The York Research Database

In terms of its ability to hold the attention of the viewer and to require an engagement with hundreds of characters and numerous complex institutions and organisations in over 60 hours of real‐time television, David Simon and Ed Burns’ television drama, The Wire, offers the prospect of a new ‘socio‐spatial imagination’. Drawing on the work of C. Wright Mills and Theodore Adorno I argue that ‘fictional’ social critique in the form of the televisual novel can be a more effective medium than mainstream social science for revealing the spaces and people that capitalism has left behind.