After starting the book and watching 3 episodes of The Corner in a row, I couldn’t make any senses of my feelings about the meaning of the show, primarily David Simon. Clearly he invests a lot of time, consideration and respect for others in these projects he took up (that’s counting this and Homicide) but I really wondered where he was going with this particular work.

I felt that at times that, though Simon and Burns turned out phenomenal work, the authors were kind of pretentious in their writing. Going back to what we were saying in class today, I just can’t tell is there is a message to be derived, if this is just about having the knowledge that places like West Baltimore exist (though I believe that places like that are exposed so much that to see this now is less shocking than even until a couple of years ago), or if they’re just out to prove that they now have two halves of a story. Do you think that either Homicide or The Corner have anything to prove? Or is it just about knowing? And does just knowing make the audience passive, as had been earlier assumed in television studies, or because they are so immersed in this world is it too much to ask the viewer for a solution? I know that this was touched on in class but I wanna hear more answers.