Homicide

CHAPTER 1
The Best Damn Show on Television
In October of 1996, Carlester Eric Robinson tore out of a Rite-Aid drug store in Baltimore, Maryland, with security guards hot on his heels.
He was just a petty shoplifter, trying to make off with a bag full of stolen Q-Tips and Polaroid film. He figured he should avoid busy Charles Street, and, instead, turned down the less-populated Trenton Street. As Robinson rounded the corner, he found himself surrounded by police cars. Directly ahead of him was the imposing sight of uniformed officers and a pair of plainclothes detectives. Obviously, there was no way out.
Realizing he had no escape, the thief raised his hands and promptly surrendered himself to Detectives Meldrick Lewis and John Munch.
As it happens, Lewis and Munch are fictional characters on a TV show, played by Clark Johnson and Richard Belzer respectively. How was the thief to know that the cops were actors, wielding plastic prop guns?
Poor Mr. Robinson suffered a great deal of embarrassment that day, and his mistake gave local news teams something to chuckle about on-air. But he was not the first, nor the last, to find it hard to tell fact from fiction on the set of Homicide: Life on the Street. Even the producers admitted that they sometimes forgot what is real and what is not on this show, a show that takes such intense pride in its mind-bending "art-imitates-life-imitates-art" recursions.
The producers of Homicide even incorporated the thief's embarrassing arrest into an episode broadcast a few months later, and topped off this self-reference with a cameo appearance by series producer Barry Levinson, playing himself as the producer of a TV series called Homicide. The TV detectives then offer Levinson some words of advice about how to make the show more "realistic."
Homicide: Life on the Street
From its gritty and convincing realism to its cinematic, avant-garde style, this drama from acclaimed feature-film director Barry Levinson announced itself as something special with its very first broadcast in January 1993.
Homicide is an innovation in a medium best known for playing it safe, and it has garnered loyal fans and critical praise while challenging audiences to demand more from television. Fans have responded by nicknaming the series "The Best Damn Show on Television."
Homicide owes much of its realism to the work of Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon. In 1988, Simon spent a year shadowing the real-life detectives of Baltimore's Homicide Unit, and published his experiences as the highly acclaimed Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991, Houghton Mifflin Company).
Barry Levinson and his co-creators adapted the book into a TV series, keeping many of its stories and dialogue intact. In later years, David Simon joined the team as a staff writer, while continuing his nonfiction crime writing.
Mind Over Matter
For all its intensity, Homicide is not known for dramatic action. The brilliant detectives of Baltimore's homicide division capture their perpetrators, or "perps," by wit and will alone. These men and women are prized for their brains, not their bodies, and so it is little surprise that their bodies are not as finely tuned or honed as so many other TV police characters seem to be.
On those rare occasions when action is called for, the detectives will find themselves unprepared for it. The simple act of chasing a suspect a measly block becomes a dangerous and costly act. In Episode 34: "Fire, Part One," Detective Tim Bayliss strains his back as a result of his exertion. Bayliss' real-life counterpart, Detective Tom Pellegrini, chose to join the Homicide Unit because he found the mental stimulation of solving crimes much more appealing than the hazardous duties he performed in Baltimore's Quick Response Team.
THE CHESS PLAYERS
The cast and crew of Homicide have often noted that their detectives aren't typical action heroes. Actor Richard Belzer (Detective John Munch) calls them "the chess players." As it happens, Richard Belzer and Andre Braugher (Detective Frank Pembleton) keep this motif strongly in mind while shooting the show. Between takes, the two play a running chess game against one another. Braugher, who has maintained an overwhelming winning streak over his costar, plays the black pieces ("I've had four hundred years' practice," he jokes), and uses the same defense ten games in a row.
THE ONE THING THIS COUNTRY'S STILL GOOD AT
The United States leads the industrialized world in homicide rates. It is the tenth leading cause of death, claiming some 24,000 people each year, roughly a murder every twenty minutes.
