In season two of The Wire Season one's drug war narrative---a Baltimore police unit hunting a gang of drug dealers and the utter failure of traditional policing and incarceration in the face of poverty and the drug trade---is displaced. The account of the drug war in America continues in the background.

The focus has shifted to Baltimore’s decrepit industrial waterfront, where the struggling longshoremen’s union has used the last of its financial resources to lobbying politicians to revitalize projects at the docks. As part of the effort, the union’s checkers, who monitor the comings and goings of ships’ cargo, have begun cooperating with a crime syndicate importing contraband (and illegals) run by The Greek.

The death of working-class America is explored through examination of the city ports. Faced with ever-shrinking work opportunities after decades of soft complacency, white dockworkers and their kids, like their inner-city black counterparts, turn to crime and the allure of easy drug money when presented with no ready options.

Is the argument that unencumbered capitalism is not a substitute for social policy and that on its own, without a social compact, raw capitalism is destined to serve the few at the expense of the man?

The beginning of the exploration of the crumbling of a city is where David Simon broadly shifts "The Wire" away from being merely a good cop show about the drug wars. Season 2 indicates that the theme of institutional dysfunction will be expanded across different areas of the city as the show progressed. What sits on the horizon is the decline of Rust Belt inner cities.

This is a drama crafted not as a television entertainment, but as the visual equivalent of a modern novel that represents what is happening in American cities and what is at stake.It is such a contrast to the crime television about sexually perverse serial killers or psychotic mass murderers or child rapists.