Scholars and teachers from all disciplines will find practical examples of how to implement HBO's The Wire in any course using this, the first book length project dedicated to teaching The Wire in the college classroom. Each chapter details the pedagogical goals behind the choice to teach the show, how the show was employed in class, and student response to it.

Some chapters address using a whole season; others focus on how to teach a specific episode; all of them detail how they utilized the show to engage students in critical and creative intellectual inquiry. As a whole, the book provides disciplinary and theoretical frameworks for using The Wire within the disciplines of Media, Writing and Narrative, Ethics and Rhetoric, Education and Literacy.

Fans of The Wire--inside and outside of higher education--will be interested in how it is being leveraged in classrooms across the country and how these discussions are shaping cultural criticism.