HBO's The Wire Follow-Up Makes Stringer Bell's Dream A Nightmare

14 years after The Wire’s end, We Own This City returns to the streets of Baltimore in a world that is contrary to Stringer Bell’s dream.

HBO's The Wire Follow-Up Makes Stringer Bell's Dream A Nightmare

Stringer Bell’s dreams of legitimizing his criminal empire are cast aside in HBO’s new series We Own This City – making his long-held dream a nightmare. More than 14 years after the ending of the popular HBO crime series The Wire, creator and former police reporter David Simon has returned to the platform with another Baltimore-based story of institutional rot. Although Stringer Bell and his associates are largely a distant memory in We Own This City, more shocking is that Bell’s aspirations to overhaul Baltimore’s criminal underbelly seem to be all but forgotten as well.

We Own This City is based on the 2021 nonfiction book We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton. The story details the rise and eventual fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force and the corruption that led to its demise. The story was adapted for HBO by David Simon and frequent collaborator George Pelecanos and stars The Punisher‘s Jon Bernthal as the notorious Wayne Jenkins.

We Own This City is more of a spiritual successor to The Wire than a direct sequel, sharing similar themes and tone with its predecessor while telling a true story with a cast of characters based on real people. Much like The Wire, We Own This City explores the impact that one person’s misguided or criminal actions can have on their surroundings, this time scrutinizing the actions of the Baltimore Police and the GTTF. While the show is a timely contemplation of the corrupting power of law enforcement, the moral degradation of a legitimate business such as the Baltimore Police feels like a perverse twist on the overarching desires of the late Stringer Bell as legitimate businesses succumb to the trappings of greed and power.

Stringer Bell (played by The Wire’s breakout movie star Idris Elba) was in many ways antithetical to his close friend and business partner Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), attending business classes and purchasing real estate while Avon wreaked vengeful havoc on Baltimore. Despite Bell’s death at the end of the third season, the show carried his wishes forward to the end, with The Wire finale seeming to imply that Marlo would pick up where Bell left off. However, We Own This City flips the script, turning legitimate businesspeople into criminals due to wanton greed and a lust for power in a display of precisely what Bell had been rallying against.

We Own This City is a worthy successor to The Wire, with David Simon’s deep understanding of police work and the Baltimore area again on full display. Although there is still debate as to what extent HBO’s The Wire is based on a true story, We Own This City’s use of such an infamous true-crime tale brings a degree of intrigue to the show that is capitalized on by its talented cast. In this way, the show has seemingly moved on from the legacy of Stringer Bell, which could have saved its characters significant difficulty and heartbreak if they had chosen to follow in his footsteps.