Created by David Simon in 2002, the HBO series The Wire presents the established moral code of a society that lies outside mainstream America and depicts institutions designed to maintain the status quo. Terry Eagleton suggests of Dickens, that his ‘grotesque realism is a stylistic distortion in the service of truth, a kind of astigmatism which allows us to see more accurately.’ The content of Simon's programme operates in a similar way. It proposes an alternative to academic narratives able to disseminate knowledge beyond the closed-off world of peer review.

The richness, uniqueness and intricacy of The Wire has made it difficult to trace its thematic and stylistic heritage. The programme has been referred to as a ‘lyrical sociology’, ‘a type of urban sociology’, ‘a rendering of urban theory’, a ‘fontless social science’, a ‘theoretical archetype’, a ‘Dickensian show’, and more. At an aesthetic level, The Wire has been qualified as a work of ‘psychological realism’, ‘social realism’, as something aspiring to Fredric Jameson's aesthetics of ‘cognitive mapping’, or even a ‘rich counterpart to actor-network-theory’.