In Season 3, Episode 4 of the HBO series The Wire, Major “Bunny” Colvin, a senior black police commander assigned to Baltimore’s violent western police district, is interviewed by two white officials from Johns Hopkins University who want to persuade him to leave the city police force to run the school’s security force. One of the recruiters gets up, saying he has to “tinkle” in the “little boys room.” The other recruiter, a former policeman himself, explains to an incredulous Colvin, “You’ll get used to these academic types, Bunny, especially when you get that first paycheck.” Colvin decides to stay with the City of Baltimore, where he organizes, in response to relentless political pressure to get the murder rate down, a zone of de facto legalized drugs, into which he tries to push all of his district’s drug traffickers and users. (The new residents take to calling the neighborhood “Hamsterdam.”) The season ends with Colvin being unceremoniously fired when his scheme, despite its success in cutting the murder rate, is exposed by the press.

Having taught at Johns Hopkins for nearly a decade and being a frequent visitor to its various medical facilities scattered throughout Baltimore, I experienced this plotline as quite a revelation. Most people connected with the university drive through the city, a seeming wasteland of boarded-up row houses and vacant lots, with their doors locked and windows up. Their Baltimore is the gleaming hospitals, Inner Harbor and leafy Homewood campus. For Major Colvin, by contrast, Johns Hopkins University might as well be on Mars, a fairytale world totally unreachable by the residents of the city he knows best. In Season 4, Colvin, now a civilian, tries to save a young man named Namond from life in the streets. There is a very painful episode when he and his wife take Namond to an upscale restaurant in the Inner Harbor, and Namond is frozen in embarrassment, not knowing how to deal with the waiter, the menu or the salad fork set in front of him. 

Seeing your world reflected through the eyes of such a teenager is only one of the great achievements of The Wire, which, over the years, has attracted a cult-like following and also an unusual degree of intellectual respect. The series of sixty episodes, which aired from 2002 to 2008, is now the subject of numerous courses in sociology departments and film schools around the country. David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who worked the crime beat and wrote a book based on it called Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, produced the series. Simon reportedly took the...