she argues for its relation to other mass-culture objects through the narrative paradigms it employs, namely ethnographic journalism and melodrama. She notes that the series utilizes a point of view derived from a kind of ethnographic journalism valued by David Simon and developed in his work as a feature writer, and then as a documentarian of sorts; and then she argues for The Wire's relative conventionality as a television melodrama. In her next section, titled “Justice in The Wire: Tragedy, Realism, and Melodrama,” she further develops her treatment of the show's melodramatic core by arguing against its generic status as tragedy, and then goes on to define it as a “Realistic, Modern, Serial Melodrama.” By this she means that it redefines melodrama in order to provide contemporary viewers with a compelling sense of moral order, even if, in the end, “the mode of melodrama still hold us in its grip” (126). In the study's last section – “Surveillance, Schooling, and Race” – she largely shifts from this emphasis as she discusses the show's ongoing discourse of knowledge and school, but she returns to these earlier concerns in the last chapter, as she assesses the status of the series as a racial melodrama, considering the show's unconventional treatment of race, concluding that it rewrites broad melodramatic treatments of race “in the most progressive way possible” (188), even as it retains it generic status as a melodrama.

That The Wire is a noteworthy episode in television history is an uncontroversial assertion, and one with which Williams agrees, telling us in her introduction of her binge-watching and status as a “fan” (1–2). But clearly her fandom is only a means into this show and once she puts on her professor's hat, she employs a scholar's method of explication. But does this methodology allow us to develop a greater understanding of this show's emphases, depths, and even effects? I see this study as a rather uneven treatment of the series, and one that lacks a compelling central thread to pull the various essays together, despite its concern with genre. It is as if the material of the series resists Williams's efforts to tie it together with this particular mode of discussion. Williams's explication of Simon's ethnographic method, which she defines as “multi-sited,” in the book's first chapter is illuminating. She argues, through a treatment of the antecedents to the show – including Simon's newspaper features, Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99), and The Corner (2000) – that The Wire is the culmination of a methodological arc of development. In The Wire, Simon finally develops an effective means of dramatically presenting his insights when he eschews “rifle shot” journalism – that which tells a tale without context and only for emotional effect – and shifts to this multi-sited approach which allows for the aggregation of moments to create a representation of a social system. Within this model, he is able, as Henry James wrote in his description of realist writing and its distinction from sentimental fiction, to show and not to tell; that is, not to compromise the dramatic effect of his material by placing it in the voice of an omnipresent and overbearing narrator. Indeed, James's distinction of realist method and effect seems somewhat at odds with Williams's definition of genre.

In chapter 2, she discusses the show's status as an “ethnographic serial melodrama.” By this she means that it employs its ethnographic representations toward a dramatic framework that becomes somewhat conventional within the structuring context of television melodrama, and indeed in the next chapter she considers the show's use of dramatic pulses that make its “televisual rhythm” similar to that of Dallas, Homicide, and even Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man as miniseries. This analysis of televisual rhythms is both precise and illuminating in a formalist way. In the next chapter she extends her formal analysis of genre to discuss how The Wire, despite assertions to the contrary, is not a tragedy. It is here that her analysis becomes, in my view, excessively formalist. I have to ask myself what is gained by arguing extensively for a narrow generic reading of the show as melodrama. Aren't most complex fictions of mixed generic status? For example, in a melodrama, characters are generally captive of an overarching and conventional plot, while in a realist work, characters are able to achieve a kind of apparent autonomy that may direct the plot in unforeseen ways. The Wire exhibits both of these tendencies – which Williams notes – but on balance, over the five seasons, it tends more toward realism than to melodrama. This generic hybridity is a matter of both its narrative complexity and its realist aspirations. Those realist aspirations are its audience hooks, the reason that its viewing demographic is so smitten by the series, and the rationale for professors bringing it into their sociology and history classes.

Williams's emphasis on genre as the key to the series allows her to skim over many of its salient and notable aspects. For example, Season 3 is one that is fixated on urban geography, employing relative space in a manner that – knowingly or not – adapts the insights of social geographers such as Edward Soja, the late Neil Smith, and David Harvey (the latter two are ex-Baltimoreans!). But her method does not allow her to dig into this very meaty reading by Simon et al. of the terms of urban space employed, and its narrative impact or its sociohistorical implications. On some level, I believe Williams recognizes this problem. As she discusses the issue of schooling in relation to Seasons 3 and 4 she defines them as rewriting the television forms of “the spy melodrama and the school melodrama” (171). She then goes on to end this section of her study by arguing the need for school reform in an urban context. And while I fully agree with her latter sentiments, this conclusion breaks with her prior discussion of form and takes the series into the world. In breaking down the formal box of the televisual text and approaching it as explicitly social commentary – which generates her own social commentary – hasn't she made an argument against her own formalist approach? I find this same tendency in her last chapter, on race, which defines itself by the assertion that “The Wire has rewritten the melodrama of race in the most progressive way possible” (188). That rewriting is, I believe, the point of the show. And that rewriting is one that privileges sociohistorical reference in ways that make The Wire a compelling social commentary. On some level, I believe that Williams believes this too and at times she all but backs into this insight. But as it emerges as an implicit insight, it cannot control her study, which is excessively focussed on a very specific definition of genre.

Williams's study, then, provides a view of The Wire that is often illuminating and surprising: she certainly develops ways of approaching the series that are not obvious. The series is, as she notes, dramatically conventional in ways, as both a television and a dramatic text. But it is also a powerful social commentary – as she notes at times – and that power derives from its realist apparatus, its unconventional means of reaching beyond the confines of its presentation within the four corners of the screen. It is that aspect of the show which I find too often neglected in this study.