- Network: HBO
- Series Premiere Date: Apr 25, 2022
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Critic Reviews
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Guided by recurring snapshots of Jenkins’ police logs and buoyed by a sterling cast that includes a number of The Wire alums, the series deftly tackles its saga from a variety of captivating angles. Best of all, We Own This City boasts the sort of comprehensive detail that’s the hallmark of truly great storytelling. From the minutia of BPD protocol and the strategic tactics of Jenkins and his criminal minions, to the competing priorities of different government factions, Simon energizes every incident, argument and skirmish with a depth of knowledge about how, from top to bottom, the system works.
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A brilliant piece of work, also profoundly dispiriting.
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Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) gracefully blends shocking violence with tense conference-room inquisitions.
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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.
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Hector becomes another stellar example of how this cast allows just enough suppressed emotion to simmer at the surface. ... Even if the show didn’t use the device of police logs to explain when each vignette of Jenkins’ misdeeds occurred, Bernthal is also doing sharp work to help situate each stop along the timeline. Jenkins’ arc isn’t simply an evolution from clean-shaven academy grad to chin-bearded petty tyrant. There’s a full-bodied shift, however gradual.
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There are moments when the show seems more interested in making a case than telling a full-fledged story, and the timeline-jumping can get confusing despite the text from incident reports used as transitions and designed to to keep us grounded in the chronology of events. Nevertheless, it’s a vivid, richly detailed series, shot with gritty intimacy by director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) and worth watching for a host of reasons. A big one is Bernthal’s performance.
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Simon is always most interested in the whys behind institutional scandals, and that seriousness of purpose sets “City” apart from so many true-crime dramas that spend more time inventorying weird details rather than explaining the broader strokes. ... “City’s” biggest flaw, one of the few it shares with other true-crime dramas, is a fractured chronology that emphasizes cleverness over comprehension. With this much happening at once, all the onscreen datelines in the world aren’t enough to avert the sense of being unmoored from time. But that may be a quibble for a show like “City.”
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Sparked by a jittery live-wire performance from Jon Bernthal and anchored by incredibly smart dialogue, “We Own This City” is a stand-out mini-series in one of the most crowded periods of “Prestige Drama” in years.
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As a methodical, unblinking account of the ways that the criminal justice system is designed to keep poor and minority citizens marginalized, it’s certainly an eye-opening one.
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The engrossing HBO series manages to structure itself like a self-aware procedural that constantly asks us to question what we think we know about how criminality is conceived by and within police departments all over the country.
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This is, as almost all Simon joints are, an ensemble piece, though it does give Bernthal one of his most substantial roles to date, and he nails it. ... Like “The Wire,” “We Own This City” doesn’t shy away from the grunt work and monotony of police work – the overlapping circles of various crimes, cops, and agencies; the embedding of shop talk and regional slang in the dialogue (lots of good examples here, but I’ll be saying “ticky-tack nonsense” for a while); and most of all, a dizzying array of supporting characters, plotlines, and intermingling threads.
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It was a darkly fascinating study of American decline and fall.
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More of an epilogue to The Wire than a spiritual sequel, David Simon’s return to Baltimore is another intelligently crafted, angry treatise on America’s fatally flawed institutions.
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We Own This City throws a lot of information out there, from acronyms to procedural terms to shifting timelines, via a web of loosely connected characters. But this horrifying story will more than reward you, once you tune in to its beat.
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The show is most successful in explaining why this unit was allowed to get away with it for so long.
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Engrossing. ... As watchably infuriating as We Own This City can be, it occasionally suffers from loyalty to its true story. Good police work happens interrogation by interrogation, which isn’t necessarily the pace of electric TV.
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We Own This City comes reasonably close to serving as a Wire follow-up. It tells a compelling story that must be seen to be believed. And it effectively raises a myriad of vital and not easily answered questions about not only public safety, but also the future of public institutions.
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“We Own This City” is still a very good show, with granular realism, a sly sense of humor and fine acting top to bottom. But its indictments lack the character shading that animated Simon’s adaptations of the housing-policy story “Show Me a Hero” and his own book “The Corner.” ... “We Own This City” instead works as a kind of appendix, an updated extra for Simon and Pelecanos’s existing, well-earned fan base.
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Provocative, powerful, and with first-rate performances, We Own This City is the next generation of The Wire fans have long craved.
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We Own This City doesn’t reach the level that “The Wire” did. Yet in terms of bringing a sharp dramatic eye to big-city policing, Simon and company pretty much own this genre.
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Serious and sobering, the six-episode limited series “We Own This City” delivers a worthy and worthwhile follow-up to “The Wire.”
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It proceeds with a somewhat scattered narrative that comes into focus slowly but surely and powerfully, without the obvious and familiar scripted signposts along the way.
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The imperative to take a rhetorical stance on this historic case has perhaps led Simon to eschew some of the richness and complexity that enlivened his earlier work, but at its best, We Own This City still possesses a thrilling urgency.
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The series’ incendiary latter episodes make it worth waiting out an ambitious but ill-conceived first half that’s bogged down almost as badly as the Baltimore justice system Simon is trying to depict.
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It’s a show that benefits from its proximity to The Wire and also suffers from it, because you can be a darned solid show and still not be The Wire. We Own This City? Darned solid, flaws and all.
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Because the actors are so good, and because Simon, Pelecanos, Burns, and company have been making Eat Your Vegetables TV for two decades and counting, We Own This City is almost always extremely watchable(*) in a way that eludes so many other sober-minded dramas about tears in the national fabric. (*) That said, the group’s experiment in nonlinear storytelling results in mixed success.
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“City” is based on a nonfiction book by Justin Fenton and somewhat weighed down by its solemn intent. It doesn’t have time for humor and it doesn’t have the space for subtlety. Too many scenes are plain explanatory and grim business simply leads to more grim business. Still, Simon has always excelled at capturing specific cultures and their contradictions.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 33
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Mixed: 2 out of 33
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Negative: 11 out of 33
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Apr 26, 2022
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May 31, 2022bad
[ bad ]
adjective, worse, worst;(Slang) bad·der, bad·dest for 36.
not good in any manner or degree. -
Apr 29, 2022