'We Own This City' Is A Worthy Successor to 'The Wire'

Everybody agrees that We Own This City, David Simon’s and George Pelecanos’s latest Baltimore epic, is an important show. It’s incisive—necessary, even. A fictionalization of Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s 2018 book, We Own This City is a spiritual successor to The Wire, telling the story of Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force, an elite plainclothes police team turned criminal syndicate. If Simon and Pelecanos explored a city in decay in The Wire, We Own This City concerns itself with a Baltimore Police Department that’s already been irredeemably atrophied by brutality and corruption. It’s an uncompromising look at the way that Baltimore and its police department have failed its citizens.

It’s also a really entertaining show.

But more than anything, Bernthal’s Jenkins is the show’s animating force. In Bernthal’s hands, Jenkins is all fidgety machismo and raw-nerve aggression. It’s a performance so visceral that it almost devours the entire show; every scene with Wayne Jenkins feels more alive than every scene without him. Rather than simply depicting Jenkins as an amoral monster, Bernthal brings such powerful charisma to the part that although you aren’t “rooting” for Jenkins, you can at least recognize the progression of his perverted inner logic. When Jenkins is snubbed at a barbecue, Bernthal makes you feel the personal injustice; when Jenkins lays out his plan to bilk the city out of overtime payments, Bernthal imbues his speech with a preacher’s rousing clarity of purpose. 

“As long as we [get guns], as long as we produce,” Bernthal says, “they don’t give a fucking shit what we do. We can literally do whatever the fuck we want. We own this city.”