Tragic timing

The HBO series The Wire is the grandchild of Homicide: Life on the Street, the groundbreaking NBC police procedural series also set in Baltimore which ran for seven seasons in the 1990s.

Homicide is remarkable for its tragic timing, no less for its diverse cast of actors playing people who are police officers. Tragic timing lands just right as caesura, the tragic poignancy of a commonplace pressed to a still point, after which life’s comedy resumes. That Homicide’s actors played people who are police officers rather than simply TV cops jettisoned and even ironized genre stereotypes on both sides of the law and across professional and social levels.

The series is based on the 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by The Wire-creator David Simon. As a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Simon had spent a year attached to the city police homicide unit, Baltimore’s “murder po-lice.” The series’s quirkiest character is the city itself, known locally as “Smalltimore” as it often can feel like a big village where everybody seems connected.

“I may be guilty but I’m not stupid,” says a suspect (cameo Baltimore resident film director John Waters) who waived an extradition hearing in New York to return to Baltimore to face charges.

The small-town connectedness makes for a lazy screen door in the fourth wall between series fiction and city fact. Actual officials such as then-Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke appear and sometimes engage with fictional ones. In one of three separate episodes directed by Academy Award-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple, series regulars Detectives Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) and Mike Kellerman (Reed Diamond), filmed by police videographer J.H. Brodie (Max Perlich), corner a confused suspect into an alley filled with a working film crew. Director Barry Levinson (a Homicide co-executive producer, here wearing a “Homicide”-embroidered baseball cap) shouts “Cut!” The fictional Lewis recognizes the actual Levinson as a local high school classmate: for Baltimoreans, one’s high school is a social marker.

Baltimore-born and -bred Levinson was key to the series as a major director and Academy Award-winner. He directed the series pilot “Gone for Goode” featuring a serial black widow, as well as the Season 3 finale, “The Gas Man,” shot from the point of view of two marginal Eastsiders shadowing Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher): Bruno (Victor Helms Jr.), just out of prison, is bent on revenge against Pembleton whose by-the-book detective work had put him there, with his sidekick Danny (Richard Edson) in a disco-happy mist.

Homicide develops its odd-lots characters and partner pairs in their daily routines interacting with colleagues and each other, locals, the media, and their command to turn red names on a large whiteboard—murder victims—into black names—closed cased: “Black is beautiful,” hard-driving shift commander “G”, Lieutenant Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto), exhorts his team, referring to the names in black with a smile. The half-Black, half-Sicilian Giardello is the series’ center; Kotto leads a cast of mostly television and character actors, several of whom may have done their best work making this series.

The show’s creators and writers explore issues beyond conventional boundaries of race, class, and gender with a variety of directors and an unusual mix of actors and guest stars, stories and dialogue showcases ensemble acting. Episodes sometimes center on a single location: the unit interrogation room, the squad room, a stakeout in a private living room, a detective’s rural hometown while on leave, a hostage-taker’s home; and unlike standard police procedurals episodes can be told from the point of view of perpetrators or of murder victims’ families.

The Season 1 episode “Three Men and Adena” works as an intense one-act play. Shot mostly within “The Box,” the unit’s small, yellow-tiled interrogation room, Dets. Pembleton and Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) grill suspect Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn) whom they believe murdered 11-year-old Adena Watson. As the pair browbeat the apparently cowering suspect for a confession, he reads each of them and then tries to turn the psychological tables by probing his interrogators’ insecurities over race, class, and their own inner demons. In Season 3’s “Every Mother’s Son,” the same detectives investigate the purportedly “accidental” execution of a 13-year-old in a bowling alley, questioning a blasé 14-year-old named Ronnie Sayers (Sean Nelson):

Ronnie: “If you’re driving a car and hit somebody you didn’t mean to, it’s an accident.”

Pembleton: “Ronnie, you shot the wrong kid!”

Ronnie: “Car accidents kill innocent people all the time. How’s it any different?”

The boys’ mothers (Rhonda Stubbins White and Gay Thomas Wilson) meet by chance in the unit waiting area as women with pairs of boys the same ages while detectives work the case. This subplot puts ordinary human faces on the toll gun violence takes on communities, here working single mothers struggling to raise families and live their lives. 

