There is no podium of the best series in history (at least recently, from the so-called 'golden age of television') where 'The Wire' (2002) did not appear. Its creator, David Simon, made a majestic portrait in five seasons and 60 episodes of the decline of a city. Each season was a rotten layer of a cake that was already hard to sink your teeth into: from the police inefficiency of season one to the corruption of the port in the second; politics in the third; the poor quality of education in the fourth and the press sold in the fifth. The pie came out round, though the ingredients continued to rot in the Baltimore sun.
Now, David Simon returns to those streets with 'The city is ours', of which HBOMax premieres its first episode today (every week it will bring a new one, up to six).
Seen from journalistic material, this time by Justin Fenton (in 'The Wire' he was based on 'Homicide' and 'The Corner', his own essays), to narrate the rise and fall of the elite police unit that came to take out drugs from the streets and ended up putting it in their pockets.
Jon Brenthal in 'The City is Ours'
crime without punishment
It all came in 2015, with the streets of the city set on fire by Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in mysterious circumstances in police custody. It is not the only reason for social discontent: only in that year there were 342 homicides in a city with few more inhabitants than Malaga, 600.000. Thus was born the Special Weapons Tracking Force, a police unit with plainclothes agents that became a true mafia. Their goal was to clean up the streets, but along the way they learned to plant false evidence, keep money from the raids, and compete with the bad guys.
The rise and fall of these plainclothes villains and uniformed mobsters is the driving force behind David Simon (along with his screenwriter, George Pelecanos) to once again demonstrate that no one gives such a shine to the underworld of the cities.
Because Simon and Pelecanos know each other very well. They already worked together on 'The Wire', 'Treme' and co-created 'The Deuce'. Now they are back, they have collaborated in a world with which they are well known. During the 2022 Television Critics Association intake panel, Pelecanos said that he and Simon were happy to return to a city we know well. “You know the story of David in Baltimore. The book on which it is based was written by Justin Fenton, a reporter for the 'Baltimore Sun' and co-producer of the series. We wanted to go back to Baltimore, where we have a great team of collaborators. Coming back has been coming back with the family. We like to bring work to Baltimore, which is a good microcosm of the country, because it can be any American city,” said the writer and producer.
The level of corruption and police brutality depicted in 'The City Is Ours' is 'The Wire' taken to the nth degree. Simon explained that the officers involved in the Weapons Tracking Task Force weren't even at the academy when 'The Wire' ended, and 'The City Is Ours' explored the Baltimore police department's utter failure of policy after years war on drugs.
"The Baltimore department that we represent on 'The Wire' had its issues and was already engaged in a lot of bad policies that were, in fact, critical of The Wire," Simon explained. “But the Arms Tracing Task Force far exceeds what we have seen, it is a level of scandal, it referred to the fact that there were officers who sold drugs on the street, that was not happening in 2007. Not remotely,” he explained, for finish: "A generation later, the Police has become deeply dysfunctional and dystopian."
