"The Wire" as a Dickens serial

It's one of those ideas that sounds less nuts the more you think about it: "The Wire" imagined as a 19th-century serialized novel. After all, David Simon's great multi-season drama had all the muckraking moral outrage of Charles Dickens (Google the reviews and try to count the number of times you see the word "Dickensian"), and its shifting viewpoint over five seasons gave it a similar historical sweep and reportorial authority. The real kick of "When It's Not Your Turn," though, is its obsessive attention to detail. You have to admire the dedication of creators Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson, who seemingly cram every arcane bit of the show's rich mythology into a fake lit-crit essay. The illustrations, ostensibly by Baxter "Bubz" Black, just add to the goofy verisimilitude of the thing. It's a fabulous fraud.

• [Anonymous]

  The Dickensian aspect….

• [PaulMorel]

  I think we crashed that server.

  • [putty]

    The web server is still running. But not only is it not showing us the web page, there was an error producing the error:

    Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.< \blockquote>

• [Anonymous]

  Hi. I’m the editor of the blog. And yes, you appear to have knocked our server down. I’ve talked to our tech guy and hopefully he’ll have it up soon.

  Sorry; we’re just a little comics blog; we don’t usually get traffic like this. Thank you for the link!

• [Kyle H]

  You know, not for nothing, but people use “Dickensian” in the reviews because the show made the term “Dickensian aspect” a nice little in-joke about the cluelessness of journalists.

• [Church]

  Oh. My. Gods.

  This is the best thing ever! (Possibly until Game of Thrones premiers.)

• [TEKNA2007]

  Great post, and perfect timing for me. I just inhaled the first three seasons of the Wire over the last two weeks. Gonna pick up season 4 this evening. I’m so hooked. Plus, my head is now full of street talk. Everything I think now ends with MF.

  Before: “When can we get together and talk about that?”
  Now: “Sit yo ass down!”

  Before: “How’s that coming?”
  Now: “Get on with it, mothaf-”

  • [Gilbert Wham]

    You know how we do.

    • [schmaltastic]

      True that

• [NoahB]

  Hi; I’m Noah Berlatsky, the editor of the Hooded Utilitarian, which published this article.

  We’re just a little independent comics blog; our site usually gets about 1/10 as much traffic as we’re currently handling. We’ve done some tinkering so it’s not completely not working, but it’s still definitely bumpy.

  My apologies for the delay, and thank you for the link. Please do try again in a day or so if you can’t get through. Thanks again.

• [NoahB]

  And actually; this might help everyone:

  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OknQr5ux00gJ:hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/03/when-its-not-your-turn-the-quintessentially-victorian-vision-of-ogdens-the-wire/+hooded+utilitarian+omar+comin&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari&source=www.google.com

  That’s the google cache page. You should be able to see that without delay…and help our server out.

  Thanks!

• [buddy66]

  By the gods! This is the best piece of faux lit crit since F. Crews took on Winnie The Pooh. Great stuff, Mr. Robinson. Indeed, brilliant!

• [KevSaund]

  The comments on the article, are just as good as the article itself.