On Wire Linda Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.Be it tragedy or melodrama, David Simon's Wire (2002-2008) resonates powerfully in American culture. five-season HBO series speaks to the issues of race, space, class, poverty, and police brutality at the forefront of national conversations spurred by the Black Lives Matter Movement. Moreover, in the aftermath of Freddie Gray and the unrest in Baltimore, Simon's in-depth portrait of the West Baltimore drug trade and those that police it is especially prescient. Simon himself has referred to his work as institutional Greek Scholars in the mainstream have tended to agree with him. In her work, On The film and media scholar Linda Williams upends such consensus, arguing that Wire is impressive melodrama rather than Greek tragedy. While both genres highlight suffering and injustice, tragedy requires an acceptance of fate (103). Police, dealers, and bystanders populating Wire struggle against the intractability of institutions. All parties struggle against their proverbial fate. According to Williams, tragedy is too inevitable to make the kinds of claims for justice that Wire, as a whole, makes (103).Williams develops her argument in three parts. First, she traces David Simon's early career as an ethnographic (11) journalist writing for Baltimore Sun. With a disdain for myopic journalism with no sense of interconnectedness or nuance, Simon sought to understand how institutions limit and interact with individual agency. He developed a reputation for such abilities while writing multiplecolumn pieces on Baltimore's drug trade during the 1980s. Most notably, Simon wrote an eight-column piece on Melvin Williams, a local drug lord with considerable entrepreneurial skill. As with Wire, Simon does not deify or condemn dealers, users, and police. Instead, he offers multiple, often conflicting, perspectives from various vectors of the drug trade. Television, Williams argues, provided Simon the perfect medium to develop both characters and the complexities of jurisprudence and urban policing, as well as the politics of the corner and the statehouse.Second, Williams addresses the relationship between the genres of tragedy and melodrama. Unlike tragedy, melodrama always offers the contrast between how things are and how they could be, or should be (84). contingency of Bunny Colvin's Hamsterdam, an informally decriminalized zone for street dealers to hawk their wares with impunity, is a good case in point. …