When American Television Became American

In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of The Wire) President Barak Obama offered that The Wire is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of American art in the last couple of decades."  The Wire combines hyperrealism with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city.  On a more macro level The Wire humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens. The Wire, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know.  But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end.  That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos.  Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order): The Sopranos; The Wire; Deadwood; Madmen; and Breaking Bad.

We need to consider carefully that these shows emerged during a particular moment on American history.  This was a period shaped by an increasingly relativist conceptualizations of truth (and, at times, outright fraud) and a resultant loss of faith in American institutions.  Resistance movements (MeeToo, and Black Lives Mater) began to shape.  No wonder that so many of the series under discussion take place amid American cultures defined by a liminal faith in law and order, within the contexts of vague moral authorities and hold American institutions with a shared, deep, suspicion.

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