The Wire is often hailed as one of the greatest TV shows of all-time, which means that anything creator David Simon touches has my attention. HBO has released the first trailer for Simon’s new limited-series, We Own This City, and it looks spectacular.

Based on the book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, We Own This City “chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force and the corruption and moral collapse that befell an American city in which the policies of drug prohibition and mass arrest were championed at the expense of actual police work.” Jon Bernthal (Baby Driver) stars as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the head of “a plainclothes unit that went completely rogue and began hunting and robbing citizens and drug dealers alike as decades of a relentless drug war and mass incarceration in Baltimore spun wildly out of control,” alongside Wunmi Mosaku (Lovecraft Country) as “an attorney assigned to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which was investigating policing practices in Baltimore prior to the Gun Trace Task Force criminal investigation.” Jamie Hector, McKinley Belcher III, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Josh Charles, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rob Brown, Don Harvey, David Corenswet, Larry Mitchell, Ian Duff, Delaney Williams, and Lucas Van Engen also star in the series.

David Simon co-created the limited-series alongside George Pelecanos,who he collaborated with on The Wire, Treme, and The Deuce. I know that there are some out there who believe that The Wire is over-hyped, but to me, it’s one of those rare TV shows that actually lives up to its lofty reputation. Here’s hoping that We Own This City will be just as good. What did you think of the trailer for We Own This City? Will you be watching?

We Own This City will debut on HBO on April 25, 2022.