The news media sensationalize exciting, abnormal murders or homicides involving celebrities. This creates an image in the public mind of who kills and why. That image then fuels popular culture, where fictional psycho killers, hit men, and gangsters roam in disproportionate numbers.
Sociologist Marvin Wolfgang conducted a classic study of homicide in 1958. He found that a third of American murders result from "altercations of a relatively trivial origin." Another twenty percent result as a part of another crime.
President Johnson's 1968 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence concluded that the "primary motivating forces" for most homicides in the United States were "usually trivial ... disagreements."
In the late 1980s, at the same time that David Simon was living among the Baltimore Homicide team, another crime journalist, Edna Buchanan of Miami, concluded that "the little things in life sometimes trigger the urge to kill: a stereo too loud, a game of checkers."
In fact, statistics show that real police work has very little in common with the usual shoot-em-up TV clichés. Police officers are more likely to die by suicide than to be killed by bad guys. It is hardly surprising, then, that Homicide has addressed suicide on numerous occasions in its stories.
Homicide detectives find that their stimulation is mental: the challenge of finding order in a disorderly world, the challenge of making sense out of senseless acts. As for the latter, however, the detectives on Homicide seldom can do such a thing, although they valiantly try. In the end, the senselessness of murder almost always defies them.
The detectives close cases, they do not solve them. "Solve" implies putting the situation right again. However, that's not possible for the lives of those left victimized by murder but still alive, usually the grieving family andfriends who will never be the same again. Furthermore, the killers may be as much victims of it all as those they killed. Putting a kid behind bars doesn't make things right again at all.
So the detectives seek sense and order elsewhere.
Who Killed Lincoln?
One of the most memorable examples within this TV series is Detective Steve Crosetti's obsession with the assassination of President Lincoln. He pursues that case, over a hundred years old, at times with more zeal than he does the cases at hand, weaving a complicated but fully-researched conspiracy theory worthy of a JFK buff.
As his partner Meldrick Lewis caustically reminds him, the Lincoln case is not an open case. Instead, Crosetti's drive to solve fully the Lincoln assassination is purely personal. It means something to him. He hopes that perhaps he can expose a century-old conspiracy, and thereby truly "solve" the case and set things right.
In the end, he never achieves that goal. Crosetti ultimately kills himself (see Episode 19: "Crosetti"), and his former colleagues must now "solve" that death. Detective Lewis may discover how his partner died, and perhaps he can guess at why, but closing the case on his friend's suicide will never "solve" it.
Loneliness
Homicide is especially frank in depicting the toll the job takes on the detectives' families. Detectives Munch, Bolander, and Kellerman are divorced. Detectives Felton, Pembleton, and Lewis find their families torn apart when their wives realize that their husbands are married first and foremost to the street. Like her male colleagues, Detective Kay Howard is too much of a dedicated detective to have a normal romance. Shift Commanders Al Giardello and Megan Russert are both alone after the death of their spouses. Even the eligible bachelor Detective Tim Bayliss is too tortured to hold down a steady relationship.
The men and women of Homicide are a lonely lot.
The Many Colors of Blue
Among its many achievements, Homicide has earned a place in television history for its unprecedented portrayal of race.
Even by the end of the twentieth century, black Americans have made fewer inroads of progress in pop culture than they have in the real world. Increasingly, blacks and whites are working together, but it would be hard to discern that fact from the boob tube.
There are shows with predominately black casts which target a black audience, shows which tend to be racy sitcoms aired on marginal networks. Then there are shows, mostly major network dramas, aimed at a "mainstream" audience, with mostly white casts. The rare examples of minority characters in network dramas often carry the burden of being the sole representative of their race in that program. Their characterizations are seen and interpreted by the viewers as being a generalized example of what their race is like as a whole.
By contrast, Homicide features numerous black characters: major and minor, cops and crooks, figures of authority and powerlessness, each one a complex and fully realized human being. No single character can be seen as a racial representative. At no point has Homicide attempted to trumpet this racial inclusiveness. The series has never marketed itself as a "black" show.
