HBO has released a new trailer for We Own This City, the new limited series from The Wire creator David Simon. If scenes of police brutality and corruption trigger you, you might want to prepare yourself for what you’re about to see. We Own This City takes a hard look at amoral keepers of the peace as they continuously poison the territory they’ve sworn to protect.
Based on the book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, We Own This 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.” Jon Bernthal (The Punisher) stars as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the head of “a plainclothes unit that went completely rogue and began hunting and robbing citizens and drug dealers alike as decades of a relentless drug war and mass incarceration in Baltimore spun wildly out of control,” alongside Wunmi Mosaku (Lovecraft Country) as “an attorney assigned to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which was investigating policing practices in Baltimore prior to the Gun Trace Task Force criminal investigation.” Jamie Hector, McKinley Belcher III, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Josh Charles, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rob Brown, Don Harvey, David Corenswet, Larry Mitchell, Ian Duff, Delaney Williams, and Lucas Van Engen also star in the series.
David Simon co-created the limited series alongside George Pelecanos, who he collaborated with on The Wire, Treme, and The Deuce. Watching this intense trailer has me feeling ashamed of myself for never making time to watch The Wire. I’ve owned the Blu-ray box set for three years and have yet to crack it open. Perhaps checking out an episode or two of We Own This City will prompt me to dive in headfirst.
What do you think of the new We Own This City trailer? Is now the best or worse time to release a limited series about disreputable protectors of the peace? Sound off in the comments section below.