“I’m not here to talk to you about the fights you have to have. I’m here to talk to you about the ones you want to have.” Those are some of the first words out of the mouth ofJon Bernthal, series lead and star of HBO’sWe Own This City, the newest in a lineup of political and procedural dramas from co-creatorsDavid SimonandGeorge Pelecanos. Directed byReinaldo Marcus Green, the opening sequence of the show seems innocuous on the surface, a police sergeant giving a speech to a room of trainees about the right and wrong ways to go about meeting the quotas set by their superiors. Bernthal’s Sgt. Wayne Jenkins goes on to couch this statement by saying that there is nothing lawful about those kinds of desired encounters, that they are the work of little more than impulse and irrational thinking, but the point is very much there. From the jump,We Own This Cityis about the underhandedness of saying something with a smile while pressing a knife into someone else’s back; it is about choices, dirty choices, and voluntary ones at that.
Adapted from the book of the same name by reporterJustin Fenton,We Own This Citycontends with the state of Baltimore — and more importantly, its police force — in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, a young man who sustained fatal injuries in 2015 from being transported in a police van after an arrest for the legal possession of a knife. There has been a manpower lag within the BPD, and as a result, the city begins to lose control of those who are willing to work, leading to a specific handful in the Gun Trace Task Force who find themselves stealing from those they arrest, falsifying overtime hours, and generally playing the role of dirty cops.
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Though I’m not familiar with Simon’s previous work onThe Wire(welcome to being born in 1998), that doesn’t seem like a barrier for entry to this show. There’s something refreshing about the way he andPelecanos approach the contemporary crime drama — which shouldn’t surprise me, given my love forShow Me a Hero— and their pairing with Green, whose work on last year’sKing Richardnetted serious Oscars buzz, proves to be a thought-provoking examination of a broken system, examining the “how did we get here?” as much as the “how do we put an end to this?”
The series has quite a lot of information to contend with, following upwards of three, four, five plot strings at any given time, a complicated route to the ultimate conviction of a number of plainclothes Baltimore police officers. To that end, the show’s timeline can find itself lost and doubling back on itself, hopping between years and tracing lines of inquiry that may leave some confused if they pay the half-amounts of attention that some have made a habit of in the streaming age.
That being said: when things go off, they do so spectacularly.We Own This Cityis led by the emotion of the situation, rather than the straight facts as the book is, but manages it in such a way that doesn’t overdramatize its very real roots — something rare in a world of procedurals stuffed into every possible timeslot most major networks can manage. It balances the sterile cleanliness of interrogation rooms with the griminess of the crimes being committed, a morbid jumble of citations, arrests, and subpoenas that culminates in scenes that’ll make your stomach drop out from under you.
Wunmi Mosakubrings a talent accrued from a number of UK crime dramas to US screens as Nicole Steele, a member of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and a fresh face amongst the various FBI agents and members of the Baltimore Police Department. It’s a lead that serves her well, especially after she was so excruciatingly underused in last year’sLoki, as a woman so very level-headed that it’s almost frustrating to watch her maintain her composure. You expect a woman in her position, fighting tooth and nail against everyone, to implode, to snap and let her emotional side come out, at least atsomepoint, and yet she remains the grounding wire of the entire series — always calm, always listening.
Mosaku co-leads the show’s unreasonably stacked cast as the perfect foil to Bernthal’s brash, loudmouthed Sgt. Jenkins, the plainclothes police officer at the center of the Gun Trace Task Force scandal. The series builds itself both around Mosaku’s Steele and her work to establish a consent decree in the city of Baltimore, as well as Jenkins’ turn from family man and trainee cop to a man who, when arrested by the FBI for racketeering, takes one look at his arresting officers and says, “Do you know who I am?”
Jenkins is, without a doubt, a complete 180 from Bernthal’s last couple of roles, supporting gigs in films likeKing Richardand Netflix’sThe Unforgivable, where he very much played a boy-next-door type, taking a backseat to the action with a smile and a nod. Bernthal’s Jenkins smiles, sure, but he’s a snake oil salesman of the highest order, the golden boy of the Baltimore Police Department who manages to slough thousands of dollars off the top of monetary seizures without blinking an eye — not to mention the guns and the drugs.
But the thing about Bernthal is that he’s never better at one kind of character or another, whether soft-spoken or aggressive, supporting or leading man. He’s unfailingly one of Hollywood’s most impressive character actors, devoting himself as completely to every role he plays as he has to the last, whether it’s a tennis coach, or a history teacher, or a plainclothes officer. That case remains true with Jenkins, and there’s a reason Bernthal’s name is above the marquee, so to speak. King of the five-minute performance, he shines even in the shortest of scenes, and even with the loudest mouth in the show, every inch of his performance serves to uplift those around him, a cast that also includes standoutsJamie Hector,Darrell Britt-Gibson, andDagmara Domińczyk, as well asJosh Charlesplaying spectacularly against type.
The series is a 180 for Green as well, who turns from helmingKing Richardback towards the law-enforcement stories that defined his directorial eye when he made his debut with 2018’sMonsters and Men. Living with these characters is gutting, watching even the most well-intentioned find themselves embroiled in something so far-reaching that it poisons the water miles from the source, and Green’s tack for dramatizing even the most innocuous of moments is what drives this series and keeps your eyes glued to the screen despite the way your stomach might turn. There’s an urgency to everything every person on-screen does, whether it’s filing paperwork, raiding a home sans warrant, or contending with memories from their own past.
We Own This Cityconcentrates high and tight on a gut-wrenching downward spiral, ending not as one would hope but with the cold reality of nothing really changing. Men are charged, things are tied up with a bow in the legal sense, and yet audiences get no sense of catharsis — which is perhaps the only appropriate way to end a story like this, one that epitomizes a system we are still dealing with, and will continue to endure for years to come.
We Own This Citypremieres on HBO on April 25 at 9 p.m. ET, with a simultaneous premiere on HBO Max.
