Fourteen years later, which is said soon, we return to the immortalized Baltimore in ‘The Wire’. HBO Max has released ‘The city is ours’ (We Own This City), a six-episode miniseries created by David Simon and George Pelecanos that revisits the port city police.
The first thing that stands out is that the series welcomes you as if you had never left home. The address of a Reinaldo Marcus Green (‘The Williams method’) comfortable and efficient together with small details (we have listening, surveillance, etc.) makes it seem that we are facing a return also in spirit to the aforementioned masterpiece of television.
Of course, despite sharing the stage and common themes, This isn’t so much a belated, camouflaged sequel to the excellent crime fiction, but rather a much less forgiving revisit. —we could say implacable— with the forces of order. If her predecessor had law enforcement officers rowing against a sea of inertia and systemic reluctance, this one goes straight to the corruption of the body.
Specifically, ‘The city is ours’ revolves around the fall of the weapons tracing special force of the Baltimore police, accused of reselling confiscated drugs, extortion, brutality and other crimes as journalist Justin Fenton recounts in his book.
We see this through the story of Wayne Jenkins, played by Jon Bernthal —who we recently saw in ‘The Williams Method’—, leader of that unit. Jumping from present to past, we are seeing his career as the great promise of the police and how the system favors his performance. The end justifies the means. As long as those above see results, anything goes.
Coffee for very coffee lovers
Coming from Pelecanos and Simon we already know what we are coming for. The dramaturgy of both is not very friendly to the pastime. His series are as dense as they are interesting; they are writers, the second is a journalist and they want to tell things, to expose. The duo has always built their series and miniseries as a thesis on sociopolitics at a specific time.
However, in ‘The city is ours’ they forget to work some of their main characters in such a way that they give added value and importance to the presentation of facts. I would even say that there are some others (such as Wunmi Mosaku) that seem made ex profeso to do so, resulting in an aseptic interpretation.
Here it is more the fault of the role that it has than of the actress. In general, the cast is fine-tuned, but the material is uneven. We could even say that it is something more attractive for the “villains” like Bernthal or Josh Charles than for the “good guys”.
Similar to this, the miniseries is riddled with creative decisions that are somewhat debatable. His overexposures, his imprecisely fractured narrative and the lack of certain anchors with the viewer can make them lose interest. It is true that it is not at all strange coming from who it comes from, but when it is condensed into six episodes it is more dangerous.
In short, ‘The city is ours’ is a quite remarkable and pessimistic miniseries in his description of police work and the law and order system. Although its quality is indisputable, we find a six-hour dose of coffee for very coffee lovers.