In 1995, the Atlanta Journal hailed Homicide as a groundbreaking series for its realistic racial composition. The producers demurred, uninterested in taking credit for trailblazing. Instead, executive producers Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana, and Henry Bromell insisted they merely strove to depict the overwhelmingly black-majority city of Baltimore honestly.
Nevertheless, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wrote a letter to NBC praising Homicide, especially Yaphet Kotto's portrayal of Lieutenant Al Giardello. In 1997, the NAACP nominated Homicide for its annual Image Awards, for projects that have made significant contributions towards advancing the image of people of color. The NAACP also singled out Kotto and Andre Braugher for Outstanding Actor nominations.
"The fact that we were lucky enough to get three outstanding actors of African descent [Yaphet Kotto, Andre Braugher, and Clark Johnson], who could play off that or not depending on the stories, has been a great enlightenment to us as writers," says executive producer Tom Fontana.
Some industry analysts have noted that Homicide's famous ratings troubles could be partly blamed on its prominent black cast members. Although Andre Braugher of Homicide earned phenomenal critical attention, it was Dennis Franz and David Caruso, the white leads of NYPD Blue, who became national stars.
The trend of black casts for black audiences and white casts for white audiences is not simply a reflection of racism on the part of network programmers, but a sad fact of American life that American audiences segregate themselves. In 1995, only three shows rated in the Top 20 among both black and white viewers. By including a rich variety of black characters, Homicide turned off white viewers. By including so many white characters, Homicide also kept away black viewers.
As a result, while Homicide has the unique distinction of realistically depicting an integrated America, low ratings have discouraged other producers from following suit.
Homicide has also addressed the glass ceiling of the police department, taking on gender issues in the workforce as well. Like Prime Suspect (1990-- )--the superb British crime drama often compared to Homicide--the mostly male world of the police department does not take well to the idea of women in positions of authority.
On one end of the spectrum is the series' Kay Howard, a brilliant and hardworking detective who never lets her guard down. Always pushing herself to be better than the best, Howard earns a promotion to sergeant based on her outstanding performance. However, the male detectives under her supervision bristle with resentment. The ingrained notions of women's roles are so powerfulthat they even surface behind the scenes, where actress Melissa Leo found herself consistently excluded from the impromptu games of football her male costars play on the set (she had to bring her own Hacky-Sack to be allowed to play with the boys).
On the other end of the spectrum is Megan Russert. As the shift commander of Homicide's second shift, she meets the same kind of wounded pride from the men under her charge. Unlike Howard, though, Russert is promoted up the ladder to captain, not on the basis of merit, but as an act of pure political tokenism. It's not that she lacks leadership skills. In fact, Russert is an exemplary detective and an uncharacteristically courageous captain. But her sudden success is both too soon and too short, since neither her promotion nor her later demotion have anything to do with merit.
The Killing Streets
In the urban sprawl of a city marked by rising crime rates and increasing fear of crime, the elite members of Baltimore's Homicide Unit continue their daily crusade against the forces of killing. At times, it seems hopeless. They are a mere handful of investigators pitted against some 300 murder cases a year.
Indeed, some of the city's murders are quite odd: one man killed for his pen; another life is snuffed out because the victim didn't think Spiro Agnew should be remembered with a statue; a lover killed in a fit of passion by a woman who then stores the corpse in a deep freezer full of brisket. Others are gut-wrenching: a little girl molested and murdered by a killer who goes free; a boy shot dead by another one for no reason; a political activist assassinated at the order of a drug cartel; three saintly women murdered and left nude in dumpsters.
It's a combat waged with brains, not guns. An average homicide detective may not even draw his gun for any reason other than to pass the departments' firing-range test.
The cops are aided in their task by the fact that the killers they track are so incredibly stupid. Unlike the usual TV crime-show stereotypes, these murderers are not criminal masterminds or serial killer psychopaths. The steady stream of dead bodies flow mainly from a single river: hotheaded folk who settle their grudges with a bang.
