‘We Own This City’ Episode 5 Recap: Show Me a Hero

In other hands, We Own This City would be a black comedy rather than a drama. I mean, how else can you interpret the thousand sins by which the men of the Gun Trace Task Force went about their job of shaking people down under the cover of their badges? They pull a guy over on his way home from picking up pizza. They do “Take Your Child to Work Day” during what amounts to an armed robbery. They show up to work late and collect thousands of dollars in overtime. Their ringleader, Wayne Jenkins, pretends to be with the US attorney’s office in order to shake down an arrestee. It isn’t hard to imagine these developments being deployed as punchlines. The show’s greatest strength, I think, is refusing to do so—treating these ridiculous developments at he grievous crimes against American citizens that they really are.

But there’s a deeper problem with We Own This City, one that transcends its strengths and weaknesses as agitprop or institutional critique, and it’s on full display in this week’s episode. Dramatically speaking, what We Own This City lacks is characters.

Oh sure, there are plenty of people in the show, some of whose names you might even be able to remember from one week to the next. But the vast majority of those people can be split into one of two camps: exposition givers and exposition receivers.

Many of the show’s most prominent roles—investigators Sieracki, Jensen, and Wise; DOJ employees Steele and Jackson—fall into the latter category; their role is simply to interview or interrogate other people about what the hell is going on, so that we in the audience can learn.

Then there’s the other camp, the exposition givers. Crooked cops like Gondo and Rayam and Ward, people in power like the mayor and the chief of police, guest stars like Treat Williams’s cop-turned-professor Brian Grabler: They respond to the interrogators’ and interviewers’ questions to deliver information that the show then passes along to us viewers.

Both halves of the equation are dramatically inert. There’s the occasional flash of human interest I suppose, like Jensen’s flute playing (Sieracki, predictably, asks if she knows any Jethro Tull), but for the most part these people are walking, breathing Wikipedia articles or Baltimore Sun investigations. They don’t function the way characters in a drama are supposed to, living and changing and growing and surprising us.

Those qualities are reserved for just a precious few figures on the show. Wayne Jenkins is the most obvious case, and boy oh boy does the episode ever come alive in the rare instances when he shows up on screen, blasting the Geto Boys in his patrol car or testing a young cop’s willingness to break the rules. (The kid says fuck no, and sure enough, he’s bounced out of the squad.)

Hersl, Jenkins’s colleague and a legendarily brutal cop in his own right, is another possible exception—a dark folk hero, a reverse Robin Hood who steals from the poor to give to himself. On the flipside, there’s Sean Suiter, the honest cop who greatly benefits from actor Jamie Hector’s magnetic screen presence. If there’s any justice in the world, artistically speaking, Suiter and Jenkins will get into at least one major throwdown before the end.

But unfortunately, there is little justice in the world, inside or outside the small screen, and Jenkins and Suiter’s respective fates are already written in stone. If only the series starring them both could have properly immortalized them by giving them a fertile dramatic environment in which to live, instead of rattling off talking points.

And there’s still the nagging question of whether those talking points go far enough. Grabler, the scholarly cop, claims that everything changed for the police when the phrase “war on drugs” was deployed, positioning police as a colonizing force in a war against the very citizens it’s ostensibly their job to protect. But take a look at the behavior of cops across the country prior to the War on Drugs terminology. Would you say that, broadly speaking, the cops bashing heads in Selma or Newark were on the side of the people? Of course not! So why do David Simon and George Pelecanos say it? Who are you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.