David Harding’s graduate seminar, Urban Public Policy through the Lens of HBO’s “The Wire,” uses the cable TV series’ realistic portrayal of life in Baltimore as a context for understanding the nature and impact of urban public policies. The five seasons of “The Wire” (which ended in 2008) focused on the drug trade, educational system, journalism, the docks, and the city government of Baltimore, offering a useful platform for an interdisciplinary examination of urban problems in a postindustrial American city. Harding says that the course is novel in its emphasis on “the connections between areas of policy that are not usually studied together.”

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