‘We Own This City’ Is the Perfect Marriage of Material and Its Co-Creators, David Simon and George Pelecanos: TV Review

Scripted limited-run dramas inspired by recent, buzzy true-crime tales have recently oversaturated the market. And yet for as many as there are, notably few have drawn from what is arguably America’s most consequential (and most intractable) criminal justice phenomenon. The problem of dysfunctional policing and its disproportionate impact on communities of color has been largely ignored by scripted television, save for occasional arcs on the fictional police dramas whose rose-tinted views of police work have contributed to that very issue. (The quality of such well-intentioned episodes generally ranges between “Not totally humiliating” and “May induce cringe spasms.”) The recent exception… Read Full Article