WITH WE OWN THIS CITY, THEIR NEW COP-CORRUPTION DRAMA SERIES, THE WIRE’S DAVID SIMON AND GEORGE PELECANOS ARE BACK IN BALTIMORE. AS THEY AND THEIR TEAM EXPLAIN, THE FIGHT IS MORE TIMELY THAN EVER

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

WE OWN THIS

CITY 7 JUNE SKY ATLANTIC/NOW

THE WIRE CASTS a long shadow. Ever since 2008, when David Simon’s epic HBO cop (and politics and education and media and the whole damn system) drama wrapped up its five-season bid for the title of Greatest Television Series Of All Time, creator Simon and George Pelecanos, his trusted writer-producerlieutenant, have spent much of their time trying to avoid that shadow. Separately, they’ve worked on shows like The Pacific, Generation Kill and Show Me A Hero.

Together, they collaborated on Treme, Simon’s paean to jazz and New Orleans, and co-created The Deuce, which ran for three seasons and tackled New York and the pornography industry. “Everything we’ve done is different, but in a way it’s not,” Pelecanos tells Empire. “Treme and The Deuce are really about American cities. The Wire was a dissection of an American city.”

Each of those shows, though, is vastly different, stylistically and superficially, from The Wire. Worlds away from the mean streets and cut-throat corners of Baltimore.

And while it seemed that every TV show sooner or later would get a shot at a revival, it was clear that Pelecanos and Simon were never going to go back. There was not going to be a sixth season of The Wire. All roads did not lead back to Baltimore.

Until one day, still working on The Deuce, Pelecanos was contacted by HBO. They wanted him to take a look at a non-fiction book that they had procured called We Own This City, written by reporter Justin Fenton and based on the infamous exploits of an elite police unit called the Gun Trace Task Force, who had spent several years using their status to stage a series of crimes. Pelecanos was immediately interested — even though the Gun Trace Task Force belonged to the Baltimore Police Department. “The story was a big story here nationally,” explains Pelecanos.

“And I thought it was a really good story. I said, ‘I’ll do it, if I can bring my team back together.’”

That team included The Wire writer/ producer alumni like Nina K. Noble, Ed Burns, William F. Zorzi and, of course, Simon, who came aboard as co-creator and co-showrunner. It wasn’t that Simon was tempted by the chance to return to Baltimore — he still lives in the city — but he saw a chance to put a full stop on a paragraph he had started writing decades earlier. “I don’t regard this as being part of The Wire,” he tells Empire. “But thematically it is certainly a cousin. If you watch the 60 episodes [of The Wire], you’ll see a detailed critique of what had gone wrong with policing in Baltimore. The arc of that curve still had more to go.”