Bernthal makes it clear that Jenkins does not see himself as a dirty cop—he reacts in horror several times when this allegation is made—but rather as a resourceful one, a guy who sees all the angles and commits a series of victimless crimes. The fact that innocent people are routinely brutalized and, in the case of one high-speed chase, accidentally killed during the course of his work doesn’t really concern him. He feels he meant well, and that’s all that matters.

That’s a tall order for any actor to convey, but Bernthal somehow makes it look easy. From underneath a series of world-historically unfortunate haircuts, his dark brown eyes radiate a sort of idiot good cheer. (When that good cheer goes away at the end of the story, those same eyes become the dim dark eyes of a hit dog, wondering what went so wrong.) Bernthal gives a physical performance that indeed makes Jenkins look like he owns this city and everyone in it. Indeed, he’s often polite to the point of comedy to the very people he arrests, robs, and/or frames. Why wouldn’t he be? He’s a good guy, right? Call it noblesse oblige, call it whatever you want: Bernthal radiates a lethal “who, me?” charm even at his character’s most brutal moments.

I tried to explain what makes Jon Bernthal so good for Decider.

And I’m left sounding like a broken record, because the show’s pros and cons have remained constant right up through the end. Jon Bernthal delivers a for-the-ages villain performance as Jenkins, the jolliest goon in the entire BPD. Jamie Hector imbues (relatively) good cop Sean Suiter with intensity and pathos. And the show’s thesis, repeated once again by Grabler, that the War on Drugs is what turned policing into the brutal business we know and loathe today still doesn’t hold water.

Look back through the history of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, environmental protests, gay liberation, fucking Prohibition, you name it—the police have been a brutally reactionary right-wing force for decades before the War on Drugs’ militaristic terminology took effect. Writer-creator David Simon’s belief in some platonic ideal of Good Policing, something that once existed and which could perhaps be revived if the drug war were abandoned, remains his and the show’s biggest blind spot.

I reviewed the finale of We Own This City for Decider.

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.

When I think of how Jenkins is portrayed in this episode, I think of Henry Hill’s description of Jimmy Conway in GoodFellas: “What he really loved to do was steal. I mean, he actually enjoyed it.” In scene after scene, Jenkins makes out like a bandit. He robs drug dealers. He robs drug dealers twice, first by looting their car, then by going to their house and looting it, too. He robs a stripper, taking back the money he gave her and then some. He robs a couple of guys raiding a Rite Aid for oxycontin, then takes the drugs to his crooked bail bondsman friend to make money off the stuff he looted from the looters. He robs a dealer’s safe, then stages a video re-creation of the looting of the safe so that the missing money never goes in the public record. And in a sense, he robs all the other crooked cops in his circle by constantly keeping the lion’s share of each haul for himself. The dude just can’t help himself.

But it’s the larger community of Baltimore he’s really robbing blind. As he explains to his fellow cops, he can take an 8-to-4 shift, show up to work at 2pm, and still make enough overtime to nearly double his salary. Why? Because during the hours where he actually quote-unquote does his job, he’s constantly “hunting,” busting heads and making arrests and seizing drugs and guns and money. “As long as we produce, as long as we put those numbers up, they don’t give a shit about what we do,” he explains. “We literally can do whatever the fuck we want.” And then the kicker: “We own this city.”

I reviewed last night’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.

It was the best of cops, it was the worst of cops. That’s the contrast established by We Own This City in its third episode, in which the paths of bad cop Wayne Jenkins and good cop Sean Suiter unexpectedly cross. But the unexpected team-up between Jenkins and Suiter—once old friends going back to their rookie days, apparently—reveals another layer to the show’s intricate interweaving of different plotlines and time frames. By now the show has firmly established Jenkins as a cowboy and Suiter as a straight arrow, in very separate storylines. Seeing them together as they raid a car wash that’s a front for a drug dealer has the effect of watching the stars of two different shows suddenly cross over and team up.

I reviewed this week’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.

We Own This City knows its chief weapon is Jon Bernthal, that’s for sure. The show’s second episode is full of lingering close-ups on his character Wayne Jenkins as he does, well, nothing really—sitting and waiting in an interrogation room, in a jail cell, wherever, just impatiently thinking about his next move. Bernthal’s black-eyed charisma here is just off the charts; even in doing nothing, Jenkins feels so dangerous you don’t want to come near him.

I reviewed this week’s episode of We Own This City for Decider.

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.