Linda Williams posted an excerpt from her book On The Wire on The Huffington Post, providing excellent analysis on the racial and economic politics of the show:

“The Wire writes the epitaph to these familiar melodramas of black and white but not because it achieves a state of colorblindness in which race does not matter. Rather, because it is no longer part of the black-and-white, tit-for-tat scorekeeping of racial injury that began with Uncle Tom and continues through every incident of racial violence, from Rodney King, to O.J. Simpson, through Ferguson, MO.”… “”Political scientist Wendy Brown has argued that liberalism as a political doctrine has long functioned as “a modest ethical gap between economy and polity.” Melodrama has worked that gap. The end of liberal democracy, to the extent that it has ended, has also meant the closing of this gap: “There is nothing,” she writes, “in liberal democracy’s basic institutions or values — from free elections, representative democracy, and individual liberties equally distributed to modest power-sharing, or even more substantive political participation–that inherently meets the test of serving economic competitiveness or inherently withstands a cost-benefit analysis.” Neoliberal rationality has hastened the dismantling of democracy in the post-9/11 period. When America fights wars against terror to defend “our way of life,” Brown argues, this way of life is less and less understood as classical liberal democracy and more and more as the ability of an “entrepreneurial subject” to maneuver in a world where only market rationality rules. Could this really be what Snot Boogie meant when he said, in the cold open to season 1, episode 1: “It’s America, man”? If so, The Wire was prescient. The America of equal opportunity has been reduced to the opportunity to steal.””

Eric Deggans of NPR writes in the article, “Rewatching ‘The Wire’: Classic Crime Drama Seems Written For Today”

“The show highlighted the overly aggressive policing of poor black communities, the way drug-dealing became the only viable business in too many neighborhoods, the stigmatization of the poverty-stricken and the ways that middle-class black people often fell short in attempts to help African-Americans stuck in the underclass… In fact, I’d argue The Wire has a greater resonance today than when it was originally broadcast, because so many of its messages about urban failure, policing and race have become a depressing reality… As books like The New Jim Crow and documentaries like The House I Live In argue that the war on drugs has become a war on the poor and the non-white, the case for The Wire‘s view of an America hobbled by the desire for order at any cost — especially if that cost mostly falls on poor black and brown people — seems seriously prescient.”

In addition, The Wire is the subject of courses at colleges around the country.

Listen to NPR: “TV’s ‘The Wire’ Gets New Life In College Classrooms”

Or find a wealth of The Wire reading and discussion material from John Swansburg of Slate.com, who shares college classes syllabi in his blog post, “More College Courses on HBO’s The Wire”