These petty grievances, the motives for murder, are either so banal or so personal as to be irrelevant to the detective's job. Most TV detectives use the "why" to find the "who," but the detectives of Baltimore city know the "why" will lead them nowhere. They look simply for the "how." That's what turns red names to black.
The central feature of the Homicide squadroom is "The Board," a massive chart of each detective on the shift. Beneath each detective's name are the names of the murdered people whose cases they must solve. As each new case is opened, the victim's name is written in red. As each case is closed, the name is reinscribed in black. A single glance at the board can reveal the ratio of red to black, and, thus, who is catching killers, and who is not.
Not all of the detectives' cases involve murder. As the city's premiere team of investigators, the Homicide Unit also handles all police-involved shootings, suspicious deaths, and other high-profile cases.
The most-high-profile cases, called "red balls," place the detectives in the media spotlight and the department hot spot. The investigators have the full resources of the police department to draw upon, but they are expected to produce results fast or there will be political hell to pay.
The cases are distributed randomly. The detective who answers the call will be the primary detective on that case. Each cop answers the phone without knowing what it will bring: an easy "dunker" that will help their closure rate or a "stone-cold whodunnit" that will linger in red under their name for all time.
Whydunnit
The detective of Homicide pits his or her wits against the physical world: the natural decay of evidence, the limitations of forensic science, the social situations that encourage witnesses to lie. However, the detective does not, in most cases, pit his or her wits against a worthy criminal opponent. There is no Moriarty for these Sherlocks.
Homicide's writers understand that most murders have little to do with the conventions of most detective fiction. Not only is the work itself more mental than physical, but that mental work bears little resemblance to the exploits of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. The cornerstone of most traditional crime fiction is motive. The first order of business for a Colombo, a Perry Mason, or a Jessica Fletcher is to determine why the victim was killed. From that, they deduce who "dunnit."
On Homicide, however, the "whys" are often absurdly trivial. Homicide depicts a world in which the petty squabbles of everyday life provoke violence and mayhem. This is a world where small talk turns into trash talk, where the slightest grievance is cause for killing. These motives are too common to be distinctive, and cease to be useful clues at all. Homicide's detectives won't find their killers by understanding why the victims were killed because no ordinary person can ever really understand how such simple complaints result in such violence.
Contrary to pop culture's depiction, most murders are the trivial kind depicted on Homicide, though no less brutal and horrifying for that. Most murders just happen, without a specific motive, because our society is awash with guns and drugs and poor self-control. These are not carefully planned "perfect crimes" executed by calculating villains for specific reasons. These are mundane murders, unsettlingly common and meaningless.
Reel Life
Homicide has often been compared to the famed TV series Hill Street Blues (1981-87). Like Blues before it, Homicide weaves together multiple subplots and story lines as it follows the lives of an ensemble cast of cops. Both shows also share a surprising blend of comedy with gritty drama.
The series has also been likened to the TV series St. Elsewhere for many of the same reasons. As it happens, Homicide's executive producer Tom Fontana cut his teeth on St. Elsewhere (1982-88), and has relied on many of the same cast and creators to develop Homicide.
For all of its critical acclaim, however, Homicide has often been overshadowed by more popular TV crime dramas like NYPD Blue (1993- ) and Law and Order (1990- ). Ironically, while Homicide hails from some of the same producers as St. Elsewhere, NYPD Blue is by the same folks as Hill Street Blues. NYPD Blue, however, eschews the ensemble format for a simpler buddy-cop drama.
GALLOWS HUMOR
Many of Homicide's guest stars have been comedians: Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin, Chris Rock, Howie Mandel, and Jerry Stiller, to say nothing of star Richard Belzer. Executive producer Henry Bromell told Entertainment Weekly that comics naturally fit the tone of the show. "There's a certain danger inherent in comics. They're up there and anything can happen. They're not quite in control."
