HBO's We Own This City is from The Wire creator David Simon and brings back some of the cast of the iconic crime show, but is it a sequel?
HBO's We Own This City reunites The Wire creator David Simon, George Pelecanos, and several cast members from the iconic HBO show, but are the two linked more closely? Already, very positive reviews for We Own This City have explored links to The Wire and it's somewhat inevitable that Simon's involvement would inspire parallels. But We Own This City is so much more than a belated The Wire season 6.
Set in a Baltimore still fighting the war on drugs that The Wire called never-ending, We Own This City is a dramatized, but very much real account of the BPD Gun Trace Task Force, led by Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) who were revealed to be running a criminal racket throughout the city. Just as Michael K Williams' Omar Little taxed drug dealers in The Wire, Jenkins' crew stole money and drugs from Baltimore's drug dealers for their own profit, taking an era of police brutality to another level.
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While We Own This City is not a direct follow-up to The Wire, both are based on the real-life experiences of the people of Baltimore and their relationship with law enforcement. Rather than being based on the experiences of David Simon and writing partner Ed Burns, We Own This City is based on a book by Baltimore Star journalist Justin Fenton, with some dramatized details thrown in. The fact that the worlds of both shows feel so similar is a chilling indictment of the failure of The Wire's chief objectives - to politically agitate change in the system - and explains why Simon didn't reboot The Wire in its place. If The Wire held hope that the system was flawed but not corrupt, We Own This City takes a step further. It's a sequel to The Wire in spirit, because it answers the original's hopes resoundingly with a fear that everything is a lot more broken than it seemed.
There are still good cops, working in the right way, but policing in We Own This City is morally repugnant at a street level and failing at its most basic objectives. To protect and serve. Jon Bernthal's opening monologue in front of new recruits sets out his stall perfectly: they don't care how we do it as long as we report the numbers. In a Baltimore still rocking after the criminal killing of Freddie Gray in police custody, and with police brutality scrutinized, the GTTF were hailed for putting up numbers, and getting out there and making arrests when they were on a decline. As Josh Charles' Daniel Hersl and his 50 public complaints of brutality prove, policing in Baltimore is a numbers game. The Wire was about a system in decline that was failing people by ignoring their welfare and "real crime" thanks to an obsession with the War On Drugs, but We Own This City is about the system revealing its horrific priorities. Numbers over people. The Wire and We Own This City aren't linked directly, but it's impossible not to see how they fit together.
On top of the narrative and symbolic themes that We Own This City and The Wire share, there are a number of The Wire actors who return in the 2022 show. Delaney Williams plays BPD Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, having played Sgt. Jay Landsman on The Wire; Marlo Stanfield actor Jamie Hector returns to Simon's Baltimore to play Detective Sean M. Suiter; Tray Chaney (who played Poot Carr) plays Narcotics investigator Gordon Hawk, and Bobby J. Brown plays GTTF member Thomas Allers having played Officer Bobby Brown in The Wire. The Wire's Donut, Nathan Corbett also returns as a Baltimore criminal; Detective Herc Haulk (Domenick Lombardozzi) appears as the head of the police union; Chris Canton (who played Savino Bratton) turns up, and The Wire supporting actors like Kevin Murray and Seth Hurwitz both got the call for We Own This City too.
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We Own This City releases every Monday on HBO.
Simon is a veteran editor who has been writing online since 2010 - long before anyone wanted to read his work. He loves Clueless. Like, a lot.