HBO’s Two Frontiers: Deadwood and The Wire

Abstract

The Wire (five seasons, 2002–2008) takes place in Baltimore, an urban venue that is distinguished by diverse modes of violence and alienation – the colour line, tensions between governmental bureaucracy and citizen, between policing executives and investigators, between corporate-oriented drug dealers and individual (take-no-prisoners) dealers, and in general between aspiring change-agents and entrenched power holders. And most significantly for this analysis, The Wire explores what Robert Crooks identifies as the new “urban frontier.” The older frontier (in “the West”) is depicted in Deadwood (three seasons, 2004–2006). That frontier, as Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin point out, was, at the outset of the Euro American–Native American encounter, a space of negotiation, a space in which institutionalised regionalisation had not yet been installed.