Review of the mini-series "We Own This City," the spiritual successor to "The Wire" from the same creators
David Simon and George Pelecanos return to Baltimore with a new story about police brutality, moral decay and a corrupt system.
"If we lose the fight, we lose the streets," charismatic police sergeant Wayne Jenkins (John Bernthal) declares to his colleagues. Behind the motivational speech about fighting is in fact a ridiculous attempt to justify barbaric ways of working - brutality, racketeering, and framing the innocent. The Baltimore City Police and the special Gun Trace Task Force, headed by Jenkins, know that you can do anything under the guise of good clearance statistics. The carefree life comes to an end soon enough as the crime rate continues to rise and another scandal involving the mysterious death of an African-American man after his arrest leads to several agencies, including the FBI and a civil rights lawyer, taking an interest in GTTF's activities.
It is symbolic that in the year when the great "The Wire" turns 20 years old, a new project by its chief creator, David Simon, is coming to the screens. Not that he was silent after the finale of the cult drama, quite the opposite: proving that that success was no accident and that he is an outstanding showrunner. Simon set out to explore other genres and eras - producing a war drama about the Iraqi campaign, The Murderer Generation, a musical, Trimsey, about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a political tragedy, Show Me a Hero, a historical series, The Deuce, about the rise of the porn industry in the 1970s and a film adaptation of Philip Roth's pamphlet novel, The Plot Against America, about Nazism in the 1940s. Simon's new project is a kind of return to his "native" Baltimore. This is the city in which he began his career as a journalist and which can be considered the protagonist of The Wire.
Simply put, "We Own This Town" is not just a new series from one of the chief writers of modern television, but also a sharp social drama that, alas, cannot avoid comparisons to the great crime series. Though many have already managed to call it an unspoken sixth season of The Wire, there is in fact one important difference between the two: Simon, once a humanist who 20 years ago argued that because of a fundamentally broken and corrupt system all people in it are painted in shades of gray, now ruthlessly criticizes the police. Now we are faced not even with anti-heroes, but with the very real villains - a bunch of morally degraded, empathy- and compassion-deprived animals who will do anything to preserve their privileges.
On the one hand, this is frustrating, because impartiality was one of the main features of The Wire, on the other hand, Simon is understandable: not only is the series based on a wild real story, the corners of which simply cannot be smoothed over, but the general discontent with the police in the USA has reached its peak in recent years. To somehow justify the officers enjoying impunity is, to put it mildly, an unfortunate decision in the current circumstances. However, Bernthal's charm is still hard to resist - in the last minutes of the series, referring to the initial speech to his colleagues, you reluctantly get into the tragedy of the character who has lost everything.
Otherwise, "We Own This City" is indeed a project very close to "The Wire", which, for example, is akin to it in its dry, almost documentary presentation and its reliance on the procedural format. Here the somewhat boring and deprived of director's handwriting Reynaldo Marcus Green, who directed all six episodes, could not have come at a better time. The creators do not use music or clip editing, instead of the title sequences they use a cut of photos and archive frames, even the color correction here is somewhat impersonal and cold. And without that the series is aloof and does not dispose the modern viewer to itself and also lacks a coherent linear narrative - instead it is episodic and somewhat chaotic narrative, consisting of stories of several characters, memories and flashbacks.
It is not until the last episode that all these details come together into a coherent picture-a sad portrait of a city plagued by institutional corruption, racism, and the impossibility of reform. It's a shame not all viewers will make it to this point, but the most assiduous will end up with not only what is certainly one of this year's top shows, but also the most important TV project that will help them better understand the modern USA. Especially the rise in popularity of BLM and other civil rights movements, as well as the constant protests against police brutality. It is worth admitting, though, that the main takeaway from watching it is the realization of the universality of history. You realize that there are law-enforcers corrupted by the authorities, who think that they own the cities, everywhere. It's just that somewhere sooner or later they get nailed and forced to answer for what they deserve, and somewhere they manage to climb the career ladder and take over individual regions or even the whole country.
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