Critic Reviews

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) gracefully blends shocking violence with tense conference-room inquisitions.

A brilliant piece of work, also profoundly dispiriting.

Guided by recurring snapshots of Jenkins’ police logs and buoyed by a sterling cast that includes a number of The Wire alums, the series deftly tackles its saga from a variety of captivating angles. Best of all, We Own This City boasts the sort of comprehensive detail that’s the hallmark of truly great storytelling. From the minutia of BPD protocol and the strategic tactics of Jenkins and his criminal minions, to the competing priorities of different government factions, Simon energizes every incident, argument and skirmish with a depth of knowledge about how, from top to bottom, the system works.

Hector becomes another stellar example of how this cast allows just enough suppressed emotion to simmer at the surface. ... Even if the show didn’t use the device of police logs to explain when each vignette of Jenkins’ misdeeds occurred, Bernthal is also doing sharp work to help situate each stop along the timeline. Jenkins’ arc isn’t simply an evolution from clean-shaven academy grad to chin-bearded petty tyrant. There’s a full-bodied shift, however gradual.

Living with these characters is gutting, watching even the most well-intentioned find themselves embroiled in something so far-reaching that it poisons the water miles from the source, and Green’s tack for dramatizing even the most innocuous of moments is what drives this series and keeps your eyes glued to the screen despite the way your stomach might turn. There’s an urgency to everything every person on-screen does, whether it’s filing paperwork, raiding a home sans warrant, or contending with memories from their own past.

Simon is always most interested in the whys behind institutional scandals, and that seriousness of purpose sets “City” apart from so many true-crime dramas that spend more time inventorying weird details rather than explaining the broader strokes. ... “City’s” biggest flaw, one of the few it shares with other true-crime dramas, is a fractured chronology that emphasizes cleverness over comprehension. With this much happening at once, all the onscreen datelines in the world aren’t enough to avert the sense of being unmoored from time. But that may be a quibble for a show like “City.”

There are moments when the show seems more interested in making a case than telling a full-fledged story, and the timeline-jumping can get confusing despite the text from incident reports used as transitions and designed to to keep us grounded in the chronology of events. Nevertheless, it’s a vivid, richly detailed series, shot with gritty intimacy by director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) and worth watching for a host of reasons. A big one is Bernthal’s performance.

Sparked by a jittery live-wire performance from Jon Bernthal and anchored by incredibly smart dialogue, “We Own This City” is a stand-out mini-series in one of the most crowded periods of “Prestige Drama” in years.

This is, as almost all Simon joints are, an ensemble piece, though it does give Bernthal one of his most substantial roles to date, and he nails it. ... Like “The Wire,” “We Own This City” doesn’t shy away from the grunt work and monotony of police work – the overlapping circles of various crimes, cops, and agencies; the embedding of shop talk and regional slang in the dialogue (lots of good examples here, but I’ll be saying “ticky-tack nonsense” for a while); and most of all, a dizzying array of supporting characters, plotlines, and intermingling threads.

The engrossing HBO series manages to structure itself like a self-aware procedural that constantly asks us to question what we think we know about how criminality is conceived by and within police departments all over the country.