We Own This City review: A great show about corrupt cops and the corrupt society around them

What happened to our cultural reckoning with TV cops? After the murder of George Floyd led to global protests, the future of onscreen police looked grim. Now Dick Wolf's Law & Order franchise has re-expanded, there's a universe for The Rookie, and the CBS procedural spin-offs have spin-offs in their spin-offs. Highbrow skepticism about play-by-their-own-rules detectives faded when Mare hit Easttown. Tough-on-crime electioneering has already trickled down to television, where well-funded paramilitary hero police defend good citizens from obvious bad dudes. Welcome to 2022, where 2020 never happened.

So thank holy hell for We Own This City, a blistering and brilliant cop show about the corrosion of American law enforcement and America itself. Jon Bernthal stars as Wayne Jenkins, the swagger-jacked poster boy for the Baltimore PD. He's a sergeant in the Gun Trace Task Force, a plain-clothes unit that gets weapons and drugs off the street. They are also, we quickly discover, hysterically corrupt. Their crimes are constant: Dollar-bricks stashed in bulletproof vests, narcotics fenced on the street. They claim overtime despite not working a full shift; they claim overtime when they're on vacation.

Co-creators George Pelecanos and David Simon expand their miniseries (airing Mondays on HBO) far beyond this scandalous behavior. The premiere opens with Wayne delivering a cadet lecture against police brutality. The timing is auspicious. It's 2017, two years after the death of Freddie Gray exploded Baltimore's streets. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) intercuts Wayne's speech with a montage of systemic brutality: One young Black man after another thrown to the ground, tossed into jail, and sent into a legal nightmare. The sequence is overwhelming, a symphony of pointless degradation. You realize Wayne and his pals are a symptom of a larger disease. Expect no cure. The patient is dying, and they are us.

Paul Schiraldi/HBO Jon Bernthal and Jamie Hector in 'We Own This City'

It's familiar turf for the producers, who worked together on Simon's landmark series The Wire. City adapts Justin Fenton's nonfiction book, though it still feels like a spiritual sequel to The Wire's (fictional) panorama. Familiar faces from the previous show take new roles here, most centrally Jamie Hector as thoughtful homicide detective Sean Suiter. This is another huge-cast, swirling-tendrils-of-narrative saga. It trusts you to care about federal consent decrees, and hopes you won't look away when things get worse.

In just six episodes, City technically covers more chronological ground than The Wire. There are interrogation-room flashforwards, where FBI Agent Jensen (Dagmara Domińczyk) and Internal Affairs Officer Sieracki (Don Harvey) interview various people about various skullduggeries. Wayne's origin story stretches back to his rookie days walking the beat. There are a couple more detectives in a couple other counties. Don't forget Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), a Department of Justice attorney researching the BPD's broader culture. She discovers an epidemic of disregarded complaints, many centering on Officer Hersl (Josh Charles), who eats civil liberties for breakfast.

City closely examines how a fixation on numbers ("If the murder rate goes down, the mayor gets to be governor") turned the BPD into a culture of stat-hunters, racking up pointless arrests and meaningless "victories" in the War on Drugs. You witness an epochal shift in law enforcement, watching how the entire job of policing becomes focused on detaining (Black) people just for loitering in known drug zones (read: Black neighborhoods). City tracks that huge story with tiny details. We find out that Homicide gets crappier parking spaces than the drug warriors. We find out that it is almost impossible to build a jury of 12 Baltimore citizens because too many citizens have personally witnessed a police officer lie.

The mystery of how all this happened is involving, even thrilling, and the cacophony-of-character approach offers multiple perspectives. We meet Sean when he's new to Homicide, using old-fashioned police work to solve a mystery. Delaney Williams played the wonderfully venal Sergeant Landsman on The Wire, and City promotes him into Comissionerhood. As Kevin Davis, he keeps saying the right things about changing the department's culture — even as he fails to take the worst offenders out of uniform. Conversely, City never forgets the victims of over-policing, following lost jobs and broken lives. At one point, Nicole and her co-workers listen to the track "Tired" by local rapper Young Moose, which namechecks Hersl as a problem cop. Of course, Nicole goes to interview Young Moose, and of course, Young Moose plays himself.

Directing every episode, Green brings a relaxed tension to heavy dialogue material. The interrogation scenes offer standout moments for all the actors, though special credit to Darrell Britt-Gibson, who finds an unexpected note of bemusement at everything the department lets him get away with. There are also some genuine stunner setpieces, including a mid-series recreation of the Freddie Gray protests.

Bernthal dominates the first episode, with flagrant facial hair and meowing Bodymore "oh"s. But City often pushes him to the background, approaching him from exterior perspectives which reveal ever-pettier motivations. You realize Wayne thinks he's the Punisher and doesn't realize he's the bad kid in a drug PSA swearing "Everybody's doing it!" His moral fall would be pitiful, if his simultaneous ascension up the ranks wasn't so disturbing. Mosaku has a harder role, patiently listening to explanations of how the Drug War went wrong. Her subplot is the most dialectic, by which I mean it has all the ranting. That could be a problem, especially with such a relatively short runtime. Six episodes for a story this massive feels like a do-more-with-less situation. I worried initially that a lot of the Simon-Pelecanos flavor was getting lost to pure-plot momentum.

But City rewards the patient viewer, and earns its most passionate rants. Hector is astounding as a decent man and a good cop struggling with his own past in the department. "Working drugs? That wasn't my finest hour," he says. "I mean, that s--- was pointless, really. And I saw some things." In the screener HBO sent to critics, there is a full 12-second pause after that last phrase, "saw some things," with Hector's sad eyes communicating unspeakable activities committed on the borderland of modern-day law and order. Meanwhile, Domińczyk and Harvey are my favorite investigative duo in years, shading their rueful good humor into dawning disbelief at how deep the rot goes. Charles defenestrates his stylish Good Wife image, bringing Hersl to life as a monster of why-not oppression. Minor characters make a major impact. Thaddeus Street, so good as The Deuce's Black Frankie, gives a heartbreaking performance as a family man whose life gets upended by casual cop larceny.

There's a mood you only get from shows produced by David Simon: Authentic, sprawling, angry yet clinical. We Own This City is all that in a shot glass, six fleet hours of simmering rage. You'll never watch another cop show the same way again. A

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