Under The Wire
We Own This City is an ambitious but uneven companion to beloved crime series
We Own This City Crave
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. Baltimore is its case study, but as one of the show's preachy monologues makes clear, a Jenkins could happen anywhere. That impression is bolstered by the series' similarities to The Shield, the FX police thriller that took inspiration from Los Angeles's late-'90s Rampart scandal.
Like other shows by Simon and Pelecanos, We Own This City isn't a particularly inviting world to enter. There are dozens of characters (some played by familiar faces from The Wire), and the scripts droop with statistics and unexplained jargon and acronyms. The first few chapters are especially — and to be frank, unnecessarily — opaque, jumping between timelines with little payoff. We Own This City is closer to a Simon-Pelecanos alsoran than another masterwork à la The Wire.
The Wire is mostly lauded today for its big-picture depiction of law enforcement and the civic necrosis that makes effective police work a Sisyphean task, but as fans know, it also boasted gorgeously crafted characters and countless actors with staggering charisma. The performances here are fine but not especially notable, penned in by the scant screen time any member of the enormous ensemble is allotted. (Other than Britt-Gibson, the standout is Jamie Hector — best known as the villainous Marlo on The Wire — who plays a homicide detective worried that his years working alongside Jenkins will taint his career.)
The possibly limited-on-purpose characterizations in favour of a systemic focus — in conjunction with the many, many stories We Own This City takes on — leaves the series somewhat didactic and airless. But viewers who aren't already familiar with the GTTF scandal are in for a harrowing account of police criminality.