It is already undeniable, and much more so after the first official trailer, that The City is Ours is a spiritual sequel to The Wire. The new series created by David Simon with George Pelecanos is based on real events and tells the story of the rise and decline of the Baltimore Police Special Weapons Tracking Force and the consequences it had for the city.
In 2015, the death under suspicious circumstances of Freddie Gray, a young black man in police custody, caused riots throughout the city. That year Baltimore got a new record for murders. Social and political pressure forced the mayor to take measures that concretely modify the social context. One such measure is the opening of a special force led by Sergeant Wayne Jenkins whose main objective was to free the streets of weapons and drugs. But this boundless elite unit brought police corruption to a new state.
The script for the mini-series was written by David Simon with George Pelecanos, Ed Burns and William F. Zorzi. The base story is the book by Justin Fenton - a journalist for The Baltimore Sun newspaper - called “We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Police and Corruption”. The starting point is a letter from prisoner Umar Burley who wanted to tell his truth and arrives at the Baltimore Federal Court. That was the first clue to a history of still shocking scopes.
From this story, the plot of We Own This City was born, the original name of the six-part fiction whose directors were George Pelecanos (The Deuce) himself and Reinaldo Marcus Green, who came from directing King Richard.
“In a city of 620,000 inhabitants, the police department reported more than 300,000 pedestrian boardings in the last five years,” describes the situation Nicole Steele, played by Lovecraft Country and Loki actress Wunmi Mosaku, in the series preview. The figures come from the book written by Fenton who investigated the real case. “It's a wake-up call to serious problems and serious solutions needed,” the author made clear in a note to Variety magazine.
It is one of the most media and conflictive cases of corruption by the US police and not a decade has passed since these events mentioned, so the aftermath must still remain latent. In this context. David Simon and team, who know Baltimore and how to bring it to the screen, took the book and the story, summoned several of their oldest collaborators and gave life to The City Is Ours.
The cast of this fiction consists of Jon Bernthal (Those Who Wish My Death, The Wolf of Wall Street, King Richard), Treat Williams (Two Fathers in Distress, The Ghost), Josh Charles (SWAT), Jamie Hector (The Wire, Bosch) and Domenick Lombardozzi (The Irishman). There is also HBO star Wunmi Mosaku, Darrell Britt-Gibson (Three Ads for a Crime) and Delaney Williams (The Wire).
The city is ours will premiere in the HBO Max catalog on April 25, 2022.
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