We Own This City will inevitably draw comparisons to The Wire, given their shared Baltimore setting, and while the latter is the greater achievement, it’s not necessarily the most significant resemblance. As much as We Own This City covers many areas, The Wire’s reach extended well beyond the police force to an entire urban environment, capturing how every element of the social and political economy was interconnected. We Own This City focuses specifically on policing and suggests that it has been actively deteriorating since the early 2000s when The Wire was discontinued.
The series spends much of its time leading up to Donald Trump’s election in 2016, allowing Simon and Pelecanos to show how a lack of justice for dead black men, coupled with economic displacement and a politically polarized culture, has heightened mistrust of the Police, who in turn are portrayed as looking at the people they are supposed to protect with active contempt.
Despite the downright nostalgic scenes of detectives poring over wiretapping devices and numerous appearances by stars from The Wire, Sidney Lumet’s 1981 film Prince of the City, based on another real story, is the most apt comparison to We Own This City about police corruption. No wonder the film’s star, Treat Williams, has a crucial, almost tongue-in-cheek guest appearance on the series.
We Own This City suffers from various minor issues. The cast’s all-round excellence is often underestimated by Reinaldo Marcus Green’s red direction. The drama can feel a little mechanical at times, probably because it closely follows the facts of the real case, and the suiter storyline in particular sometimes appears as too symbolic a contrast to the GTTF storyline, as if to clumsily underscore the fact that there are actually good police officers.
But as the series hits its home stretch and all the bits start to connect in just the way a Simon-led series can, those downsides tend to fade from memory. Few other authors write such TV tales, whose appropriately pessimistic worldview accurately reflects the fact that despite the sheer volume of people trying to do the right thing, there is plenty of money to ensure system failure thrives.
★★★★☆
We Own This City premieres April 25 on HBO in the US and June on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK
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