The Corner

This landmark six-hour miniseries is a raw, provocative drama about the seedy, destructive junkie subculture on one of America’s mean streets, West Baltimore’s Fayette Street, in the early 1990s. Based on a non-fiction book by David Simon and Edward Burns, and brought to the screen by Simon and co-executive producer and writer David Mills, The Corner takes viewers through a strikingly frank chronicle of a year in the drug-immersed lives of 15-year old DeAndre McCullough (Sean Nelson) and his parents-Fran Boyd (Khandi Alexander) and Gary McCullough (T.K. Carter). As the fractured family’s drama unfolds, flashbacks give viewers glimpses of Gary as the once-promising young entrepreneur and stockbroker and Fran as an upstanding wife and mother. The stellar acting of Nelson, Alexander and Carter add a dimension of authenticity to the cinema verite-style programs directed by Charles Dutton. Through The Corner, executive producer Robert F. Colesberry, producer Nina Kostroff Noble, and co-producer Antonia Ellis humanize Gary, Fran, their son, and other usually faceless souls moving amid the addicts and drug dealers caught up in the twin-engine street economy of heroin and cocaine. The Corner is deserving of a Peabody Award for being an achingly real and uncompromising meditation on the power drugs can hold over the lives of ordinary people.