Under The Wire

We Own This City is uneven, ambitious

HBO's new police drama We Own This City takes its title from a declaration uttered not by criminals but by a Baltimore cop, Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), who rises through the ranks while planting drugs, committing assault, stealing from lawbreakers and ordinary citizens — and showing his fellow officers how to get away with it all. The big question isn't what he did but why his superiors considered him their “golden boy” and turned a blind eye to his misdeeds for nearly a decade-and-a-half.

A miniseries adapted by David Simon and George Pelecanos from former Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton's nonfiction book, We Own This City is a spiritual sequel to The Wire, exposing and deploring the institutional rot that renders reform just about impossible. Freddie Gray's name is invoked early and often, though less as a victim of police brutality than a temporal marker after which law enforcement dug in its heels even harder against reform while residents grew ever more suspicious of them.

Showrunner Pelecanos displays no shortage of ambition. We Own This City is a portrait of how police corruption destroys a city: draining its coffers to pay settlements, disillusioning the citizenry of its leaders and institutions, and emboldening officers to act without regard to law or morality. The series has similarities to The Shield, the FX police thriller that took inspiration from Los Angeles's late'90s Rampart scandal.

The performances here are fine but not notable.

The possibly limited characterizations in favour of a systemic focus leaves the series somewhat didactic and airless.