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.
I reviewed this week’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.
Tags: decider, reviews, TV, TV reviews, we own this city