The attempts to bring down the GTTF are overseen by an FBI-fronted team led by Dagmara Domińczyk’s Erika Jensen and Don Harvey’s John Sieracki, plus a group of attorneys with the Department of Justice fronted by Wunmi Mosaku’s Nicole and Ian Duff’s Ahmed Jackson. The story is divided among members of Wayne’s team - including Josh Charles’ Daniel Hersl, Darrell Britt Gibson’s Jemell Rayam, McKinley Belcher III’s Momodu Gondo and Rob Brown’s Maurice Ward - spilling their guts in interrogation-generated flashbacks. The facial hair and so-called “run sheets” are just a few of the ways We Own This City attempts, with limited success, to situate viewers within a jumbled narrative, forcing our inherent desire for linearity to take priority over understanding true geopolitical context.

The passage of time is conveyed via unconvincing facial hair and flashbacks to misbehavior in the early ’00s, with one mishandled case after another given temporal context courtesy of online police activity logs shown in close-ups of computer screens. The GTTF is led by Jon Bernthal’s Wayne Jenkins, whose progress through the BPD is traced from wide-eyed rookie to unscrupulous badge-waving squad leader. As reported by Fenton, the case had everything. We Own This City is the story of the 2017 scandal that hit the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force. And it’s partially that Simon is not a man of infinite patience, and there are long stretches of We Own This City that feel like the work of a storyteller who would just as soon yell into a void - or at least introduce a non-character played by Treat Williams to spell out things that many (or most) viewers probably would have understood anyway. It’s partially that Simon and company clearly feel like they’ve covered this material before and they’re looking for new ways to tell the stories, reinventing a wheel that was working fine before. At the same time, they’re also the show’s primary stumbling blocks.

Repetition and frustration are baked into the DNA of We Own This City, integral to the show’s theme and structure. 'Daredevil: Born Again' Lands 'Dexter' Director Michael Cuesta (Exclusive)īecause of Simon’s involvement, We Own This City becomes an exploration of lessons unlearned, reforms gone astray and the bone-deep sadness that comes from the awareness that, almost 20 years after The Wire premiered, we’re still having the same conversations, pretending to celebrate the same Pyrrhic victories, paying lip service to the same notions that progress is being made.

We own this city justin fenton