After months of inane true-crime television in the form of hucksters and dating-app swindlers, HBO redeems the genre, returning to its early 2000s crime drama roots with We Own This City. The series, from The Wire creator David Simon and writer/producer (and, also, Wire alumnus) George Pelecanos, follows the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, members of whom were indicted on federal racketeering charges in 2017, including former leader of the task force, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal in the series).The series is based on the book “We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption,” by former Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, which chronicles the task force’s corrupt activities and ultimate crackdown by the FBI. (The same task force was the subject of another recent book, “I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad.”) The New York Times noted that the book was “clearly inspired by ‘The Wire’,” a fact that comes full circle with Wire writers Simon and Pelecanos now turning the story into a television series. Like The Wire, which is based on events and personalities involved in the Baltimore criminal and law enforcement spaces of the 1990s, We Own This City is also a Baltimore crime story that doubles as an American crime story—this one set between 2015 and 2017. It’s connection both to Fenton’s book and to its television predecessor means that viewers can expect hyperrealism in the story’s depictions of historical events and proceedings.Simon… Click below to read the full story from Men’s Health
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We Own This City Is Based on the True Story of Wayne Jenkins and Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force
