Groundbreaking police drama 'Homicide: Life on the Street' is finally streaming

If you were too young to watch NBC’s groundbreaking police drama, Homicide: Life on the Street when it first debuted in 1993, you may wonder why there’s still so much fuss about the show more than three decades later.

That’s because so much of what Homicide presented was stuff you just didn’t see on network television back then: shaky, kinetic camera work; working stiff police detectives cracking jokes at gruesome murder scenes instead of solemnly vowing justice; serialized stories that arced over several episodes; heart-rending killings that never got solved. It was a cop show without gun battles or car chases, with a bracing shot of street-level realism, filmed mostly in Baltimore.

TV fans can step back in time Monday, when NBCUniversal rights a longtime injustice and makes all seven seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street available on its streaming service, Peacock – along with 2000's Homicide: the Movie. There’s a total 122 episodes, plus the TV movie.

One person glad to see these episodes finally arrive on streaming is Tom Fontana, who served as executive producer and showrunner for Homicide, helping develop its singular storytelling style.

He wasn’t directly involved with bringing the series to Peacock, though Fontana says he and fellow Homicide producers Barry Levinson and Gail Mutrux had been bugging the company to put the show online for years.

“We could never understand why they [didn’t do it sooner],” adds the producer, who created the prison drama Oz, HBO’s first original drama series, and most recently co-created the AMC drama Monsieur Spade. “We kept getting different reasons from different NBC executives.”

In a tweet in June, Homicide producer and writer David Simon – a former Baltimore Sun cops reporter who wrote the book the show was based on, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets – hinted that music rights were central to the delay.

In an emailed statement to NPR, NBCUniversal noted that it took “many years” for NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution and Universal TV to secure the rights and clearances needed and to remaster the series for HD and 4K, noting the HD versions will be available Monday with the 4K version to follow. The show’s crossover episodes with another classic NBC police drama, Law & Order, will not be included on Peacock. But the episodes on streaming will include “most” of the original music.

Resurfacing groundbreaking 1990s TV

Watching Homicide episodes reveals a series seriously ahead of its time, created by Paul Attanasio and focused on recreating Simon’s incisive look at the city’s murder police.

Here, viewers were introduced to The Box, the interrogation room where detectives often solved cases by cajoling confessions from suspects, like canny used car dealers pushing wary customers to sign on the dotted line.

Or The Board, a large, dry-erase display with every detective’s name, followed by the case number and last names of the murder victims in the crimes they were working – solved cases written in black, open cases in red. “You look up there, you know exactly where you stand,” says Yaphet Kotto’s world weary, Italian African American squad leader, Al Giardello. “About how many things in life can you say that?”

The Homicide series was where Simon learned to write TV scripts before creating his own groundbreaking shows for HBO, including The Wire. Fontana recalls, “I remember saying to [Simon], on the first day, ‘You know how in a newspaper article, you have to answer who, what, when, where in the first paragraph? TV writing is the opposite; you put off answering those questions as long as you possibly can.’…I think that was probably the only really good advice I gave him.”

Fontana’s notes to Simon may also explain why the structure of Homicide’s episodes were so unusual for network TV. Characters didn’t directly say what was happening every moment, unlike so many police procedurals back then, which seemed to fear confusing audiences. Fontana says they would stick little “easter egg” style moments in episodes – with little regard for whether the audience understood them or not. In one story, for example, a man accused of racism seems to perceive color differently watching a TV set.

Given that viewers couldn’t watch the episodes on demand, or stop and rewind to catch things they might have missed, it was a bold choice. It also meant Homicide emerged as a series perfect for streaming, made long before streaming platforms actually existed.

NBCUniversal

‘A community of detectives’

The new episodes retain the show’s signature look in screeners provided by Peacock; songs by Miles Davis and the band Bleach seem to appear intact. Still, there is one longtime fan of the show who won’t be watching the new episodes on streaming: Fontana himself.

“I’m told the show holds up really well, but I’m not brave enough to watch it again,” he says. “I think the show feels real because we were talking about a community of detectives. And we didn’t want them all to sound like Dick Tracy or whatever. ”

Everyone from Oscar winner Melissa Leo to legendary indie film director and Baltimore institution John Waters appeared on the show. Robin Williams guested in a landmark episode called “Bop Gun,” playing the husband of a woman killed while they were visiting the city, horrified to overhear detectives joking about her murder with the easy familiarity of those who work close to death. (Williams’ appearance, Simon later wrote on his website, likely saved the show and cemented his TV writing career).

Vincent D’Onofrio also pops up in an episode Fontana cites as one of his favorites, called “Subway,” playing a man pushed onto a subway platform and pinned between the platform and the train. As the episode progresses, he slowly realizes he will die the moment they move the train car away.

Catching up on the work of departed acting legends

Perhaps best of all, fans can now see a long line of powerful actors who have since died – performers who delivered some of their best work on Homicide – including Kotto, Ned Beatty, Jon Polito, Richard Belzer and Andre Braugher.

Braugher shone as Det. Frank Pembleton, a hotshot known for closing cases by pushing suspects to confess in The Box. “What you will be privileged to witness is not an interrogation, but an act of salesmanship – as silver-tongued and thieving as ever moved used cars, Florida swampland or Bibles,” he tells a rookie observer in Homicide’s first episode. “But what I am selling is a long prison term. To a client who has no genuine use for the product. ”

NBCUniversal says fan reaction over the deaths last year of Belzer and Braugher – beloved actors whose later work included Law & Order: SVU and Brooklyn Nine-Nine – “was just another indicator that we should continue on our path” to bring Homicide to streaming now. Fontana notes it doesn’t hurt that Netflix also recently saw success with episodes of older series such as USA Network’s Suits and Showtime’s Your Honor, hinting that NBC’s Peacock might also benefit from elevating a classic series the company already owns.

But ask him why people are still interested in the show, about 25 years after the series ended, and the notoriously modest Fontana comes up short. “I’ve been trying to figure it out,” he says. “It’s unfortunate that the stories we told are still relevant. But it might engage a younger audience, because they can say, ‘Hey, prejudice, and misogyny and inequality are still part of day to day life.’”

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