Lake Trout & ACAB: David Simon’s “We Own This City” on HBOMax

David Simon/Pelecanos/Baltimore hive where you at? #downyocean for corruption, brutality, bad times & bad haircuts with our good friends John Bernthal & Josh Charles :D

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gah
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First episode was really good, and there's only six, so I'm in. I want a lot more Jamie Hector before this thing is over.

i have a lot to say about this but i am busy with work. the first episode was dog shit. will i continue watching? yes.

I need to read the book (and I haven’t seen the show yet but am hype to)

i read the other book so i am probably not going to read fenton's tbh. i just hate exposition that is like "hellow i am in baldimore so of course i casually talk about lake trout?"

But they were pioneers in the blending of rock music with drum n bass!

Bernthal plays such a good unrepentant sleazebag.

i have a lot to say about this but i am busy with work. the first episode was dog shit. will i continue watching? yes.

Haven't watched yet, but I'm very curious about your take

ok i am going down pulaski highway for pit beef to the gym but i will say more later!

i love everything about bernthal

the way he has all the details down of the affable big dick cop who is also an insanely tense asshole
constantly onhigh-alert - like his eyes look then he moves, when he turns his head he is like a t-1000
the visible tendons in his neck
the way he says hi to every single person walking into IA to show them that he knows them, such a sad “swinging dick power move”
the walk! omg. it’s like a cross between a body builder & an old wrestler, like he lifts weights but also maybe had a back injury 20 years ago

i am obsessed with what he’s doing here
have met guys like this

i really liked the first ep

I want to punch bernthal in the face but I will watch

exactly

josh charles too. hideous & excellent.

Josh Charles is incredibly hateable in this.

it is amazing how hateable he is!
like for decades he’s been the charming cute quippy guy in everything & it’s not like he super-transformed but just all his mannerisms & his look & that sullen way about him is so good/horrible

ok so i am trying to be fair here. i think this should be longer than 6 episodes but i will accept the limitations. i like crime stories but i cannot stand to watch even one minute of law and order and many elements of this reminded me of it. like the extremely awkward dialogue they feel they have to use to tell their dumb audience what is happening. and the things that would just never happen in real life. they wouldn't interview a sitting judge! they could have just used something else there.

anyway, i believe that david simon loves and identifies with cops. i do not think he is capable of truly understanding or explaining why this happened because he is a "bad apples" guy. and i have been reading justin fenton's writing for like 13 years now? he has written two stories *at most* that i have thought were good. he is kind of a dim bulb. there are tons of things about this story that are really intersting and i have followed it very closely, so i am trying not to nitpick, i'm just afraid what is being set up here is how the good guy suburban cops found the bad apples and saved the day.

and i deleted something because i thought i was being too harsh

Harbl have you read “I got a monster?”

i’ve only seen the ads on twitter, which make it look incredibly awful

who owns/built this city? cops, right? gtfo

unless there’s pembleton, maybe

I think I've gotten dumber since The Wire finished because I had a hard time following the action in this one!

What day of the week do episodes come out?

Monday I believe

Ain’t up yet. Maybe they post later in the day to mimic “prime time?”

Yeah that’s usually what they do

Yeah, for better or worse, HBO Max is still tied pretty closely to HBO's schedule for current shows. They typically pop up to stream at the same time they air "live" on HBO.

I kept thinking this had Stephen Baldwin in it

Seems like they’re layering flashbacks within flashbacks ??? Lot of moving around
They also not only use the Jenkins computer report to announce them but also the traditional method of just announcing it on screen ….aghhh

Enjoyed the first episode, but about halfway in it struck me how much John Bernthal reminded me of Alf.

Man, this show.

anyway, i believe that david simon loves and identifies with cops. i do not think he is capable of truly understanding or explaining why this happened because he is a "bad apples" guy.

It's really interesting because having watched The Wire so many times, some of the dialog from The Wire is recreated almost verbatim here. I remember watching the trailer for this, and thinking, "Oh! Bernthal plays McNulty Breaking Bad!" and it's kinda true, that that's how it was played. Like, I was hoping for a complete re-framing here, but it is still a lot of cop love.

i am trying not to nitpick, i'm just afraid what is being set up here is how the good guy suburban cops found the bad apples and saved the day.
the first two episodes are definitely leading that direction. ... I wonder if some of my reading is because I am so used to watching cop shows, but ... cop shows are the dominant narrative so ... it isn't just me.

I'm still watching this though -- and I've stopped being a TV masochist -- I couldn't watch past the first 3 episodes of that Super Pumped show because of the asshole factor (speaking of shows that take place where I live and stories I followed lol).

i see we are still talking about pit beef in episode 3

bernthal’s wayne just gets more & more punchable the more you learn about him

Yea not only the character but also his face and acting. I think ep 3 is where I get off the boat

“Happy Wayne Jenkins Day, motherfucker!”

i am going to finish this in a little bit. i just didn't feel like it. but there's only one more. i just want to emphasize though, what an epic bacon mustache guy:

Oh my dear sweet country mouse. In this town, we sprinkle Old Bay atop crustaceans, soft ice cream cones, baby binkies, hookers and baptismal fonts. You've only just begun. https://t.co/CNyIto1vrU

— David Simon (@AoDespair) June 3, 2022

SO many direct-to-camera sermons in the finale. And the absolute last scene may make you hurl a brick through your TV, or laptop, or whatever you're watching it on.

