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David Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO series, The Wire (2002-2008), has frequently been termed “Dickensian” for its ambition to present urban social reality in its totality. Primarily focusing on the fourth season, which offers a wide-lens, deeply contextualized investigation into Baltimore’s failing public school system, I interpret the show intertextually to discern its different forms of urban pedagogy. With Dickens’s Hard Times and other narrative intertexts, I argue that The Wire, with its “Dickensian” attentiveness to the relations of part and whole, attachment and detachment, foregrounds the act of reading and misreading social reality. This is fundamentally a pedagogic process, positioning its characters and viewers as “students,” imparting to them lessons in critical thinking. The knowledge gained is largely negative; nevertheless, teaching The Wire in a Korean university has revealed its efficacy in provoking student-viewers to critical reflection on urban social reality and their own positionality.
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