This chapter will critically examine how poverty, race, and the political economics of the narcocapitalist society all function within the narrative world of HBO’s award-winning series, The Wire. I will analyze the series across its five seasons with a special focus on the series’ interpretation of the upwardly mobile economic aspirations of many of its characters. The Wire’s Baltimore setting also offers viewers an interpretation of a contemporary American urban metropolis populated with African American and Latinx citizens who occupy the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, while city politicians, judicial officers, and businessmen occupy the highest echelons of that hierarchy. Using textual and discourse analysis, I critically analyze the messages the series offers to its audience in keeping with a political economic theoretical framework. Thus, this chapter’s analysis will attempt to answer the following three questions. First, how is the socioeconomic hierarchy defined within the series and in what discrete ways is poverty defined? How are those definitions contested or reaffirmed against its inner city setting, and by whom? Second, what influence, if any, does the narcocapitalist system of drug production, distribution and consumption have upon the characters’ lives? And third, how is wealth and success characterized and by whom? What justifications (if any) are offered for the methods by which their economic successes are achieved, and what costs if any appear to that success?