Introduction

In ‘The ivorine tower in the city: Engaging urban studies after The Wire’, Rowland Atkinson and David Beer (2010) argue that urban studies scholars, sociologists, and social scientists cannot afford to ignore the release of the fifth and final season of the HBO television series The Wire (2002– 08) in 2008. Although they do not use the terms, they are concerned with both the aetiological and pedagogic values of the series: with the way in which the series provides knowledge of the city in late capitalist decline and with the way in which the series facilitates, augments, or enhances the communication of knowledge of the city in late capitalist decline. Atkinson and Beer offer a twostage defence of The Wire as a paradigm-changing event in social science. First, they make the uncontroversial claim that the series meets the criteria for academic research, providing knowledge of the dynamics, inequities, and social problems characteristic of cities and exploring the possibilities for social progress in cities. This is The Wire's aetiological value, which could also be expressed in terms of the capacity of the series to do urban studies. I (McGregor 2019) recently made a similar case for James Ellroy's (1995, 2001, 2009) Underworld USA Trilogy, arguing that the three novels taken together constitute a critical criminology because the Trilogy is an alternative way of doing criminology (an aspect of aetiological value that is related to, but distinct from, the provision of data that can be employed to reduce or prevent crime or social harm). I am thus in agreement that creating narrative fiction can be an alternative way of researching social science and my own experience of The Wire is sufficient to convince me that it is as valuable to criminology as it is to urban studies.

Having established that The Wire meets the criteria for academic research, Atkinson and Beer (2010) then claim that the five seasons taken together provide 60 hours of instruction on the city in late capitalist decline, divided into the following themes (like any academic module): drugs, gangs, and police; dock unions and city politics; city bureaucracy; education and social services; and news and the media machine.