on we own this city, history catches up to the wire.
The new HBO show We Own This City, from David Simon and George Pelecanos, tells a fictionalized version of the corrupt Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore. It might be understood as a sequel to their famed HBO series The Wire. Many of the same actors reappear in new roles, and the drug war and the police in Baltimore returns as the focus. Yet the original show felt as though it was out ahead of history. We Own This City, by contrast, feels like it is just desperately trying to keep up with history. The Wire spread the word televisually from the corner to those beyond it about topics such as the actual state of urban America, policing, the richness of Afro-Baltimorean life despite the challenges of poverty and racism, and the interconnected stories of many people, marginalized and elite, in this fabulous but troubled city. We Own This City feels as if it is in pursuit of historical forces that might, in fact, have overtaken it. Fictionalization served the social realism of The Wire well; the realities of a dysfunctional society seem to have trumped fiction on We Own This City.
This is not meant to be a criticism; it almost seems to be purposeful in the show’s presentation. In the back-and-forth temporal concept for the show, there is a sense of dislocation. Where are we in time exactly? Then, now, when? Freddie Gray’s 2015 death at the hands of police and the subsequent protests against that incident hang over the show, but they are in the background of what we witness on screen. Instead, we are thrown about offices, crime scenes, police units, street corners, bars and restaurants, scenes from the past remembered during interviews, and more current discussions and dialogues among characters. The repeating set piece of police database entries in difficult to understand code, used as a kind of scene cut, also makes for a mood of always being a little behind the action. Wait, one asks, what is being entered here? Whose computer is this? Are these the datafied codes of the coverup or are they the traces of investigatory inquiry into that coverup?
All of the show comes to the viewer in a stark digital-feeling cinematography of hyper-reality that adds to the sense of a show out of breath as it attempts to keep up with the unbelievable real-world plot that has outpaced fiction. The show’s camerawork takes on a kind of raw, viral, social media video quality to it while still echoing something of the surveillance edge of The Wire. It’s as if who is watching who has changed, spiraled out of control from the way in which The Wire structured spectatorship. On The Wire, which culminated in the meta-commentary of the final season’s focus on journalism coverage, the viewer was on the outside, but continually invited in to the human stories and systemic conundrums of Baltimore. On We Own This City, we are swallowed up by history.
Even the characters placed closer to the viewer—investigators, passerby, honest cops—seem trapped, unable to escape. The wire on The Wire surveilled, but it also gave us distance, a feeling that we could see the larger structural problems, the way everything connected. We Own This City abandons this conceit. Sure there are still wires and tracking devices and perspectives meant to be outside the thick of the corruption, but overall, it is as if the clarity of relationality glimpsed on The Wire has vanished into far more confusing complicities, alienations, and despondencies. The Wire was bleak, but retained enormous hope as well; We Own This City feels far more disconsolate.
The Wire hummed. It shared with the wider world the staggering beauty of people trying their best under almost impossible circumstances. The system was broken with occasional moments when it worked. Life was not good overall, but life went on. There was a cycle, a way forward. The sytem was far from perfect, it contained tragedy and trauma, but it comedy and hope also permeated through moments of connection, pride, insistence on kinship, and efforts to do better. The world of Baltimore on The Wire was flawed, but it could move forward, reproducing itself in all its ugly with some of the good still included.
The overall effect of We Own This City is more like a puzzled grunt of vexation at the state of things. It feels more as if we are poised at the end of a broken system that needs complete replacement. You see this in the off-the-hinge, cartoonish character of Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, hammed up to the hilt by actor Jon Bernthal. You glimpse it in the affect of exasperation and exhaustion expressed best perhaps in the acting of Wunmi Mosaku as Nicole Steele, a civil-rights-division attorney, and Jamie Hector, reincarnated from the cold-blooded drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield into the principled Bunk-like homicide detective Sean Suiter, a man trying to be good police in a department that has lost its way. In the past, the small and large failures and triumphs of these types of characters made a difference. On We Own This City, the jury is out. We aren’t so sure.
Returning to the scene of the crime in the Baltimore of The Wire, We Own This City proposes that something is unfixable with policing in the United States—if it ever was fixable in the first place. Yet the reasons why, and more crucially how to solve the problem, recede not into the past, but oddly into the future, unattainable. On The Wire, the feeling was that despite everything maybe we could turn the corner on the mistaken “war on drugs” in the United States and all its sordid history; We Own This City suggests that the history unleashed by that war may own us.