How deep does that villainy go? There’s the rub, with the show and with [David] 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.
I’m covering We Own This City for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.
Tags: decider, reviews, TV, TV reviews, we own this city