They Don’t Make Dad Shows Like 'Homicide: Life on the Street' Anymore
Baltimore is the Oakland of the East Coast
Peacock recently added Homicide: Life on the Street to its library. It’s the first time the classic Baltimore-set crime drama has been available on streaming.
I had never watched it before, but it was one of my parents’ favorites when I was a kid. I remember my mom telling me about how Det. Munch crossed over from Homicide to Law & Order. I found that so fascinating. How could one character be on two different shows? This was before the Munchiverse had expanded to 10 shows. Later on, I knew Homicide by its reputation as a great show for its era that presaged the Golden Age that came a few years later. Homicide begat The Wire, one of the GOAT TV shows, which, freed from the constraints of broadcast, achieved the grit and complexity that Homicide wasn’t allowed to have. Homicide walked so The Wire could run.
But after watching two episodes, it appears that Homicide is better than I was led to believe. If this came out now, it would be one of the best shows on TV. I was expecting it to be at a Law & Order level of quality, but it’s closer to The Wire. It’s not as good as The Wire, of course, but almost nothing is. And I’m not saying that Law & Order is not excellent. The Law & Order franchise is the most perfect plot delivery system ever conceived. But Homicide is artistic in a way Law & Order doesn’t aspire to be. The wandering handheld camera, the Baltimore location filming (I can’t tell if the actors are actually driving around the city during the car scenes, or if it just really seems like they are), the witty dialogue, and especially the dreamlike editing give it a style that feels more like an indie movie than a broadcast procedural. That distinctive 1-2-3 repetition of the same moment from different angles is extraordinary. It’s a choice that still feels bold more than 30 years later.
So much was said about Andre Braugher’s Emmy-winning performance as Det. Frank Pembleton when the actor sadly died last year, and seeing the show now it’s so clear why his performance stuck with people. He makes Pembleton seem like a guy who’s so weird that he has to be real. His highly theatrical performance complements the more normal ones around him. He doesn’t feel like he’s acting on a different show, he makes Pembleton seem like he’s in a different reality of his own creation. Pembleton’s personality is so forceful that it imposes itself on the world around him and turns it into his world, for better or worse. We all know people like that.
The rest of the cast is terrific, too. Melissa Leo doesn’t get featured much in the first two episodes, but she’s great in what she’s in. Part of why my parents had such a fondness for Homicide is because Leo lived in the next town over and my mom would see her around and register that she knew her and greet her as if she were a neighbor or another parent from school before realizing that she only knew her from TV. I also love Jon “Sick of the High Hat” Polito as philosophical, conspiratorial detective Steve Crosetti. His line at the end of the first scene of the first episode, where he complains that the murder he’s investigating probably has a simple explanation — “That’s the problem with this job. It’s got nothing to do with life.” — is my favorite line of dialogue in the two episodes I watched. It tells you that on the surface, the show is about investigating murders, but it’s really about life’s open-ended questions that you can only answer for yourself. It serves the same thesis-statement function as the famous “This is America, man” exchange at the end of the first scene of The Wire. (I also loved the dark comedy of the cemetery director saying of an unusually hard-to-kill woman, “You’ll need an atom bomb to get her in here.”)
Shows like Homicide literally don’t exist anymore. There hasn’t been a Peabody-quality new network police procedural in over a decade. The last one was Southland, and that only lasted one season on NBC in 2009 before moving to TNT for the rest of its run. As Andy Greenwald said on a recent episode of The Watch discussing Homicide, the ability to make shows like this has probably been lost. This is mostly because there’s no business incentive to make dramas with 20+ episode seasons for streaming services. The shows that are still doing it are broadcast shows, which don’t have a business incentive to be artistically ambitious. There doesn’t seem to be much of an interest anywhere in morally complex, stylistically innovative cop shows that grapple with the present moment, which is a shame. I, personally, would love to see a sophisticated, ensemble, ongoing detective drama that tracks multiple cases per episode the way Homicide does. Max is making The Pitt, which is a reskinned ER from Noah Wyle and John Wells. What’s stopping them from hiring Homicide’s Tom Fontana from creating a new cop show in a similar vein? Seriously, what? Is Fontana not interested? Who else can they get? I’m sure somebody has a good pitch.
-I reviewed The Old Man Season 2 for TV Guide. I didn’t love it. It’s an okay show pretending to be a good show.
The Old Man's stylistic choices create a tension it can't resolve. Its presentation — especially in the virtuosity of Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow's performances and in the cinematic quality of the direction, cinematography, and editing — is that of a serious show like The Americans. But its overly expository dialogue and weathervane characterization are that of an unserious show like The Blacklist (I'm not saying The Blacklist is bad, just that it's a different type of show that places less of an emphasis on thematic depth). That tension makes The Old Man not work as a cerebral drama about the interior lives of spies or as a fun action thriller about old guys kicking ass, but rather traps it in the mediocre middle.
-I also reviewed the latest episode of Bad Monkey for Episodic Medium. Episodic Medium is doing a pledge drive right now, so you can subscribe at a discounted rate, which you should do if you want to read great episodic TV criticism.