Where do Bunnys come from? From Hamsterdam to hubris

The Wire has not only been identified as one of the greatest television studies of the destitution of the modern American city through the genre of the police procedural, but it has also been hailed as a modern work of tragedy. The strength and depth of its characters confer upon them the tragic status of brave and courageous individuals battling the vagaries of fate. For Simon and Burns, the contemporary gods are, however, the faceless forces of modern capitalism. While acknowledging the necessity for such a cultural reading of the dramaturgy and genuinely tragic pathos achieved by the collaborative writing and creative vision led by David Simon and Ed Burns, this paper challenges this reading since it risks reducing African Americans to passive, albeit tragic victims of all‐powerful forces. It also inhibits the possibility of imagining agency and action. Tracking one character, Colonel Howard 'Bunny’ Colvin, who has not been fêted or celebrated in the subsequent popular and academic debates about The Wire , the authors argue that Colvin represents a figure of exception in the overall scheme. In several key spheres—creative policing, the drug trade and in education—he is a figure of action. Thus the paper reads this character through the prism of the political theory of Judith Shklar who denounces 'passive injustice’ and indifference to misfortune, calling for informal relations of everyday democracy and active citizenship in line with a series of diverse critics of contemporary American urban social relations (Lasch, Sennett). The question of action as itself a form of diagnosis and responsibility leads back to Gramscian concepts of the organic intellectual and to Hannah Arendt. Without losing sight of the fact that The Wire is a fictional drama, the paper argues that narratological analysis of one character can contribute imaginatively to the field of social and political theory while using its affective capacity to situate the viewer/reader in the dilemmas of social practice that the crisis portrayed in The Wire so forcefully represents.