Watch it and love it. As a story about gangs, drugs, inequal­ity and social/institutional and legis­lat­ive fail­ure to pro­tect poor com­munit­ies, The Wire is astound­ing telly. In por­tray­ing the inter­con­nec­tions between the struc­tures of power and the power­less – and show­ing how these are not always embed­ded in formal insti­tu­tions – it com­ments on the com­plex­ity of social life in the cleverest ways. Words have been spilled on its bril­liance (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/wire).

No way to make a liv­ing loves it for talk­ing about work. The Wire por­trays work in a way that makes sense to people who’ve had a job. It’s not like other shows: the key ten­sion is not who will shag whom, (as in Grey’s Ana­tomy, which Dawn intends to dis­cuss at length on this site), nor is work a con­veni­ently loc­ated site for the con­tinu­ation of ongo­ing local stor­ies (like the fact­ory in Coron­a­tion Street). It offers a series of work­places, at vary­ing levels of form­al­ity, where people are com­pet­ent or incom­pet­ent, good, bossy, well-meaning, face­less or cha­ris­matic; and where the indi­vidual is con­strained by an organ­isa­tional struc­ture within which he or she can struggle or shine, and by work col­leagues who can enable, inter­vene and obstruct. The Wire is the best por­trayal of work you’ll see on TV and there will be an occa­sional strand to this blog to discuss …

  • Corner boys and start­ing work; the divi­sion of labour
  • ‘an inelastic product’ – formal edu­ca­tion, skills and employability
  • mas­culin­ity and the police force
  • uni­on­isa­tion and brotherhood
  • polit­ics a work
  • cru­saders and volunteers
  • Tem­pletons and how to deal with them.
  • Office spaces
  • The rela­tion­ship between inside and outside,
  • social­ity around work … and so on. OK, I’ll shut up.

I will be talk­ing about some of this at The Wire as Social Sci­ence Fic­tion con­fer­ence, where Ewen Speed and I are giv­ing a paper on ‘Mutu­al­ism and Mar­kets: An Explor­a­tion of Moral Reg­u­la­tion in The Wire; http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/Wireconference.html