On the one hand, Homicide has its roots in the crime journalism of David Simon, while, on the other, NYPD Blue is inspired by the experiences of New York homicide detective Bill Clark. The nudity and adult language of NYPD Blue may have stirred up more controversy, but in many ways Homicide is the riskier show.
Homicide dares to show the tedium of police investigations and the unsettling role of luck in catching crooks. Homicide doesn't always close its cases in one hour, and some are never closed. Sometimes criminals are identified, butcannot be brought to justice. Sometimes the notion of justice is so ambiguous as to be useless. In addition, these detectives do not get along all the time. The tension simmering beneath the surface can, at times, be more dangerous than what is waiting for them on Baltimore's streets.
NYPD Blue has lost many of its female cast members over the years because the actresses quickly have grown tired of being sex objects and ciphers. On Homicide, the women characters can be seen as true peers to their male colleagues. The men and women of Baltimore's Homicide Unit are too busy being relentless, intense perfectionists to think about interoffice dating. A few love affairs have arisen (Detective Beau Felton and Lieutenant Megan Russert, Detective Mike Kellerman and Chief Medical Examiner Julianna Cox), but these are the exception rather than the rule.
Compared to NYPD Blue, Homicide is vastly more challenging, more disturbing, less predictable. Homicide is not the kind of show that reassures the audience. In the end, this fearless storytelling is more provocative than some mild nudity or swearing will ever be, as well as being much more realistic.
The writers of Homicide (including Tom Fontana, Henry Bromell, David Simon, James Yoshimura, Julie Martin, Jorge Zamacona, Bonnie Mark, Anya Epstein, and Darryl LeMont Wharton) not only look to the true crime stories of Simon's book and current news stories for realistic inspiration, but also many of the series' subplots and relationships are based on the real lives of its stars. The actors who play Frank and Mary Pembleton are married in real life; the actors who play Megan Russert and Beau Felton continued their onscreen affair offscreen, as well; the brief affair between Detective John Munch and Medical Examiner Alyssa Dyer failed onscreen whereas the two actors have been in love in real life for over sixteen years. Sometimes the relationships between onscreen events and offscreen reality became so complex that Homicide has been called a dramatic version of Seinfeld (1990-98).
Producer Tom Fontana once said he thought it would be great, albeit unlikely, if they could get Jerry Seinfeld to guest star on the show. Some other Seinfeld performers have made appearances on Homicide. Jerry Stiller, better known as the abrasive Frank Costanza on Seinfeld, played a perfectionist bartender for Homicide. Michelle Forbes joined the cast in the fifth season as Medical Examiner Julianna Cox, having previously appeared on Seinfeld as George Costanza's girlfriend.
Homicide's impressive roster of guest stars also includes Robin Williams, James Earl Jones, Chris Rock, Howie Mandel, Julianna Margulies, Gloria Reuben, Al Freeman Jr., Steve Buscemi, Valerie Perrine, Chris Noth, Mandy Patinkin, John Waters, Bruno Kirby, Jay Leno, Tim Russert, Lily Tomlin,Charles Dutton, Edward Herrmann, Wilford Brimley, Chris Eigeman, Rosanna Arquette, Elijah Wood, Neil Patrick Harris, the Reverend Horton Heat, Melvin Van Peebles, Vincent D'Onofrio, and real-life Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke.
Not all of Homicide's notable contributors have done their work in front of the cameras. Thanks to the prestige bestowed upon the show by esteemed producer-director Barry Levinson, numerous feature-film directors and other luminaries have lent their talents to being guest directors: Nick Gomez, Michael Lehmann, Stephen Gyllenhaal, John McNaughton, Ted Demme, Whitney Ransick, Peter Weller, Michael Radford, Kathy Bates, Whit Stillman, Barbara Kopple, etc.
It should be noted that without a regular director, the role of cinematographer on this series has greatly increased in importance. The cinematographer has assumed a role otherwise performed by the director, that of keeping a consistent look and feel for the show. That style has, of course, become exceptionally distinctive.
