We Own This City
★★★★
Binge/Foxtel

Given the number of police shows produced for television since the invention of the medium, it is surprising there are so few good ones. As a genre it has delivered more than its fair share of mediocrity. And the masterpieces, few and far between, include The Shield (2002-2008), Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), NYPD Blue (1993-2005) and, of course, The Wire (2002-2008).

Against that tapestry, We Own This City lands with an ambitious thud. Set in the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, its cast includes Jon Bernthal as Sgt Wayne Jenkins, Wunmi Mosaku as attorney Nicole Steele, Jamie Hector as detective Sean M. Suiter and Josh Charles as police officer Daniel Hersl.

Jon Bernthal as Sgt Wayne Jenkins in We Own This City.

The high watermark for Baltimore-set police dramas is The Wire, but that’s a complicated comparison a number of fronts. Firstly, and simply, it’s unlikely any series will be the equal of The Wire. But also, and perhaps most significantly, We Own This City comes from The Wire creator, David Simon, and Simon’s long-time collaborator George Pelecanos.

In a way, what sets We Own This City apart from the great masters of the genre is the extent of its swing on the ethical axis. The truly great police dramas, such as Hill Street Blues and The Wire, predominantly focused on the good guys. The Shield, and the gritty, brilliant Australian police drama Blue Murder, are examples of shows which lean deep into the darkness.

We Own This City is something else again, a deep plunge into policing gone wrong. Jenkins (Bernthal) and his colleagues are the worst of the worst, a bloated mess of ethical lapses and policy breaches. Into that world comes attorney Nicole Steele (Mosaku) who is conducting an inquiry into policing. She’s a match to Jenkins’ fuse, and the series promises all sorts of explosions to come.

Wunmi Mosaku as attorney Nicole Steele.

There is also a peculiar, and surely conscious, connection to The Wire. Supporting actors who played villains in that series return in We Own This City as law enforcement. It’s hardly an overt statement, and might only be apparently to either the careful eye or fans of The Wire. But the intention is plain: to illustrate that the boundaries between good and bad, faded but still discernible in The Wire, seem to have faded entirely here.

At six one-hour episodes, We Own This City is perfectly packaged. A reflection, perhaps, that if you’re not going deep, you can’t also go long. The Wire lasted five seasons but never felt over-told. It was a more patient drama, content to unfurl its story tendrils in a slower, more meticulous fashion.

We Own This City is no rock video. (Cop Rock, anyone?) But it’s faster-paced and more suited to contemporary storytelling. It also gives actors like Bernthal a perfect stage on which to work. The Wolf of Wall Street and Daredevil feel like smaller essays in his craft. Here he spreads a pair of monstrous wings, completely claiming the screen for himself. All the awards will surely be his.

Whether there is a higher purpose to the series is not clear. As a polemic on failed American policing, it is persuasive, a dark reflection of the headlines which command ever larger slices of the media noise machine every day.

But it is by no means a conclusive case. If Simon and Pelecanos are masters of framing a story, they refrain from turning it into an Oscar speech. And there will, as there was with The Wire, be as many fans of the bad policing, as there will be viewers who are hoping the show’s corrupt house of cards comes tumbling down.

A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.

Most Viewed in Culture

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article