Among the series’s many guest stars are Robin Williams as a family man whose wife is shot in front of him and their two children in a stick-up near the then-new Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Steve Buscemi is a white supremacist and murder suspect who purports to read Greek, shown up by the Black detective interrogating him who actually does. Lily Tomlin eludes a police escort to settle a longtime score. Melvin Van Peebles is a funeral director who “socializes” with his subjects. Elijah Wood is a smarmy adolescent sociopath. Joan Chen is an ambitious crime reporter. James Earl Jones and Jeffrey Wright are father and son in a prominent local family whose Haitian refugee “domestic” is murdered. A vindictive shove catches Vincent D’Onofrio between subway car and platform. Alfre Woodard spars with Det. Pembleton over her clinical care of the terminally ill. Charles Durning is a retired cop brought back to help close a 60-year-old case.

Season 5 includes “Heart of a Saturday Night,” an understated auteur episode by film director Whit Stillman with the feel of a short film. In addition to the usual series cast, Stillman regular Chris Eigeman (Metropolitan, 1990; Barcelona, 1994), along with Rosanna Arquette, Polly Holliday and Tom Quinn play the husband, wife, and parents of three murder victims, brought together with Chief Medical Examiner Julianna Cox (Michelle Forbes) in a survivor support group. The action shifts between the support group, the three murders, and detectives working these cases.

“Of all the movie theaters in all the towns in all the world, he had to walk into mine,” a Baltimore theater manager (Wallace Shawn) told police detectives investigating a murder.

In “A Case of Do or Die” (Season 7) Wallace Shawn manages a movie theater showing Casablanca (1942) in which an obnoxious film-going regular who blurts out classic movie lines with running commentaries does not survive a screening. The episode written by Homicide regular Anya Epstein focuses more centrally on a pair of stories about women who leave men. Epstein is the granddaughter and grandniece of the team who wrote the Casablanca screenplay; the episode title was taken from the lyrics of Casablanca’s classic theme “As Time Goes By”, the song Sam (Dooley Wilson) immortalized in playing again.

In addition to Kotto, Braugher (whose actual wife Ami Brabson plays his non-police officer wife Mary in the series), Johnson (who directed six episodes and also acted, directed, and wrote in The Wire), Secor, Diamond, and Forbes, long-term unit regulars include stand-up comic Richard Belzer as Det. John Munch, Melissa Leo as Det. Kay Howard and Isabella Hoffman as Det. Megan Russert. In the early seasons, Ned Beatty, Adam Baldwin, and Jon Polito featured as detectives; Toni Lewis, Peter Gerety, Jon Seda, Callie Thorne and Michael Michele join the unit in later seasons, with Giancarlo Esposito as FBI Special Agent Mike Giardello, G’s son. Željko Ivanek is Assistant State’s Attorney Ed Danvers.

In the sense that Homicide’s cast played people who were law enforcement officers, the series may have humanized its older NBC sibling Law & Order and cop shows that followed. Characters from the two NBC series crossed over several times to work cases involving Manhattan and Baltimore law enforcement agencies. Belzer’s Munch transferred to the NYPD in the Law & Order franchise after Homicide was canceled in 1999 (and reprised the role on another nine shows). His serial, rambling commentaries were memorably brought up short once by an adolescent: 

“It’s like you have to use all these weird words, and it’s like you’re listening to the words like they were a cartoon coming out of your mouth, and you’re watching them, thinking: ‘I’m cool. I’m cool,’” Fidel McGibney (Ryan Todd) told the uncharacteristically speechless Munch in the Season 3 episode “All Through the House.”  

Homicide won critical acclaim throughout its run but chronically low Nielsen ratings made it a constant target for cancellation and “massaging” by NBC. This did not go unremarked by the show’s writers. In an episode late in the series’s final season, a detective compares the apparent “invisibility” of a so-called Nielsen family to a suspect who may be a mobster relocated with his family to Baltimore in a federal witness protection program.

However, the genuine actors’ studio of regulars and guest stars and the diversity of directorial, shooting, and writing styles made a statement and remain a phenomenon: Each episode is a thing in itself, memorable, and seldom gives the viewer the same thing twice. Although Homicide’s telephones sit on desks and police officers type reports on typewriters, first-time viewers nearly three decades later may be surprised to find its race, class, gender, and criminal justice issues easily in step with today’s.

Homicide: Life on the Street 1993-1999 U.S. (122 50-minute episodes) Baltimore Pictures/NBC Studios. Created by Paul Attanasio; written by Tom Fontana, James Yoshimura, Anya Epstein, David Simon, and many others, based on Simon’s 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets; executive producers Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana, and others.