Regardless, We Own This City doesn't differentiate itself enough from The Wire to make it feel like appointment viewing, but it does have The Wire's nuanced, journalistic-style writing, humanistic portrayals of characters (especially its Black characters on both sides of the "thin blue line"), and an urge to showcase Baltimore as a city struggling to embrace is positives and find itself. Fans of The Wire should find plenty to appreciate in We Own This City, as long as they aren't seeking something wholly new.
Even those viewers familiar with the recent history of the Baltimore Police Department and the Gun Trace Task Force scandal may struggle initially to follow the narrative, but eventually, the pieces come together. Many HBO viewers will likely be shocked by the casual brutality and broad daylight crimes of the Gun Trace Task Force, a supposedly elite plainclothes unit that operated more like a street gang with police impunity. Not much in We Own This City will surprise informed Baltimoreans at this point, though it will no doubt re-anger, frustrate, and dishearten Charm City citizens. Some may question if the department is capable of reform.
We Own This City, the next installment in David Simon's iconic television shows about Baltimore cops, is set to premiere on HBO Max; here's how many episodes viewers should expect and when the finale will air. We Own This City follows Simon's influential creations like The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Streets, and The Corner into the often gritty Baltimore PD, this time with a focus on the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force. The limited series, portraying true events in Baltimore in the mid-2010s, includes references to Freddie Gray's death in police custody, as well as the rising crime rates of the East Coast metropolis.
A highly acclaimed journalistic masterpiece and true crime classic, Homicide illustrates a year in the life of the detectives of the Homicide Unit in the city of Baltimore. David Simon, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, spent 4 years on the police beat before taking a leave of absence to write this book.
The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known - and cautiously avoided - by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad.
In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.
In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945 and whose restaurant soon became the rage throughout the city and the chief watering hole for celebrities, diplomats, sports figures, and mobsters.
They were the DeMeo gang - the most deadly hit men in organized crime. Their Mafia higher-ups came to know, use, and ultimately fear them as the Murder Machine. They killed for profit and for pleasure, following cold-blooded plans and wild whims, from the mean streets of New York to the Florida Gold Coast, and from coast to coast. Now complete with personal revelations of one of the key players, this is the savage story that leaves no corpse unturned in its terrifying telling.
In this urgent book, award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton distills hundreds of interviews, thousands of court documents, and countless hours of video footage to present the definitive account of the entire scandal. The result is an astounding, riveting feat of reportage about a rogue police unit, the city they held hostage, and the ongoing struggle between American law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve.
We Own This City is based on the book of the same name by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, and will be a six-hour limited series chronicling the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force, detailing the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work.
Jon Bernthal has quickly become one of the most sought-after actors on both the big and small screen thanks to roles in the likes of Marvel's The Punisher, The Walking Dead, The Wolf of Wall Street and Baby Driver. He is due to appear in another HBO project later this year, The Many Saints of Newark, which will act as a prequel to HBO's influential crime drama series The Sopranos. Set in the 1960s and 1970s in Newark, New Jersey, the movie will use the 1967 riots in the city as a backdrop for tensions between the Italian-American and African-American communities, with Bernthal starring as Tony Soprano's father, Giovanni "Johnny Boy" Soprano.
The HBO true-crime drama does this by examining the rise of ex-sergeant Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) in the Baltimore Police Department, his and the GTTF's actions, and the two-year federal investigation that resulted in their arrest and imprisonment.
Fourteen years after its fifth and final season came to a close, The Wire is often held up as one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Now new series We Own This City is taking us back to the streets of Baltimore for a thrilling six-part drama based on a true story and set once more in the city's Police Department.
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For decades the city was essentially run by militias, of which the police were one. During the period when the GTTF was active, inmates from a criminal gang, the Black Guerrilla Family, were in charge of the local jail. Tavon White, the most senior BGF member in the Baltimore City Detention Facility, fathered five children by four prison guards and bought a BMW and a Mercedes-Benz while inside (Loney was his second in command). The police treat areas of high poverty and high crime like occupied territories, criminalising communities and using force as the first resort. There is little democratic oversight and few legal consequences when they overstep the mark.
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