Jon Bernthal in We Own This City, the new police drama from the creator of The Wire. Streaming on Neon.
Jon Bernthal in We Own This City, the new police drama from the creator of The Wire. Streaming on Neon.
Opinion by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
"Now, here's the thing," Sergeant Wayne Jenkins of the Baltimore Police Department says conspiratorially to the room full of police rookies hanging on to his every word. "When you have to fight, you gotta win."
Walking out from behind the wooden podium that's emblazoned with the BPD's golden badge heshakes his head in exaggerated disapproval as he continues.
"There's people who think police brutality is when police win the fights," he says, before throwing his arms wide open in exasperated righteousness and asking, "Last time I checked, aren't we supposed to win the fights?"
After basking in the murmurings of approval from his fellow officers, he continues.
"If we lose the fight," he says dead seriously, all hints of sarcasm gone. "Then we lose the streets."
This is the electrifying opening to the five-minute-plus monologue that starts Neon's new police drama We Own This City. Beginning a series with such a lengthy monologue is a gutsy and audacious move, but one that demonstrates ironclad belief on the part of the storytellers and in their lead actor.
Jon Bernthal in We Own This City.
In an absolutely captivating and charismatic performance, Jon Bernthal immediately draws you in and leaves you feeling like a police trainee being gifted with wisdom and real talk. Only the show quickly establishes that his thundering rhetoric is not much more than moral bluster as it begins to cut away at pivotal times during his speech/rant.
Contrasting his blathering on about the virtues of police work are either scenes of police using extreme force while making arrests or drug busts against predominantly African-American males or Jenkins himself strolling easily through Baltimore's meanest of streets while masterfully twirling his police issue wooden baton with nonchalant yet threatening confidence.
"If you're getting good cases, you're bringing in drugs and guns and shooters then s**t, you can't lose!" he concludes, wrapping up to a round of applause from the new recruits. "Go out there and give 'em hell."
It's truly a helluva opening scene and one that makes you realise the series is something special among the usual and plentiful police procedural fare. Considering its pedigree that's not surprising.
Scene from We Own This City, the new police drama from the creator of The Wire. Streaming on Neon.
The six-part mini-series is from David Simon, the creator of the early 2000s crime epic The Wire and his long-time collaborator George Pelecanos.
Even now, two decades on, The Wire remains one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Starting small in season one with a simple wire-tap into a local drug-dealing gangster the series quickly sprawled out over its five seasons to show the corruption and failings of Baltimore's police, politics, ports, media, and education system as well as America's eternal war on drugs.
Based on Simon's time as a police reporter at newspaper The Baltimore Sun, The Wire was a work of fiction, albeit a grimly accurate one. While We Own This City returns Simon to the streets of his old stomping ground, focuses on corrupt police and again shares origin roots at The Baltimore Sun, this time around We Own This City is based on actual events that The New York Times called, "one of the most startling police corruption scandals in a generation".
Scene from We Own This City, the new police drama from the creator of The Wire. Streaming on Neon.
The story, which was revealed in Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton's best-selling book of the same name, is about the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force, an acclaimed department whose policing methods would be revealed to fall very far on the wrong side of the law and into criminal territory.
Where The Wire patiently spun its interlocking narrative, We Own This City moves at a quick pace. Its first episode alone introduces all its major players; the corrupt police squad, the drug gangs, political appointees and the problems at City Hall, an integral police team from a nearby district as well as the FBI investigators looking into the alleged corruption.
Jon Bernthal in We Own This City, the new police drama from the creator of The Wire. Streaming on Neon.
It's a lot to pack into an hour, yet We Own This City strides confidently as it presents its various and many moving parts across multiple timelines and in a way that plays off and upends viewer expectations. It's complex storytelling that in lesser hands could have easily gotten away from its creators, but here feels natural and easy to follow.
The episode ends with a defiant comeuppance of sorts and the promise that it's just getting started diving down into the depths of America's policing system. Even though it's just getting started We Own This City is proving to be arresting viewing.