Cinematographer Jean de Segonzac swirls about the set on a rolling stool, whirling around the cast members with a hand-held camera. While other shows, such as NYPD Blue, fake a hand-held look to suggest a documentary realism, Homicide does it for real. Shot as if it were a real documentary, de Segonzac's camera becomes a player in the action.
In addition to giddy camerawork, Homicide's editing (often the work of Cindy Mollo's nimble fingers) breaks all the rules TV producers are taught. Continuity goes out the window as Mollo and the other editors focus solely on getting the emotion of the scene right. Sometimes, capturing the full emotional punch of a scene demands that they replay a certain shot or line of dialogue several times, as if it is being drilled into the audience's skull.
The Winning Touch
Although it took a few years for its influence to be felt on other shows (see sidebar), Homicide's effect on critics was all but instantaneous. Homicide: Life on the Street has won two Emmy awards and two Writers Guild of America awards. It has been named Program of the Year and Drama of the Year by the Television Critics Association, and Electronic Media's semiannual poll of television writers named it "Favorite Series." It was also nominated for the Producers' Guild of America Golden Laurel Award. In addition, Viewers for Quality Television has awarded Homicide the "Q" award, the highest honor they can bestow on a series.
EVERYBODY'S DOIN' IT
As Homicide entered its sixth year on TV, other shows started to borrow its experimental editing techniques. NBC's Pretender (1996- ) started using the trick of repeating the same shot in rapid succession in 1997, about the same time the producer of Babylon 5 (1994- ) asked his editor to duplicate "the Homicide look." Even Seinfeld (1990-98) borrowed the stuttering jump-cut to underscore a highly emotional flashback as George Costanza recalled getting a wedgie in middle school.
After actor Mandy Pantinkin appeared as his Chicago Hope (1994- ) character Doctor Geiger in an episode of Homicide, Chicago Hope's producers included a detective obviously modeled on Frank Pembleton in one of their episodes. Richard Belzer appeared in a Homicide parody in the feature film A Very Brady Sequel (1996), and then appeared as Detective John Munch in a 1997 episode of The X-Files (1993- ).
Finally, Homicide won the highly coveted Peabody Award, and it has done so three times (in 1993, 1995, and 1998). Named for philanthropist George Foster Peabody, the Peabody Award is considered the television industry's most prestigious honor. In selecting Homicide: Life on the Street from over 1200 entries, the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, which administers the Peabody Award, identified the show as "a socially relevant dramatic series that manages continually to improve upon its impressive record of achievement." In the more than fifty-five-year history of the award, only two drama series have ever been so honored: Homicide, and St. Elsewhere. Notably, both shows were coproduced by Tom Fontana.
Despite such accolades, Homicide has never been a ratings hit and has faced the threat of cancellation on several occasions during its history. Fans may have called Homicide "The Best Damn Show on TV," but TV Guide dubbed it "The Best Show You're Not Watching."
However, there is a meaningful distinction between successful and popular . In this age of focus groups, test screenings, and market research, movies and TV shows can be fashioned by creators who serve more as manufacturers than storytellers.
Entertainment that is sufficiently inoffensive and predictable, if heavily promoted, can become a major success without ever actually being liked by anyone. Major summer-movie blockbusters can be considered hits evenbefore they open, if a sufficient number of people have decided on the basis of the marketing to go see the film. Thus, the actual quality of the content of the film becomes irrelevant to its popularity. Such programming is successful insofar as it doesn't drive away viewers.
Perhaps it is true that Homicide does drive away viewers. The show demands a lot from its audience, and its uncomfortable depictions of the dark side of life can be too much for some TV viewers. However, for those who have warmed to its immeasurable charms, Homicide is satisfying in a way no other show can be. Its audience may be fewer in number than its immediate competition (like the exceptionally unexceptional Nash Bridges, which first went head-to-head against Homicide in 1996), but they are committed and loyal fans, whose enjoyment of the show runs very very deep. This is a level of success that only a rarefied number of television shows can ever hope to achieve.

Copyright © 1998 by David Kalat