If David Simon makes something for HBO, whether it’s one of the greatest television shows of all-time (The Wire) or a miniseries where Oscar Isaac has a mustache (Show Me a Hero), it’s worth watching. His creative collaboration with the network continues with We Own the City, Simon’s first series set in Baltimore since The Wire.
We Own the City “chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force and the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work,” according to HBO. The six-episode limited series is directed by King Richard‘s Reinaldo Marcus Green, while Simon worked on the scripts with George Pelecanos, William F. Zorzi, and Ed Burns, all of whom also wrote for The Wire.
You can watch the trailer starring Jon Bernthal (there’s going to be a lot of confused Blue Lives Matter folks seeing their beloved Punisher as a crooked cop) above. Here’s more:
In the 2000s, the Baltimore Police Department struggled to respond to crime with meaningful police work, giving itself over to mass arrest and drug warring instead. We Own the City shows how the department’s desperate reliance on statistics over substance eventually led to the inability of department officials to supervise the Gun Trace Task Force and the further inability of the department to discipline rogue police. At the time of the GTTF scandal in 2017, though there were numerous indications of corruption within several plainclothes units going back almost a decade, Baltimore police commanders held to the belief that any street unit that could bring in guns and drugs consistently had to be championed and protected. We Own the City depicts the inevitable corruption of a unit given this carte blanche.
We Own the City, which also stars Wunmi Mosaku, Jamie Hector, and Josh Charles, debuts on Monday, April 25.