Making facts out of make-believe. “The Wire” between news and fiction
Abstract
In his remarkable television oeuvre, David Simon has always been committed to portray USA political and social issues. For this purpose, he has often chosen the docudrama form, that is, a fact-based representation of real events. In his longer TV series, however (The Wire, Treme, The Deuce), Simon has always used fiction. In this essay I will try to explain how The Wire, through a complex set of textual and extra-textual procedures, creates a mirror image of the docudrama: unraveling a fictional plot inside an extremely accurate reconstruction of the surrounding environment, the TV series tries to equate fictional facts with actual, real events, in order to explain their causes.
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