Holy shit, there’s going to be a class on “The Wire” at Cal! And even better, the instructor is one of my old film professors, the esteemed Linda Williams, who once gave a lecture comparing pornography to the American musical. My best thing that happened to me as a result of that lecture was going home and watching “Singin’ in the Rain” and mentally documenting each instance of the comparative “money shot.” She’s a great film theorist and professor, and if I was still in the Bay Area I would go back and just audit the course, since my thousands upon thousands of readers know how highly I regard “the best television show in history.”
UPDATE: I just checked my previous posts and it turns out I only wrote ONCE about “the best television show in history.” So, I guess my legions of fans wouldn’t know how highly I regard the show. They do now; it’s a staggering work of heartbreaking genius. And yes, that previous combination of “staggering” and “heartbreaking genius” is completely my own. I didn’t crib that from anyone. Not at all.
Here’s the course description. Glad to see my old department continues to explore cool shit:
Discerning critics and avid fans have agreed that the five-season run of Ed Burns and David Simon’s The Wire was “the best TV show ever broadcast in America”–not the most popular but the best. The 60 hours that comprise this episodic series have been aptly been compared to Dickens, Balzac, Dreiser and Greek Tragedy. These comparisons attempt to get at the richly textured complexity of the work, its depth, its bleak tapestry of an American city and its diverse social stratifications. Yet none of these comparisons quite nails what it is that made this the most compelling “show” on TV and better than many of the best movies. This class will explore these comparisons, analyze episodes from the first, third, fourth and fifth seasons and try to discover what was and is so great about The Wire. We will screen as much of the series as we can during our mandatory screening sessions and approach it through the following lenses: the other writing of David Simon, including his journalism, an exemplary Greek Tragedy, Dickens’ Bleak House and/or parts of Balzac’s Human Comedy. We will also consider the formal tradition of episodic television.
(via kottke)
Tags: berkeley, television, the wire
