The Wire was too optimistic, turns out.
What happened to our cultural reckoning with TV cops?
After the murder of George Floyd led to global protests, the future of onscreen police looked grim.
Jon Bernthal and Jamie Hector in ‘We Own This City’.Paul Schiraldi/HBO
Highbrow skepticism about play-by-their-own-rules detectives faded whenMare hit Easttown.
Welcome to 2022, where 2020 never happened.
They are also, we quickly discover, hysterically corrupt.
Their crimes are constant: Dollar-bricks stashed in bulletproof vests, narcotics fenced on the street.
They claim overtime despite not working a full shift; they claim overtime when they’re on vacation.
Co-creators George Pelecanos andDavid Simonexpand their miniseries (airing Mondays on HBO) far beyond this scandalous behavior.
The premiere opens with Wayne delivering a cadet lecture against police brutality.
The timing is auspicious.
It’s 2017, two years after the death of Freddie Gray exploded Baltimore’s streets.
The sequence is overwhelming, a symphony of pointless degradation.
You realize Wayne and his pals are a symptom of a larger disease.
The patient is dying, and they are us.
This is another huge-cast, swirling-tendrils-of-narrative saga.
In just six episodes,Citytechnically covers more chronological ground thanThe Wire.
Wayne’s origin story stretches back to his rookie days walking the beat.
There are a couple more detectives in a couple other counties.
We find out that Homicide gets crappier parking spaces than the drug warriors.
The mystery ofhowall this happened is involving, even thrilling, and the cacophony-of-character approach offers multiple perspectives.
We meet Sean when he’s new to Homicide, using old-fashioned police work to solve a mystery.
Delaney Williams played the wonderfully venal Sergeant Landsman onThe Wire, andCitypromotes him into Comissionerhood.
Conversely,Citynever forgets the victims of over-policing, following lost jobs and broken lives.
Of course, Nicole goes to interview Young Moose, and of course, Young Moose plays himself.
Directing every episode, Green brings a relaxed tension to heavy dialogue material.
There are also some genuine stunner setpieces, including a mid-series recreation of the Freddie Gray protests.
His moral fall would be pitiful, if his simultaneous ascension up the ranks wasn’t so disturbing.
Mosaku has a harder role, patiently listening to explanations of how the Drug War went wrong.
Her subplot is the most dialectic, by which I mean it has all the ranting.
That could be a problem, especially with such a relatively short runtime.
Six episodes for a story this massive feels like a do-more-with-less situation.
I worried initially that a lot of the Simon-Pelecanos flavor was getting lost to pure-plot momentum.
ButCityrewards the patient viewer, and earns its most passionate rants.
Hector is astounding as a decent man and a good cop struggling with his own past in the department.
That wasn’t my finest hour," he says.
“I mean, that s— was pointless, really.
And I saw some things.”
Charles defenestrates his stylishGood Wifeimage, bringing Hersl to life as a monster of why-not oppression.
Minor characters make a major impact.
