David Simon’s We Own This City sees the creator of The Wire turn his attention back to the Baltimore drug trade after over a decade of expanding his scope to the Iraq War (Generation Kill), post-Katrina New Orleans (Treme), and the New York sex industry (The Deuce). There are enough similarities between the two shows that We Own This City could be seen as a spiritual sequel to The Wire. In addition to featuring many of the same cast members, the HBO series was also co-created with crime author George Pelecanos (who also co-created The Deuce), and it serves as another closely observed analysis of institutional rot and the Sisyphean task of policing Baltimore’s most impoverished neighborhoods.
Based on the book of the same name by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, We Own This City jumps back and forth between eras to tell the story of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, which was implicated by the F.B.I. in a major corruption case in 2017. The show’s central figure is Wayne Jenkins (John Bernthal, who exudes a volatile machismo with a hint of troubled insecurity), a swaggering sergeant forced to confront his guilt after years of increasingly audacious racketeering. The series also follows a number of other officers and public officials, including a civil rights lawyer, Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), in her efforts to seek justice for victims of the department’s abuses of power, and a homicide detective, Sean M. Suiter (Jamie Hector), trying to stay on the straight and narrow.
Though its glowing reputation as one of the pillars of prestige TV remains relatively undimmed, a changing socio-political climate has badly aged certain aspects of The Wire’s police-oriented narrative. In part, We Own This City attempts to rebuff any “copaganda” allegations that might have been thrown at the earlier series in the intervening years.
Jenkins holds forth on police brutality in a fiery opening monologue, attesting to his own enjoyment of beating suspects every now and then, before cynically advising against it purely because of the unwanted attention that it’s bound to attract. Not long after, the series raises the specter of Freddie Gray’s much-publicized death in 2015 and the unprecedented spike in murders that followed the subsequent civil unrest, pithily summarizing the Baltimore PD’s position as “if we have to police the right way, we’re not going to police at all.”
We Own the City’s dialogue can often sound like an op-ed, but overall its hardened naturalism is satisfyingly immersive. We’re shown the nitty-gritty of everyday police work with the addictive attention to detail that distinguishes Simon’s work, particularly in the show’s early episodes. Despite the dense exposition, the use of surveillance camera shots, flashbacks, and overlapping dialogue helps to keep things moving at an impressive clip, as director Reinaldo Marcus Green injects just the right amount of dynamism into procedural intricacies.
We Own This City paints a vivid portrait of a police culture warped by both internal and external forces, showing how it enabled systematic theft, harassment, and the accidental killing of bystanders. Still, it can sometimes feel as though the series is going through the motions, relaying all the important events while leaving it up to the broader social context to drum up excitement. With relatively few intimate human moments, there’s also less of the moral ambiguity that’s always been a cornerstone of Simon’s work.
Though officers regularly insist that the force of Jenkins’s reputation led them astray, there’s not much of a sense that they felt truly compelled to act in the way that they did, by something too large for them to grasp. The imperative to take a rhetorical stance on this historic case has perhaps led Simon to eschew some of the richness and complexity that enlivened his earlier work, but at its best, We Own This City still possesses a thrilling urgency.
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