Oughta Get a Nod: We Own This City and its dynamic star Jon Bernthal

The last time David Simon won an Emmy, his competition was Christ. In 2000, HBO's searing The Corner defeated CBS' Jesus for Outstanding Miniseries. Simon spent the next two decades delivering one magnificent national indictment after another, from the epic metropolitan flail of The Wire through Treme and The Deuce. A key collaborator on all those works was novelist George Pelecanos, who co-created The Deuce and wrote on every season of The Wire. The TV Academy threw occasional bones to their work — a writing nod here, a Sound Mixing prize there — but it is past time to recognize the boldness and texture of their kind of television.

Which means it's time to hurl some (now-renamed) Limited Series nominations at We Own This City, a six-part HBO cop drama co-created by Pelecanos and Simon. City gives the always-great Jon Bernthal the role of a lifetime as Wayne Jenkins, a hard-charging cop beloved by his superiors and his fellow officers…until years of illegal behavior cast a shadow on his career, his police department, and the entire modern state of policing. A true ensemble, City also features mesmerizing performances by Jamie Hector (as a good cop caught up in Jenkins' corroding influence) and Josh Charles (as a brutal yet untouchable cop).

Paul Schiraldi/HBO Rob Brown, Ham Mukasa, Robert Harley, and Jon Bernthal in the HBO limited series 'We Own This City.'

Like The Wire before it, the series never loses sight of the regular people whose lives are ruined by systemic forces beyond their control. Humane, thrilling, and infuriating, City laps all the glossier true-life miniseries currently infesting our screens with a vital frontline depiction of American unrest.

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