We Own This City (series) review: A bit too long

Released in April of this year, We Own This City is a HBO limited series based on true events in Maryland involving police corruption and suspected abuse of power. While 6 episodes doesn't seem like a lot, I feel as though this entire thing could have been done in a 90 minute movie easily and don't really understand why they decided to stretch it out. I've actually never understood this about a lot of series that seem to be unnecessarily drawn out especially if all of the episodes are released at the same time. In We Own This City they did release the episodes week-by-week so I would imagine that this was their motivation to make it so long and I really don't like this trend.

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The only immediately recognizable star in this for most people is going to be Jon Bernthal, who is an actor that I still have a grudge against because he was involved in ruining one of my favorite superheroes, The Punisher. That was another series that was intentionally and unnecessarily drawn out across a ton of episodes with so much filler that people lost interest very quickly, even a die-hard fan like me who had the original comic book as a kid.

We Own This City isn't that bad but while the story is good, it is told from so many different angles that you just get kind of bored. I know I did and I found myself reaching for my phone to look at other things while it was on the screen across the room from me. In my world, this is always a sign that the producers have done something wrong with their production. At least in this case it was intentional so they could release one episode a week between the 25th of April and the 30th of May. For people that were actually tuning in on time in order to only watch one episode a week, this might have been ok. To people like me that had all 6 episodes at once it was more of a "get on with it already!" type situation.

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Based somewhat on true events, this WOTC focuses on plainclothes officers in Baltimore and how they were charged with keeping crime rates down even if their methods didn't follow the law. We see in this series how people are rounded up for loitering en masse, only to have the charges dropped at the jailhouse if they sign a paper stating they are not allowed to sue the city for wrongful arrest. While this method is definitely unethical, it actually did work in reducing crime. I do like that the presentation, which at first seem anti-cop in nature, shows that while these methods did in-fact affect innocent people, the end result was one of a lot more peace and a lot less crime.

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They also would kick in the doors of suspected crack-houses without warrants and the cops would keep a lot of the drugs and money that they found for themselves. While this is primarily presented as being bad, it also showcases that the methods they used were actually very effective in reducing crime. I don't pretend to speak for the makers of the show but I believe that they were trying to be fair to the police force and show that while they knew what they were doing wasn't "by the book" that the criminals are very aware of how the "book" works and other methods had to be used in order for them to be able to do their jobs. It also shows how the corruption wasn't specific to just this one unit, but it actually went all the way up to the top to politicians that needed lowered crime rate statistics in order to keep their jobs.

I'm not going to spoil the story for anyone that wants to watch this because I think that for people that enjoyed The Wire this might scratch exactly that sort of itch but instead, it is based on real life events and real people.

Should I watch it?

This is a tough one to answer because overall I feel that the story is good and my only gripe with it is that it is far more long than it needed to be. Some people don't mind this but I have a very low attention span and a low tolerance threshold for unnecessary storyline details that are there solely for the sake of achieving a certain number of episodes. The increased length of the series doesn't do much for the overall picture and I think the producers were very aware of this. That being said, the acting is done very well including and especially the performance by Jon Bernthal. If I were you I would fire this up with my remote in hand because I can all but assure that you are going to be using it to skip large swaths of what I consider to be unnecessary material.

As is normal in most series, the first and last episodes are far more gripping than everything in-between and honestly, I think you could probably only watch those two and still understand the full story.