Often hailed as the ‘best show on television,’ and described by its creator David Simon as “a novel” (Kois), HBO’s The Wire is a weighty drama that cries out for (and receives) a great deal of critical interpretation. Critics have justly heaped their praise upon the series, citing its realism and the sheer scope of Simon’s narrative vision. It might once have been mistaken for a conventional ‘police procedural’ (in the vein of Simon’s earlier Homicide: Life on the Streets), but it gradually became a sweeping critique of contemporary urban society. Over its five seasons, The Wire transcended any conceivable genre or narrative formula, sketching out a comprehensive portrait of life in Baltimore, a “postindustrial American tragedy” (Havrilesky1) of a minor metropolis and its decaying, dysfunctional institutions. It seems, therefore, that it may ultimately offer as much material for the social critic as for the critic of popular culture. It is not only ‘the best,’ but the most Foucauldian show on television, the show which reveals the most about the technologies and techniques of contemporary discipline and punishment. We can map Foucault’s theories about institutions fairly directly onto the Baltimore presented in The Wire, demonstrating how his ideas about power and discipline2 remain vitally important for social theory. At the same time, however, the series illustrates how the forms and functions of power have diverged from those of the nineteenth-century disciplinary revolution. Disciplinary power still seeks to produce and control docile bodies, but its mechanisms as depicted here have changed a great deal since Jeremy Bentham first sketched out his Panopticon. When examining The Wire – and, by extension, ‘postindustrial’ urban society – we must move beyond a conventional ‘disciplinary’ and ‘institutionalized’ reading of Foucault. This does not, however, prevent us from reaffirming the core of Foucault’s approach, described quite perceptively by Giorgio Agamben as “an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life” (5). Cast in these terms, the general concerns of Foucault and The Wire are clearly alike in spirit, regardless of how their specific strategies and conclusions may differ. It is therefore in this spirit that I present my own broadly ‘Foucauldian’ reading of The Wire, one which is both a critical reading of Discipline and Punish, and of discipline and punishment in a wired, postindustrial state.