We Own This City Trailer: The Creator Of The Wire Returns With Another Story About Baltimore Corruption
HBO announced a little over a year ago that David Simon, the creator of the acclaimed series "The Wire," would be returning to Baltimore, Maryland to uncover more tales of corruption in a new limited series called "We Own This City." Based on the book of the same name by Baltimore Sun journalist Justin Fenton, the show takes place in the wake of Freddie Gray's murder in police custody where drug and violent crimes are surging and the cops were under extreme scrutiny. Yet, even with the added attention on the men and women tasked with protecting Baltimore, one sergeant and his unit exploited the system to get rich off the city and its citizens.
Now, ahead of the show's simultaneous premiere on HBO and HBO Max later this month, the network has unveiled the official trailer for the six-episode event.
Charm city fakes
As you can see from the trailer, Simon is joined by a number of "The Wire" alumni both on and off-screen. Behind the scenes, he developed "We Own This City" alongside George Pelecanos and they're joined by producers Nina K. Noble and Ed Burns. Meanwhile, Jamie Hector, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Domenick Lombardozzi, Trey Chaney, Delaney Williams, Jermaine Crawford, Anwan Glover, Chris Clanton, Nathan Corbett, Maria Broom, Susan Rome, and Michael Salconi all return to HBO for the series, but some look to have very different roles than when we last saw them in Baltimore.
In addition to the wonderful talent reuniting 20 years later, this series also features a multitude of extremely accomplished individuals including "King Richard" filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green as the director and executive producer of the project, "Loki" star Wunmi Mosaku as attorney Nicole Steele, and Jon Bernthal of "The Walking Dead" and "The Punisher" as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the central figure in the unprecedented corruption taking place within the Gun Trace Task Force. It'll definitely be interesting to see Bernthal pull a complete 180 from Frank Castle with his strict code of honor to Wayne Jenkins' lack of honor. He's shown the magnitude of his range in a number of his recent projects, so it'll be interesting to see him continue to branch out into unique roles.
For more information on the story, here's the official synopsis from the press release for the trailer:
"We Own This City" chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force and 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.
In the 2000s, the Baltimore Police Department struggled to respond to crime with meaningful police work, giving itself over to mass arrest and drug warring instead. "We Own This City" shows how the department's desperate reliance on statistics over substance eventually led to the inability of department officials to supervise the Gun Trace Task Force and the further inability of the department to discipline rogue police. At the time of the GTTF scandal in 2017, though there were numerous indications of corruption within several plainclothes units going back almost a decade, Baltimore police commanders held to the belief that any street unit that could bring in guns and drugs consistently had to be championed and protected. "We Own This City" depicts the inevitable corruption of a unit given this carte blanche.
"We Own This City" debuts on HBO and HBO Max on Monday, April 25, 2022.