We Own This Media: White Liberalism and Prestige TV

You might feel confused on watching the David Simon, Ed Burns, and George Pelecanos joint We Own This City, an HBO miniseries on corruption in the Baltimore police force “after Freddie Gray” (more on this later) by the team that brought you The Wire. The new show evokes The Wire, yet if you didn’t know better you’d say it was made by people who’d never seen The Wire, since it specifically lacks every strength of that show. (Other than good acting, which we can’t really credit to writers and producers.) It has received inexplicably positive reviews. 

Maybe in the emperor’s-new-clothes regime of American media in 2022, if your show/movie/book is supposed to be good, well, it must be good. If it’s supposed to have the right politics, it must have the right politics.

My household (re)watched The Wire (which originally aired 2002–2008) during the pandemic. My housemate hadn’t seen it. The rest of us were curious to see how it held up, though I ended up mostly thinking about how poorly TV has held up, even when there’s so much more of it. Compared with most TV, it’s dignifying and even revelatory how The Wire respects its audience. Sometimes a character does something and you can figure out why, or what happened off-screen, based on what you infer from previous events—but none of this is spelled out. The show figures you can follow what’s happening even when characters use jargon or slang you may not know or speak in accents rarely broadcast on national media. You, the viewer, are trusted to do your part of the work. You are active, needed to think and feel connections, to interpret, to synthesize, to be moved, to make meaning with and from art. 

The Wire is panoramic, an ensemble piece, in the traditions of social realism, and so its characterization isn’t always deep. Yet in many of the best scenes, it’s the specificities of a supporting character—someone’s particular choices, values, failures, possibilities, turns of phrase—that you remember. Think of young teen Randy Wagstaff in season 4, who has lost almost everything good in his life and is about to be abandoned to a new group home—a fate the well-meaning Sergeant Carver failed to prevent and in fact, despite his intentions, helped cause. Randy and Carver walk up to the home’s door, and the kid suddenly turns to comfort the adult beside him, offering him the stark lie: “It’s OK. You tried.”

There aren’t characters in We Own This City. There’s exposition. Every line of dialogue is expository. Encounters between characters feel like condescending live-action representations of bland liberal political tropes. If you happen to miss anything, don’t worry, the show will repeat it again. As critics have noted, Jon Bernthal gives a hell of a performance, given not much to work with, and Jamie Hector and others are great, too. When watching The Wire I’ve often gotten depressed at how many fantastic performances we see from actors—especially Black actors—whose careers rarely offered them roles this rich again. Wire actors pop up in guest spots on Law & Order or CSI or whatever, often playing a generic criminal type. It’s an injustice and a bummer to see these artists limited like this. Why on earth (we can guess why) hasn’t Hassan Johnson—who plays Wee-Bey Brice with a mesmerizing, original blend of charisma, humor, brutality, resignation, and self-knowledge—gotten more great roles to make his own? I didn’t think I’d have to lay this same charge at the feet of the makers of The Wire, 20 years later. Here they’ve rehired a bunch of the great actors they once served so well, but given them garbage to use as dialogue.

We Own This City has to be one of the worst written “good” shows on TV. What gets me is that, in their careers, Simon et al. got the rare support all difficult, political, pop-skeptical artists want—and which they deserved. Their work may have initially underperformed commercially (at least by industry standards), but then they found an appreciative audience, critical praise, steady success. Their next projects got supported, and the projects after that. And in response, evidently, their art got less ambitious, less relevant, less distinctive, less original, more generic. Simon has put in a solid amount of time getting in fights on Twitter. 

In this show, poor Wunmi Mosaku—playing an attorney in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice who’s investigating the Baltimore police department—has to act surprised by everything anyone says for six episodes. Her character, a supposedly experienced attorney, seems just gob-smacked by every aspect of her job. She is clearly meant as a stand-in for the viewer, and this show does not respect the viewer. This central character lacks interiority to the extent that it seems like she’s just now starting to think about police brutality and corruption, right here in whatever scene she’s been thrust into, where her first task is to unnecessarily establish for the viewer who everyone is (So, you’ve been a public defender for 12 years? etc.). In the weird one-dimensional artifice of this show, no matter a character’s background or job, they seem to have no context for what’s happening and invite other characters to explain it to them. They discuss everything in terms white liberals would use and will understand, regardless of whether the characters are white liberals, which mostly they aren’t. For long stretches, race curiously vanishes from this show’s reality and its characters’ interactions, then returns when it will serve the plot. Corrupt cops may own this city, but white libs own this media.

