Capitalist Realism and Serial Form: The Fifth Season of <i>The Wire</i>

When speaking about The Wire, the HBO series he cocreated with Ed Burns, David Simon frequently compares the show to a nineteenth century realist novel and suggests that any particular episode might be read as an individual chapter. Indeed, some critics, following Simon him self, have used the term visual novel to mark The Wire's radical break with standard televisual aesthetics.2 Simon, of course, is not the first to compare television to nineteenth-century realism. In his 1954 "How to Look at Television," Theodor Adorno unfavorably compared mystery shows to nineteenth-century French novels and concluded,