Homicide: Life On The Street premiered on NBC after the Super Bowl on January 31, 1993, and ran for seven seasons, until 1999. Created by Paul Attanasio based on David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, the best known behind-the-scenes names associated with the series were Simon, producer-director Barry Levinson and showrunner Tom Fontana. The show was a naturalistic and gritty cop drama, months before NYPD Blue premiered and gave viewers a preview of Simon’s point of view almost a decade before his most famous show, The Wire, premiered. It also was nominated for a boatload of Emmys, with Levinson and star Andre Braugher winning the award, among others. Amazingly, it hasn’t streamed anywhere — until now.
HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Two police detectives look for a bullet in a dark alleyway. One, Steve Crosetti (Frank Polito), tells his partner, Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson), that the quest is more important than the result as he lights a cigarette.
The Gist: Homicide: Life On The Street takes place in Baltimore, in a fictional version of Baltimore PD’s Homicide Unit, led by Lt. Al Giradello (Yaphett Koto). In the first episode, we see the various detectives in that unit deal with the cases that are marked in red on the whiteboard that tracks each detective’s cases. We follow them as they investigate and question witnesses and people of interest, but the series is as much about the cops as it is about their cases.
We mentioned Crosetti and Lewis, who are tracking down the girlfriend of a shooting victim; she got shot in the head but somehow survived. In the meantime Crosetti keeps giving Lewis his theories on how someone other than John Willkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln.
Detectives John Munch (Richard Belzer) and Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty) investigate their current case, but Munch is still annoyed that he hasn’t been able to close a case they took on a few months ago, and Bolander keeps reminding him about how frustrating the case has been.
A new detective, Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), reports to the unit, having come from the mayor’s security team. Giradello has confidence in his new detective’s abilities but the rest of the group would rather lightly haze the rookie.
The lieutenant assigns Bayliss to partner with Kay Howard (Melissa Leo), forcing her old partner, Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) to partner with Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher). Most of the detectives aren’t fans of Pembleton; they chide him for wearing pink ties with polo ponies on them, and hate his very Frank-centric attitude. For what it’s worth, Pembleton would rather work alone, too.
But Giradello loves Pembleton’s tenacity, especially when it comes to interrogating suspects. There are downsides to it, though, like when Pembleton drives Felton crazy looking for the unmarked car that matches the keys in his hand. But, before questioning a suspect in the murder of an older man who looked like he had a seizure, Pembleton tells Bayliss that he isn’t interrogating him, he’s “selling a long prison term, to a client who has no genuine use for the product.” And it doesn’t take long for Pembleton to break the suspect down into confessing.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There weren’t many network shows like Homicide when it debuted in 1993. It feels like it should exist in the same universe as The Wire, but it doesn’t. And as most people know, Belzer’s Munch transferred to New York; Belzer starred for 15 seasons on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Our Take: The key question to watching Homicide almost 32 years after its debut is: Does it hold up? Fans of the show are of course delighted that it’s finally on streaming, but there are plenty more who never saw the show. Is it going to look like a relic of the ’90s or seem as gritty and riveting as it did back then?
Of course, there are elements of the show that are going to jangle the eyes and ears of young millennials and all Gen Zers, like the indoor smoking, some of the casual slurs thrown around, the typewriters and land-line phones that actually have bells that ring when a call comes in.
The first episode is very much in Levinson’s style, with a ton of naturalistic-sounding conversation that has little to nothing to do with anything having to do with the cases the cops are working on. If you ever saw Diner or Tin Men, you know what kind of conversation we’re talking about. You may even be surprised to see Munch as a guy who’s so unsure of himself, given that his character turned into a quip machine in the hands of Dick Wolf and company on SVU (though he does let loose a Montel Williams reference when questioning a suspect played by Steve Harris a few years before he starred on The Practice).
The second episode smooths those quirks out a bit, as Bayliss pursues the first case he’s put in charge of, the murder of a young girl. But the show certainly doesn’t seem like a bowdlerized, network-sanitized version of a gritty crime/cop drama. In fact, it seems surprisingly current, which makes it revolutionary given the era in which it debuted. From the camera movement to the dialogue to the fact that the show is more inclined to examine the psyches of the cops and not the criminals — these are all elements that defined the “golden age” era of TV that took shape starting right as Homicide left the air.
Sex and Skin: None in the first two episodes. NYPD Blue broke the “skin barrier” later that year, though that mostly consisted of bare male butts and female sideboobs.
Parting Shot: Bayliss goes to the scene of the case where he’s the lead for the first time, and sees that it’s the body of a young girl.
Sleeper Star: Hard to call Braugher a sleeper, because his epic interrogation scenes were cited by critics and fans as the best part of the series. But from his first scenes, you could tell he was going to be the standout in what was a pretty stellar cast.
Most Pilot-y Line: We cringed a bit when Lewis called Crosetti “a fathead guinea” and “a little Italian salami-brain.” We also cringed when Bayliss mistook Crosetti for Giradello.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We doubt a show like Homicide: Life On The Street would be made for network television today, especially given its usual mediocre ratings; the show was too stark and too invested in its witty dialogue to match the procedural bent networks have today. But it would have been a hit on cable or streaming, mainly because it has crackling writing, a great cast and a realistic vibe that even shows today seldom pull off.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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