Good morning, Baltimore—you’ve got a chance to learn all about the city’s moral collapse in new HBO crime drama We Own This City.
The Wire creator David Simon writes and produces this gritty limited series, with six episodes in total telling the police story of Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Track Task Force. We Own This City can be seen on BINGE and Foxtel Now from April 26, with the entire miniseries dropping at once like a crime-ridden Maryland neighborhoods’ property values.
Jon Bernthal seems to be extremely typecast as a cop: we’ve seen him grapple with good, evil, and the reach of justice in between in roles like The Punisher and his creepy Sicario character. Here he’s playing Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, on the other side of the interrogation for once and looking pretty frazzled.
“Long story. Lotta twists”, he promises in the trailer below. The woman tasked with getting to the bottom of it is Wunmi Mosaku as a civil rights attorney: she wonders out loud why there’s been over 300,000 random, racialized pedestrian stops in her city, and knows that the police commissioner won’t answer when she asks if any fireable offences have ever happened.
It’s all a bit too real, with news coming out of Buffalo that two cops who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground and fractured his skull have been reinstated. We Own This City draws from a book of the same name by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, so it should dig into the bone-deep corruptive decay of its authoritative characters with all the precision of great non-fiction.
All six episodes of the limited series are directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, best known for recently directing Will Smith’s Oscar-winning performance in King Richard. He’s probably feeling a bit relieved to be onto his next project…
