In honor of ‘Homicide: Life on the Street’ streaming on Peacock: Top 5 episodes
Sometimes it’s hard to revisit a favorite TV series you haven’t seen in decades. Will the show hold up or be hopelessly dated? Happily, NBC’s groundbreaking 1993-98 police series “Homicide: Life on the Street” is just as brilliant as it was three decades Peacock recently dropped all seven seasons as well as 2000’s “Homicide: The Movie.”.
As NPR noted: “It was a cop show without gun battles or car chases, with a bracing shot of street-level realism; film mostly in Baltimore. ‘Homicide’ presented stuff you just didn’t see on network television back then: shaky, kinetic camera work, working stiff police detectives cracking jokes at gruesome murder scenes…serialized stories that arced over several episodes, heart-rending killings that never get solved.”
The series, which was set in the fictional Baltimore Police Department Unit, was based on David Simon’s (“The Wire”) 1991 book “Homicide: A Year in the Life of the Killing Streets.” Simon was also a producer of the series created by Paul Attanasio and executive produced by Barry Levinson. “The series. along with ‘NYPD Blue,’ which also premiered in 1993-infused the cop genre with more grit and moral ambiguity,” said the New York Times, “setting the stage for hard-edge cable dramas like ‘The Shield’ an Simon’s own ‘The Wire,’ “one of the most celebrated series of all time.”
“Homicide” was never a ratings champ but developed a hardcore fan and critical base. During its run, the series won a plethora of honors including 17 Emmy nominations winning four awards, three Peabody honors and the Humanitas Award. The cast included Melissa Leo, who would win the Oscar for supporting actress for 2010’s ‘The Fighter,” Yaphet Kotto, Clark Johnson, Kyle Secor, Richard Belzer, Jon Polito and Ned Beatty.
Andre Braugher, who died last December at the age of 61, was the breakout star as the moral, mercurial and brilliant Frank Pembleton who was known for his superior interrogation methods though his often-arrogant attitude doesn’t endear himself to his fellow squad mates. In the fourth season finale, he even suffers a stroke while interrogating a subject. Braugher became just the second black performer to win the Emmy for lead actor in a drama series in 1998.
Braugher told me in a 1995 Los Angeles Times interview that when he was asked to audition for “Homicide’ he was happy to see that he couldn’t discern Pembleton’s race in the pilot script. “I said, ‘This is a real person’ because when writers in television today write for African American characters, they are really two-dimensional,” he said. “They are rarely more than foils, shadows of people. They are cartoons. I picked up this script and said ‘I could take a chance on this. I am going ahead with this because I can make anything out of a person, but I can’t make anything of a cipher, really.”’
His main aim as a black actor was just to be able to play a human being. “If Pembleton had been some jive-talking or hyper righteous sort of character, I think I would have turned it down because there is no fun in it,” he said. “There’s a whole life that goes on for Pembleton which is not written there in the script. There’s a whole moral issue of him that is working for Pembleton, and no one is writing it. I don’t need to write it, but it’s extremely important to me.
He described Pembleton as an avenger. “Life is extremely precious to him,” the actor explained. “If there’s a murder down on Earth, I’m in essence a messenger of God to ferret out evil and bring it to justice if I possibly can. Of course, we don’t know very many people like this who envision themselves as instruments of God on Earth, but that’s where he’s coming from. I get my man sooner or later.”
Wondering what episodes to check out first on Peacock? Here’s a look at five of the best:
Levinson won the Emmy and was nominated for the DGA award for directing “Gone for Goode,” the first episode of the series which aired Jan. 31, 1993, in the prime spot right after the Superbowl XXVII. The episode set the tone for the series-gritty, raw replete with a herky jerky hand-held camera, jump cut editing straight out of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave playbook and multiple story arcs including one involving an elderly woman who has murdered five husbands for insurance money. The episode was penned by Attanasio who earned a WGA nomination.
Tom Fontana won the Emmy for “Three Men and Adena” which was the fifth episode of the first season. Directed by Martin Campbell, the in-your-face episode most takes place in “The Box,” the stifling interrogation room. Pembleton and Bayliss (Secor) have 12 hours to interrogate an elderly street vendor (Moses Gunn in his final performance) about the brutal murder of 11-year-old Adena Watson, which is never solved during the run of the series.
Robin Williams earned an Emmy nomination for guest actor for his poignant turn in 1994’s “The Bop Gun.” He plays a married father of two vacationing with his family in Baltimore whose wife is murdered in a robbery. The episode also won the WGA Award for David Simon and David Mills from a story by Fontana. Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, the episode also features his son, a young Jake Gyllenhaal, as Williams’ son. It was the first episode of the series to focus on the victim rather than the detectives. With Williams’ participation, the series attracted over 16 million viewers.
Airing Dec. 5, 1997, the haunting “The Subway” installment starred Vincent D’Onofrio as a man who is pushed into the path of a subway train by a troubled man (Bruce McVittie). D’Onofrio’s John Lange is pinned between a train and the station platform. Pembleton learns he has about an hour to live and tries to solve the crime while comforting the man in his last minutes. James Yoshimura, who penned the episode, based it on an installment of HBO’s “Taxicab Confessions” in which a New York City cop relates the true story of a man pinned between a subway and platform. D’Onofrio was Emmy nominated for his startling performance, Yoshimura also earned an Emmy nomination for the script and the episode won the Peabody.
The late great Charles Durning earned a nomination for guest star on a drama series for “Finnegan’s Wake” installment that aired April 24, 1998. He plays a retired cop, who was obsessed for years with the 1932 unsolved murder of a young girl and returns to the squad to help solve the case. The episode was directed by Steve Buscemi who received a DGA nomination for his work. Buscemi had previously appeared as a sociopathic gunman on the show.
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