they made the Office of Civil Rights do so much exposition, i was kinda bummed at their “do u see” scenes

but the show was trying to do a lot, maybe too much & some parts suffered more than others

tbf i didnt know the irl story at all so i was mostly just along for the ride as a viewing

oof this is painful

Yeah really surprised by just how much critical acclaim it got

i didn't understand the purpose for the last scene at all

i was a little disappointed that this incident didn't make it:

In addition to conducting questionable stops and searches, stealing money, and
violating BPD’s body-worn camera policies, Hersl was involved in two accidents as a
result of police pursuits—including one on August 31, 2016 that left a driver seriously
injured. Not only did Hersl and the other officers fail to stop and render aid to the
driver, but Hersl could be heard laughing about the accident on the bug that had been
installed in Gondo’s vehicle. Hersl also suggested that the officers falsify their
timecards to make it appear as though they were not working at the time of the crash.
One community member commented that Hersl’s laughter during that incident seemed
to demonstrate how Hersl felt about the community—which was particularly striking
given that Hersl’s own brother had died when a car fleeing police crashed into him.175

from this if you want to read 660 pages of horrors https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e25f215b3dbd6661a25b79d/t/61dfb04407c9d81f367972d8/1642049639956/GTTF+Report-c2-c2-c2.pdf

The last shot felt to me like an indictment of thin blue line police culture.

(I seem to have enjoyed this a lot more than most.)

yeah that was how i took it also

yeah i think that's probably correct and consistent with simon's apparent belief that this is a culture problem, that the war on drugs fuels a culture that rewards bad behavior, etc., and we would have better-behaved cops if we ended it. kinda myopic imo.

nb i don't rly know anything but (as w the wire before it) i did not take "bad apples" away from this (clumsy, stilted, tv-runtime-bloated) show about how no incentives exist in the culture or institutions of policing to produce any other kind of apple. characterizing jenkins as a true believer genuinely baffled when his heroic impunity is suddenly revoked is what makes clear that the problem is not just the guy. his gee-whiz faces while learning the ropes as a trainee suggest that this affable idiot is a vessel waiting to be filled with the police's starriest and most self-pitying ideas about themselves. the cops around him, including his partners in crime, can't 100% buy into these ideas and even find jenkins' commitment to them a little strange; but this means absolutely nothing because they are nevertheless the animating ideas of the institution and whoever does buy completely into them will naturally become a leader, as jenkins does.

a movie would i think have focused more efficiently on the bernthal/hector diptych (a cop who thinks he's good cuz he does cop stuff; a cop who thinks he's good cuz he doesn't; both go to hell) and left out the sections in which wunmi mosaku has to alternate scenes where she's wearied by years of carrying the knowledge of what is going on with scenes where she's shocked and baffled at having it explained to her. (a better tv show would have left them in but given her a real part.)

at first i did enjoy the mean laughs at the expense of liberal politicians talking piously about "uprisings" while doing nothing to address any of the causes or grievances of the phenomena they're proud of using the appropriate words for, but eventually felt the portrayal of the mayor was a silly cartoon. also it's in her scenes of course that a simon fixation recurs that i do find p suspicious: the idea that if only these damn politicians would give the police the budget they need these problems could all be fixed. you can just about read this as merely the delusion of the totally impotent commissioner jay landsman, but the show never managed to turn this guy into a real character-- like mosaku he is mostly there to exposit, or be exposited to-- so it is hard to excavate any irony from him, or to argue that the show sees him as any less dignified and tragic than he sees himself.

anyway i wouldn't rly recommend it but bernthal's performance was v good.

xp yeah you're right that the entire thing is pinned on the war on drugs, which no doubt is epiphenomenal like everything else (also criticizing it as "dumb policy" without citing john ehrlichman on its origins is always an error). the scenes where treat williams rails nobly against it are the nadir.

yeah i don't think the show is itself a bad apples story and i may have been imprecise above but i think simon believes to an extent that the bad guys are ruining it for everyone else and if we didn't have this war on drugs incentivizing them the good guys would have a chance to shine. i'm not sure that's quite the way to describe it either though.

yeah he def believes that the war on drugs has smothered the chivalry of Real Po-Lice. but what's always funny about this is that the police departments his shows portray have been completely immersed in the war on drugs for decades, like at this point approaching the horizon of living memory, such that even a viewer from mars whose only window into earth culture was david simon shows would eventually have to ask, well if it's so destructive and stupid and pointless and expensive why do you keep doing it? is there a show about that?

that the war on drugs fuels a culture that rewards bad behavior, etc., and we would have better-behaved cops if we ended it. kinda myopic imo.

it presupposes that cops were "good" prior to the war on drugs, which is a seriously flawed premise, esp. in re race relations. I do (I have a couple more episodes to go) appreciate that there are more characters that are "citizens" in this. I was disappointed that there was nominal attention paid to the older couple whose car was hit by the fleeing suspect, along with the multitude of other victims of police brutality and repression. I wish it were actually a longer show, so that we could see more of those people as people, in addition to some time spent with activists and protesters.

yeah def agree w that

it presupposes that cops were "good" prior to the war on drugs, which is a seriously flawed premise, esp. in re race relations.

Now I'm imagining David Simon trying to collaborate with James Ellroy on a show and both their heads exploding in the first story meeting.

Actually a Simon / Ellroy collaboration about the "(Not So)Great Society" set in the late 60s/early 70s could be really great.

i would watch/read the hell out of that

Simon: So this cop is conflicted. He believes in justice but he lets his personal appetites crowd out his good instincts on occasion.

Ellroy: I see. So instead of murdering hookers he just takes home victim pictures and jerks off to them?

This is a very weird series - totally floating by on the strength of performances (accents) and Wire cameos (Dookie!) but enjoyable thanks to the latter?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnNniN9XOK0