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Homicide: Life on the Street

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Homicide: Life on the Street is an American television drama series chronicling the life of a fictional Baltimore police homicide unit. It ran for seven seasons on the NBC network from 1993 to 1999, plus a 2000 TV-movie. The series was based on David Simon's nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and many characters and plots in the series are directly based on individuals and events depicted in the book.

The series

Homicide was developed by Paul Attanasio and included film director Barry Levinson as an executive producer, but Tom Fontana is largely recognized as the guiding hand behind the series. With its no-nonsense look at the workings of a homicide unit, from the nuts and bolts of answering calls and how crimes are solved, to the professional and personal drama in the unit, to the dominant use of handheld cameras to film the series, Homicide developed a trademark feel and look that distinguished itself from its contemporary series. The series was also filmed entirely on location in Baltimore, which practiclly became a character on the show. Homicide was responsible for several television innovations, including being the first show to regularly use the technique of playing a musical number over a montage of scenes.

The series got off to a shaky start on the schedule with a nine-episode first season. Despite premiering in the coveted post Super Bowl timeslot, the show had lackluster ratings. Two Emmy Awards (Barry Levinson for directing and Tom Fontana for writing) and the success of NYPD Blue were responsible for NBC giving it another chance, though the four episode pick up was the smallest in network television history. Though ratings continued to be bad, NBC kept it on the air for five full seasons after that. However, NBC would never stop meddling with the series, mandating that Jon Polito be dropped from the cast, clamoring for more romance and violence, and sometimes airing episodes out of order, usually in an order that made no sense to the ongoing storylines.

While viewers never really got a handle on the show, critics adored it from the beginning. Hailed by many as the best and most realistic cop show ever and one of the very finest dramas ever produced and propelled by strong writing and a stellar ensemble cast, the show garnered three straight television critics awards for outstanding drama from 1996-1998 and was the first drama ever to win three of the prestigious Peabody Awards for best drama (1993, 1995, 1997).

The series has been re-run on Lifetime and Court TV, and the first four seasons are available on DVD. One DVD set combines the first two seasons, while separate sets contain the complete third and fourth seasons. Each DVD package contains the episodes in the producers' intended order, and not necessarily the order in which NBC aired them.

At the time the show was aired, it has been often compared to another similar show NYPD Blue. It has been widely discussed to know which show was hot and which one was not, both shows having their pros and their cons.

Notable stories

The series opens with Detective Tim Bayliss being assigned to Lt. Al Giardello's unit and partnered with Detective Frank Pembleton. Pembleton resents having his style cramped with a partner, and Tim, nervous and a little scared, isn't sure he's up to the job. His first case is the murder of a young girl, Adena Watson, full of publicity and pressure from all sides. The story culminates in the first-season episode, "Three Men and Adena", throwing several actors in a box to talk, argue and shout their way through an interrogation.

"Night of the Dead Living", also from season one, shows the unit working the graveyard shift in the middle of a hot summer when the building's air conditioning has broken down and tempers are running high.

Homicide saw its cast rotate, as most TV series do, and it dealt with these changes with varying degrees of effectiveness. The first major cast member to leave saw his character die, and the exploration of what happened and how the unit reacts to it is the focus of the season three episode "Crosetti".

The third season also featured a three-part episode in which several detectives are seriously injured, two of them near to death, while the rest of the unit copes with the loss and hunts down the attacker.

"All Through the House" was a special Christmas episode in the third season, Homicide-style.

Homicide often mixed its characters' personal lives with their professional lives, including several affairs among department officers. Despite this uncompromising approach, the series always felt slightly uncomfortable dealing with romance, and predictably the affairs tended to end badly.

The fourth season saw the departure of two other cast members, and the addition of arson investigator Mike Kellerman. Kellerman became the central figure of the main storyline during the fifth and sixth seasons, involving the death of an underworld crime boss and the gang war that rocks the city in the wake of his death.

The sixth season is also notable for the acclaimed "Subway" episode, which centered on a man trapped between a subway car and the edge of the platform. Although he was still alive, he would die from his injuries the moment the car was removed from his body. The homicide unit was called in to investigate whether the man fell by accident or was deliberately pushed from the platform (as it turned out, he was pushed); two of its members tried in vain to find the victim's girlfriend before his death. Andre Braugher as Detective Frank Pembleton and Vincent D'Onofrio as the doomed victim John Lange would earn Emmy nominations for their performances in this episode.

The seventh season is widely regarded as the weakest, as it lacked an overarching storyline and the characters - following a major cast overhaul, including Braugher's departure - felt less dynamic and the stories less inventive than earlier episodes.

In the 2000 TV movie, Giardello runs for mayor and is shot, and the whole unit turns out to find the shooter. Every regular from the series - including those whose characters died - returns for this final chapter in the story.

Cast

Original cast

Other regulars

Recurring characters

Trivia

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