viz.

I just finished reading an article in The New Yorker about HBO's The Wire, a gritty drama set in the city of Baltimore. Each season the show focuses on a different aspect of the city, beginning with drug dealers on the streets and gradually moving outwards to include the labor unions at the docks, the politicans, and in its fifth and final season, the news and those who cover it. More often than not, the shows paints an image of the city that is grim and hopeless.

At the end of the article, David Simon, the show's creator, explains a new show he is working on that will be set in New Orleans. He says, "This [new] show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter. ‘The Wire’ has not really done that. I certainly never said or wanted to say that Baltimore is not worth saving, or that it can’t be saved. But I think some people watching the show think, Why don’t they just move away?” The article' author adds, "Indeed, the City Council of Baltimore once nearly passed a resolution that proposed steps to counter the bad image of Baltimore propagated by “The Wire.” In 2005, the Sun quoted a report by an image-consulting company that the city had hired. 'Baltimore is plagued by negative press and harmful characterizations in the media, resulting in an inferiority complex,' it said. 'The perception of Baltimore is ‘The Wire,’ ‘The Corner,’ ‘Homicide’ . . . a hopeless, depressed, unemployed, crackaddicted city.' And, under the headline “NO WAY TO TREAT A TOWN,” a reviewer for the New York Post quipped, “I don’t know this Simon guy, but he doesn’t seem to like Baltimore very much, although he makes a very good living writing about it.”

The whole point of the show, however, is to demonstrate not only that Baltimore and its residents are frequently shortchanged by those with the power to do so, but to show the terrible results. Therefore, I find Simon's statement confusing because, in fact, his show does seem to make an argument that cities matter.