‘We Own This City’ Episode 1 Recap: The Untouchables

“Can’t fuck with Superman.” So says Sgt. Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), on his way into a Baltimore Police Department building for what he believes will be a fairly routine investigation by Internal Affairs. He’ll end the day in handcuffs, but his self-aggrandizing proclamation of superhero status deserves careful consideration. We Own This City Episode 1 opens with a sequence that cuts between his time as a beat cop, showing him effortlessly smashing a man’s bottle of booze just because he can, and his time as the head of a high-profile, high-powered BPD unit, lecturing fellow cops about when and when not to beat the shit out of people on the streets. Everyone likes beating people up now and then, he says, but there’s a right way to go about it. Wouldn’t Superman say something similar when asked about how he deals with Lex Luthor? If Superman saw a major chunk of the American population as a series of interchangeable Lex Luthors, would that make a difference?

Based on the book of the same name by Justin Fenton, We Own This City tells the story of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force, lauded for its success until its own rampant, gang-like criminality was exposed. Indeed, the episode opens with one of the Task Force’s members, Momodu Gondo (McKinley Belcher III), being interrogated like a regular old gangster; only later, via flashbacks, do we see that his gang color is blue, so to speak. In one key sequence, he helps other cops raid a low-level dealer’s apartment, cleaning it out and pocketing the profits in cahoots with the guy’s former supplier. Imagine Omar from The Wire with a badge, no scruples, and a generous pension plan, and you’re halfway there.

Nibbling around the edges of the case at this early stage are a trio of cops from neighboring counties, McDougall (David Corenswet), Hawk (Tray Chaney), and Kilpatrick (Larry Mitchell). Hoping to catch the supplier of a bad batch of heroin that has led to multiple overdoses, they pool their resources and track a dealer to his home, only to discover that the place has already been cleaned out. Their only lead is a second tracking device Hawk discovers beneath the suspect’s car, one loaned out to a member of the Task Force. Rather than return it, McDougall opts to hang on to it, just in case.

In a parallel storyline, Wunmi Mosaku and Ian Duff play Nicole Steele and Ahmed Jackson, two members of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division brought in during the waning days of the Obama adminstration to monitor the BPD in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray at the department’s hands. They deal with a political establishment that has essentially thrown in the towel, a police force that refuses to do its nominal job now that it’s under scrutiny, and hyper-abusive cops like the infamous Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), who has the proverbial long-as-your-arm rap sheet but is still on the streets. (He bashes some poor guy’s head in over nothing at all in one of the episode’s more disturbing scenes, though another in which he humiliates a man in front of his kid for no reason is equally upsetting in its own way.) Can they achieve anything against those odds, with the threat of a Trump administration looming? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Jon Bernthal is the star of the show, by every metric that the word “star” implies. He earns his top billing with his physical presence alone. When his Wayne Jenkins is busy being fêted by his fellow cops or conducting the kind of raid that has earned him his reputation as a cop’s cop, there’s a genial, loping quality to his movements, as if he’s a man entirely at home in the world. It’s worth comparing and contrasting the work he does here to the streamlined, somehow paranoid movements of his character Frank Castle on The Punisher, just to see how he can create multiple tough guys with seemingly no overlapping characteristics. (I mean, the incredible Baltimore accent with which he speaks here is enough to differentiate him from the Noo Yawkisms of the Punisher all by itself.)

But when he gets arrested by the FBI on his way to what he believes is a routine Internal Affairs meeting? That’s when Jenkins gets really scary. Look in his eyes as he sits in that interrogation room—“black eyes, like a doll’s eyes,” as Quint from Jaws would put it—and you’ll see nothing, nothing but deadly rage. That look alone is enough to send the police commissioner (Delaney Williams) out of the room with a single, disgusted word: “Fuck.”

“The rest of them looked away,” says the commissioner after he leaves the room, referring to other cops swept up in the bust. “Not this motherfucker. Not for a second.” And indeed, Jenkins’s response when the Feds come to talk to him is, in essence, disbelief that a man like him could ever be treated so disrespectfully. “Do you guys know who I am?” he asks, but the question is rhetorical. He knows who he is—an untouchable—and how dare anyone question it. One episode in and you can tell he’ll be a villain worth remembering.

But how deep does that villainy go? There’s the rub, with the show and with Simon’s work as a whole. Starting with The Wire, Simon opened a lot of eyes to the rank brutality, corruption, and racism of the War on Drugs, and for that he is to be commended. But…well, let’s quote from the blurb HBO PR attached to advance screeners of the show: “We Own This City chronicles…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.” This presupposes, of course, that somewhere out there exists “actual police work” divorced from these cruel, classist, and racist policies; it ignores the possibility that cruelty, classism, and racism are in fact the real work that the institution of policing exists to do. For all his fire and brimstone, Simon is a garden-variety cop-respecting Bernie-bashing solidarity-undermining centrist in many respects; he doesn’t question bedrock supposition that policing is, at its heart, pretty good, and could perhaps be made to be pretty good overall. So, as you did in The Wire, you’re going to see a few heroic cops fighting to reform the system from within, shoring up the romantic ideal of police work even as the show purports to undermine that ideal.

It’s true that the show has already set up several villainous forms of policing: the drug war, obviously, but also the criminalization of “driving while Black” and “walking while Black,” individual abusive cops, the zeal for high arrest numbers that keeps such cops on the beat, et cetera. But how do you square this with the fact, attested to in this very episode, that after the killing of Freddie Gray and the uprising (the show puts the term in sneer quotes by making it a buzzword for mealy-mouthed lib politicians) that followed, the vast majority of Baltimore police simply stopped doing their jobs, in a work slowdown meant to protest against basically any scrutiny of their tactics or consequences for their abusive brethren? Either bad policy and individual bad apples are to blame, or an entire metropolitan police department can say “fuck you” to the people they’re supposed to protect and stop working. One or the other is true. There’s no middle ground to be staked out here.

But that middle ground is where We Own This City lives, to its detriment. Does that make it bad television? Not if you’re aware of its limitations as agitprop and appreciative of its success as a piece of filmmaking. Bernthal’s performance makes it worth the price of admission, and director Reinaldo Marcus Green sets up several memorable, appropriately ominous shots: Jenkins’s expert twirling of his nightstick at the start of the episode, say, or the long slow zoom in on the BPD’s doors as Jenkins unwitting approaches his own arrest. As was the case on The Wire, the physical business of police work makes for some memorable moments as well; I laughed out loud when Hawk retrieved his tracking device from the car, only to discover he’d actually grabbed a second, unknown tracking device. You can get a ton of dramatic mileage out of “oops, we stumbled into a much bigger case than we thought” on a cop show, and so far We Own This City is all about “a much bigger case than we thought.” How big, and how far the show is willing to go to prosecute it, is an open question.

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.