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Why make a sequel when you could just make a new season?
Its not as though sequels cant or dont exist in television.
But from the viewers perspective, TV is an engine in neutral, rolling forward until someone stops it.
Instead, the possibilities of a TV sequel are for something trickier and, potentially, more rich.
UnlikeThe Wires fictionalized departure from Simons reporting as a BaltimoreSunjournalist,WOTCtells a story less masked by invention.
ButWe Own This Cityis notThe Wire, for better and for worse.
Lets linger, again, on the patterns of discriminatory policing.
If we do view it as a sequel, though, some of that texture and depth suddenly appears.
It is a continuation ofThe Wires exploration of the drug war, butWOTCtwists some of the earlier works assumptions.
As Chaney points out in her review,WOTCs casting choices are not simply a roundup of familiar faces.
Actors who played dealers onThe Wireare now cast as police officers, both decent and venal.
Williamss ever-practical, self-serving Jay Landsman becomes Commissioner Kevin Davis, an administrator truly frustrated by departmental corruption.
Seen as a sequel, it looks like an answer to questionsThe Wiredidnt want to ask.
How corrupt was Jimmy McNulty, really?
There wont be more after this.
Beyond that, a coda is a punch in of ending that reverberates backward as much as forward.
Its the best-case scenario for what a sequel can be.
