WE OWN THIS CITY
Sky Atlantic, 9pm
After both historical and alt-historical excursions, The Wire showrunner David Simon returns to his fertile home ground of Baltimore to generate another drama about cops. This six-parter, which started last week but is also available as a box set, is a true-crime tale set in the recent past that exposes the dark heart of the city’s police force. It focuses in on the actions of the Gun Trace Task Force, a small unit whose officers (mis)used their powers to arrest, persecute and steal from African-american citizens with impunity for a decade until 2017. This second episode jumps back to 2004, when GTTF chief Wayne Jenkins (a sneering Jon Bernthal) is indoctrinated into the force’s corrupt ethos of cuffing black men solely to get arrest stats up. Scroll forward to 2017 and the rot has set in deep, with GTTF officers in cahoots with drug dealers and worse. As with The Wire, viewers may find it a challenge to keep up with slang-laden dialogue that pulls no punches, but characters such as (fictional) Department of Justice investigator Nicole Steele (Britain’s Wunmi Mosaku) help with ample expository dialogue. If the piece so far lacks any figures we love to hate, Simon and co-creator George Pelecanos are telling a gob-smacking story. And it feels good to be back in Baltimore.