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Recently I had occasion to remember that when Schindler’s List came out, European filmmakers like Michael Haneke critiqued the moral failure of certain aesthetic choices Spielberg used to dramatize the Holocaust. It seems quaint that people used to have critical conversations like this—that they thought form mattered; they thought art mattered in the specificities of its form. In the grotesque algorithmic circus of social media, form is often treated as just some blank vehicle, a means to commodify simplistic inert scraps of politics, politics that dissolve powerlessly back into whatever electoral affiliation the viewer understands the artist to have. I hungered for public conversations about art while watching this show incant the name Freddie Gray every other scene. “After Freddie Gray,” “after Freddie Gray,” characters say again and again (they talk to each other in conversation as if giving presentations to a nonprofit’s donor base). What happened to Freddie Gray, and the uprising that followed, are the only things the show doesn’t fully explain, though these events drive the show’s plot. (Intriguingly, late in the show, Jon Bernthal’s character, our main corrupt cop, shows a glimmer of discomfort when facing protestors, as if a decade or so into his career he’s starting to get why people might protest against him, a complex moment of subjectivity the show doesn’t pursue.) There’s no reason to assume everyone viewing will understand this shorthand, after Freddie Gray. I was confused—this show explains everything, including scenes you just watched two minutes ago, but not the one thing it might be useful to explain?

Then I realized that this show can’t talk about what happened to Freddie Gray. The medium as they’ve composed it, the show they’ve created, is inadequate. The cops are the realest people in this show and they’re not that real. If they were realer, the show could—and would have to—try to give an account of the unthinkable, evil sequence of events in which police officers arrested Freddie Gray without cause and casually ended his life.

On the one hand, it’s right for a TV show not to dramatize this, not to exploit Gray’s death as a spectacle. The forms are too often dehumanizing. I shouldn’t even describe his death here—though I want to say one thing, because a group of people employed by the state did this, to a fellow human being who was chained up and powerless: when Freddie Gray was finally pulled out of that police van, his spine was 80 percent severed at the neck. 

So, all the failures of form—how to even begin to speak of that fact?—leave us even more desperate for form. How do we respond to the endless ongoing history of violence that claimed Freddie Gray, how do we mourn, protest, witness, prevent, revolutionize, rage? 

In response to this kind of question, We Own This City, a fictional version of a true story of police corruption in Baltimore, clearly does want to counter the “few bad apples” cliché that comforts liberals. It’s trying to show how the systems and environment around these individual cops nudged them toward hypocrisy, amorality, violence, ruination. The show wants to ask: they were decent apples once, so why did they go bad? Yet despite this aim, by the end we’re left with the bad apples theory anyway because the show’s whole focus is on this handful of baddies and the arc of their punishment. The “good” cops who investigate and prosecute them are completely blank, just characterless incarnations of procedural law and order, not agents whose different specific choices and values we might understand and build upon. The commissioner is a sorrowfully ineffective Joe Biden type whose inability to do a single goddamn thing, despite his OK intentions, I guess could be somehow convincing or tragic. (I miss the flawed humanity of this actor’s Wire character, the lovably potty-mouthed company man Sergeant Jay, who could never be called a good guy but despite himself sometimes acted compassionately.) Because the show doesn’t take on what happened to Freddie Gray, the protests portrayed here vaguely seem to be more about police corruption—scenes of cops stealing money and drugs over and over—and less about racism and state violence, which again unintentionally supports the idea that better policing would solve all this, just lose those bad apples.

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Early in the first season of The Wire, there’s a key clash among characters: the team of cops we’ve been following comes to arrest the young guys we’ve been watching deal from that couch on the lawn of the projects. Bodie, one of the main teen characters, punches a cop, who dives exaggeratedly. The other cops (including Carver) start wailing on Bodie. It’s sickening to see. From across the way, Detective Kima Greggs sees what’s happening and we watch her turn and run full-speed toward the action. Because Kima is a sympathetic character (and a woman), and Bodie is a sympathetic character, while watching I instinctively, hopefully assumed that Kima was coming to stop this brutality, do right by this child. No. She’s running because she wants in. She kicks Bodie viciously. He curls up, helpless, his boss D’Angelo looking on, not surprised but disturbed. In that scene, the show refused TV viewers’ expectations and set its terms: no comfy cops-and-robbers hero-worship stuff here. Viewers were going to have to deal with something sicker and realer and endless and human and devastating.

If that sounds worthwhile to you, I recommend skipping We Own This City and instead watching Paul Schrader’s new film The Card Counter. It’s a stripped-down noir set piece—a gambler with a dark past; a doomed escapade—that features the most morally forceful representation of America’s use of torture in Iraq I’ve yet seen in US film. (It’s been almost twenty years since Abu Ghraib, but maybe twenty years is just the start of the timeline of repentance.) Schrader knows how to use viewers’ familiarity with these “war on terror” torture scenes—from the show 24 and everywhere else since—against us. He turns up the volume until nothing is left onscreen but pure evil. This is hell, and the Americans are its demons. No reason, no order, no good guys, no “reform”—nowhere for the American viewer to hide.

Likewise the name Freddie Gray ruptures any sense of order and reason. How we think, how we feel, how we live together—his name calls us toward the edge of the abyss. We can only ever begin to answer the questions this name asks us: how have those officers felt, every moment they’ve lived since they opened up that van and saw him there, no longer speaking, no longer breathing? I think art must keep trying to honor Freddie Gray, though the truth of him will keep exceeding the reach of our forms. He’s beyond some paint-by-numbers prestige-media show. He’s beyond any day on Twitter. He’s lost forever and unavenged.