'We Own This City' review: Gritty and great

WHAT IT'S ABOUT In 2015, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal) was lauded as a hero cop who had been running the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) Gun Trace Task Force — an elite unit created to get guns off the street and fight violent crime. In 2017, he and six other task force officers were indicted on federal racketeering charges, accused of robbery, extortion and overtime fraud. (He's now serving 25 years at a federal prison in Kentucky).

Adapted from the 2021 book, "We Own This City," by former Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, "City" charts the rise and fall of Jenkins, as well as accomplices Dets. Momodu "G-Money" Gondo (McKinley Belcher III), Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles) and Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson). It's also about how a pair of hard-nosed investigators, FBI agent Erika Jensen (Dagmara Domińczyk) and BPD investigator John Sieracki (Don Harvey), built the case.

This six-parter was written by longtime collaborators George Pelecanos, Ed Burns and David Simon.

MY SAY "We Own This City'' reunites three star writers from "The Wire '' (Simon, Pelecanos, Burns), so comparisons with their long-ago classic are inevitable. Same city, same streets, same grit, same dysfunction. By adding Simon's other landmark series, "Homicide: Life on the Street,'' to this list, their portrait of Baltimore is now the TV equivalent of Picasso's portrait of Guernica. The horror is permanently affixed, or fixed as long as there are TVs around and reruns to see them on.

Before asking what Baltimore did to deserve this fate, it may be worth noting that the comparisons are also somewhat superficial. The events of Fenton's book and newspaper series are so recent that this is closer to explanatory journalism than a TV entertainment. This frequently tracks like that, too. There are time jumps, shifting points of view and a huge cast of characters all circling around the central one — Bernthal's Jenkins, who is at once cocky, insecure, self-pitying and delusional.

The explanatory part is here, too, albeit far more refracted. In interviews after his Sun series ran, Fenton explained that police reforms in the wake of Freddie Gray's 2015 death led to genuine gains — getting illegal guns off the streets — which also created the sort of culture where someone like Jenkins could thrive.

That cruel paradox is the story of "We Own This City," and to an extent, the horror, too. The fallout from Gray's death led to police resignations, work slowdowns, then resurgent crime and more guns on the streets. Meanwhile, funds to the BPD were also cut. Against this backdrop, Jenkins' stature actually grew. Little did anyone know. (He was eventually tripped up by a wire surveillance, a key storyline in the early episodes.)

By the final episode, retired detective Brian Grabler (Treat Williams) spells out the utter futility for Department of Justice attorney Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku) who had been investigating the BPD: "We've achieved nothing but full prisons and routine brutality and a complete collapse of trust between police departments and their cities." In the context of this city, and this series, that actually ranks as gross understatement.

Like most Simon-Burns-Pelecanos heroes, those of "We Own This City'' end up bitterly disillusioned, or worse. If you want to find out what happened to Det. Sean Suiter (Jamie Hector), briefly associated with the Gun Trace squad, then watch the HBO Max documentary "The Slow Hustle," which arrived last fall. Considering how Hector portrays him here — recall his Jerry Edgar from "Bosch '' but this time a loving father of five — his particular tragedy is profound.

Blame all of this on one truly dirty cop? In fact, "We Own This City" finds all sorts of culprits, human and otherwise. Mostly, it stares into the abyss and the abyss stares back.

BOTTOM LINE A brilliant piece of work, also profoundly dispiriting.