The Best Part of HBO's 'We Own This City' Isn't Jon Bernthal
The Big Picture
- We Own This City showcases a broken system filled with racism, violence, and theft.
- Nicole Steele, the civil rights lawyer investigating police corruption, serves as the moral center of the series and connects with viewers emotionally.
- The parallel storyline of the Gun Trace Task Force provides insider knowledge to the audience, creating tension between those in the know and outsiders like Steele.
HBO's acclaimed miniseries We Own This City, by The Wire and Tremé's David Simon and George Pelecanos, is set in the fraught years following the police killing of Freddie Gray –– a Black man who died after injuries sustained during a "rough ride" by law enforcement officers –– and features a nuanced examination of police brutality and institutionalized corruption in the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD). It specifically focuses on the real-life story of Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), a former police officer currently in federal prison for his extensive crimes while on the city's once prestigious Gun Trace Task Force.
Though the show chronicles the rise and fall of Jenkins and his numerous accomplices, it also rejects the conventional wisdom that a handful of bad people can be held solely responsible for the corruption scandals plaguing the police department. Rather, We Own This City depicts a broken system rife with racism, violence, and theft, in which the moral malleability, opportunism, and carelessness of rank-and-file officers like Jenkins are rewarded with promotions and prestige. And it's Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), a civil rights lawyer brought in by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate this culture of corruption, who has thus far proven to be the moral center of the series.
We Own This City
TV-MACrimeBiopicDramaTells the story of the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force and the corruption surrounding it.
Release Date April 25, 2022 Creator George Pelecanos, David Simon Cast Jon Bernthal , Josh Charles , Jamie Hector , Darrell Britt-Gibson , Wunmi Mosaku Main Genre Crime Seasons 1'We Own This City' Is a Brutal Police Drama
It's the sense of connection with Steele that ensures viewers become emotionally invested in the show. Strong parallels develop between Steele's experience of the city and ours as spectators. We, too, are aghast at the legal system she's inherited and the lawlessness pervading the police force even after the killing of Freddie Gray. Steele, like the audience, comes to Baltimore with a degree of preliminary information about the city's well-publicized crime rates and bitter internal politics. Mosaku imbues her character with grace and confidence, even as Steele remains an outsider due to her lack of on-the-ground experience in the city and the skepticism of her exhausted legal peers.
As she grapples with the moral implications of her professional presence in Baltimore post-Freddie Gray, Steele is also full of questions: How are people like Wayne Jenkins and fellow Gun Trace Task Force member Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles) allowed to continue policing despite years of complaints about their use of force and frequent racial profiling? Why do city police officers contend that the post-Freddie Gray indictments have kept them from doing their jobs? Why are crime rates soaring, such that people are murdered in their own backyards?
Steele's initial incredulity, though, soon gives way to action rather than cynicism. Through interviews with Hersl and other BPD employees, like beleaguered police commissioner Kevin Davis (Delaney Williams), she comes face-to-face with a system that prioritizes quantity over quality when it comes to arrests and turns a blind eye to acts of brutality. And it's hard for her to address the city's skyrocketing crime rates when rank-and-file officers like Hersl, Jenkins, and other Gun Trace Task Force members are themselves directly involved in Baltimore's thriving drug trade.
Wunmi Mosaku's Nicole Steele Connects With the Audience
CloseDespite our lack of access to Steele's personal life, a crucial alignment between audience and character soon develops. Like Steele, we are initially deprived of information or context about Baltimore's endemic corruption, because the people she interviews either don't want to talk about it or are too cynical to believe that systemic change could occur. And we are similarly left in the dark about why the law enforcement system in the city is failing to protect the people it claims to serve.
It's only through the parallel storyline regarding the brief ascent of the Gun Trace Task Force that we're finally given access to this muddled world. The dramatic irony creates a sustained tension between those with "insider" knowledge (Jenkins and his associates; and, eventually, the audience) and the "outsiders" like Steele, who unhappily remain on the periphery of the city's prolonged internal collapse. HBO's We Own This City is packed with impressive actors and performances, but Wunmi Mosaku's Nicole Steele is the highlight of this devastating police drama.
We Own This City is available to watch on Max in the U.S.
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