![]() ![]() But after I hooked him up with my agent and they got a contract, I let it be. I was just thinking, journalistically, this needs to be a book. I wasn’t thinking about television or dramatizing it. And I said, “We’ve reached a level of dystopia in the drug war that is fresh and this scandal, it has legs and it’s got to be written.” And so that’s all I was thinking about. And so I actually called Justin and I hooked him up with my book agent. I read the stories contemporaneously that Justin Fenton was writing - he had my old gig at the Sun at the time - and I thought, “There’s a book in here. What made you think you weren’t finished with this story?ĭavid Simon: This came about in a one-two punch. You were on the crime desk at the Sun you wrote the books Homicide and then The Corner, both of which were turned into series then made five seasons of The Wire. Jon Bernthal, right, and Josh Charles, seated, in ‘We Own This City.’ Courtesy of HBOĭavid, you have spent much of your career covering the Baltimore streets. Green, as it happens, joined in from his car as he drove to a little league field in Mar Vista, “where I literally take half my meetings.” “We both talk about this work on almost purely athletic terms,” Bernthal says in a recent Zoom session with Green, Pelecanos and Simon. Both former baseball players - Green considered a career in the MLB, and Bernthal played pro ball in Moscow while studying theater there in the early 2000s - the two shared a close bond on set. Bernthal reteams with his King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who helms all six episodes of We Own This City. He is played in the series by Jon Bernthal, whose extensive research for the role included ride-alongs with active police and numerous conversations with Jenkins and his former colleagues. The group’s ringleader, Detective Wayne Jenkins, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. ![]() Based on the book of the same name by former Sun reporter Justin Fenton (one of Simon’s successors on the paper’s crime beat), the show addresses the high-profile scandal that rocked the BPD in 2017, when several plainclothes officers from the department’s elite Gun Trace Task Force unit were convicted of racketeering - among many other charges - for their abusive practices and their role in a conspiracy to distribute stolen drugs. 'The Idol' Stars Defend Controversial Show: "We Always Knew We Were Going to Make Something Provocative"Īfter this grand tour of American dysfunction, Simon and George Pelecanos - a crime novelist who wrote several episodes of The Wire and co-created several series with Simon - have returned to Baltimore with their new miniseries, We Own This City, which premieres April 25. ![]()
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