© Prod.
Broadcast May 5 at 8:30 p.m. on BeTV
David Simon is today one of the heavyweights of fiction on television. Wiretapped (The Wire), his series about the drug trade in Baltimore, is often cited as the “greatest series of all time”. Since then, he has not been idle. Treme showed how New Orleans rebuilt itself, literally and figuratively, after Hurricane Katrina. The Deuce chronicles the rise of porn in the 70s and 80s in New York. But good.
Simon returns today to his favorite subject, Baltimore, by adapting a 6-episode miniseries We Own This City, the book of a journalist from the Baltimore Sun, where he also worked. This time, it’s the cops of the Gun Trace Task Force, a team of cops responsible for flushing out illegal firearms, which in 2017 was convicted of extortion. We attend the investigation which caused the fall of this brigade, but we also discover the reasons and the framework which pushed these agents to act in this way.
As the leader of this corrupt division, Jon Bernthal (The Walking Dead, The Punisher) excels, surrounded by a very good cast of supporting roles. The comparison with The Wire is inevitable, especially since those who interpreted drug dealers at the time embody… police officers. Series We Own This City is perhaps not as fine as its elder, it remains nonetheless fascinating and very strong, in particular thanks to a natural and realistic style of production, which we owe this time to Reinaldo Marcus Green, director of The Williams Method.