NEARLY two years after the final season of “The Wire,” the acclaimed HBO series that counts a devoted fan base among collegians, scholars are finding compelling sociology in the gray-tinged urban life it chronicled.
Courses are cropping up in catalogs across the country.

William Julius Wilson, the prominent Harvard sociologist, is the latest to announce he will teach a course on the show, next fall out of the black studies department.

For the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when Dr. Wilson gathered scholars, activists and the show’s creator to analyze the series’ impact, he did not mince words: “It has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other media event or scholarly publications, including studies by social scientists.”

This semester at Duke University, Anne-Maria Makhulu, a professor of cultural anthropology, will introduce a course that explores cities — “urbanization, de-industrialization, the ‘ghetto,’ the figure of the queer thug, hip-hop, and many other aspects of urban black experience” — through “The Wire,” which was set in Baltimore. The waiting list is almost as long as the enrollment cap.

And proof that the show is cross-disciplinary: Jason Mittell, a media scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont, teaches “Urban America and Serial Television: Watching ‘The Wire’ ” as a way into American culture through the lens of television. At the University of California, Berkeley, Linda Williams’s rhetoric course “What’s So Great About ‘The Wire’?” examines its journalistic, novelistic and dramatic roots.

Premium cable is not required. While Professor Williams skips season two (for brevity), Professor Mittell shows all 60 episodes during class time, five episodes a week.