Remembering Homicide: Life on the Street

Man, I miss this show.

The show I refer to is Homicide: Life on the Street, based on the fantastic book by David Simon (who has moved on to create one of the best shows of THIS decade, The Wire). Homicide was an incredibly ground-breaking series, one that introduced us to one of the best TV characters ever written, Frank Pembleton (portrayed by one of the best actors of this generation, Andre Braugher).

It was a show that defied expectations, that started out in a documentary style that made some viewers wonder if they were watching a fictional series or were actually eavesdropping on the real-world conversations that took place as detectives sweated paperwork and tried, desperately, to improve thier clearance rate and get all that red ink of The Board.

It was a show that shook up the status quo, killing off one of the main characters after the short first season (a suicide, we ten found out) and then threatened the lives of three other series regulars within a few weeks after that.

It was a show that threw us for a loop when the lead character, the aforementioned Frank Pembleton, suffered a stroke, making us weep openly as the character fought to get back on the force (Braugher, finally, won an Emmy for his performance in his final year on the series).

It was a show that was, in a way, the last of its kind for network television – a program where the bad guy is very often no caught, where the good guys are sometimes the bad guys… it was the spiritual godfather of The Sopranos, of The Shield, or The Closer… of all the great gritty crime shows that became so incredibly popular on cable. It was the last show of its ilk on network TV, and that in itself is evidence of how the broadcast spectrum has changed this past decade.

Homicide ended 10 years ago, and I still wish I could revisit those characters again. This past week, I was able to visit Baltimore, where the series was set and filmed (appropriately enough, also the home of Edgar Allan Poe, the creator of the detective fiction genre) and was able to visit a couple of the locations the show used. It was a surreal experience, after watching all those hours of the series so many years ago – I half expected to see Pembleton and Bayliss walk down the front steps of their offices – instead, only a screaming homeless man was there.

I miss it – and I think we will not see anything like it again.

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