Modern Police Procedurals < Homicide < The Wire
Before The Corner and The Wire David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun. During the mid-80s he spent a year following around homicide detectives and wrote the book “Homicide: Life on the Killing Streets.” That book was eventually turned into the series Homicide: Life on the Street which aired on NBC from 1993-1999. Last night I watched my first episode of the show (though not the first episode of the show). It now airs daily on the Sleuth Channel, a digital cable channel owned by NBC-Universal (natch) that reruns their well stocked back-catalog of mystery and crime series.
It’s almost impossible to judge a television program on one episode, let alone judge a series that aired for seven years based on a fleeting 45-minute excerpt of the story. That being said, Homicide, from what I can tell, is fantastic television. The short review would be something along of the lines of Homicide being just like The Wire but without the nuance, but that sells it short. Sure, things are a little more blunt, but compared with The Wire, everything else might as well be a sledgehammer.
Instead, Homicide: Life on the Street is simultaneously a look at what cop shows once were, and a look at what cop shows would eventually become. Visually the series is as gritty as CSI (and the other modern procedurals) is slick. The editing is jumpy, sometimes covering the same action two or three times from different angles. The look is very reminiscent of early episode of OZ (both shows were produced by Tom Fontana).
Dramatically, the most significant difference between Homicide and, really, everything else on television today, is how the actors were given so much room to breath. In the episode I watched, two cops played out a scene on the inside of a yacht through two commercial breaks. Modern television is so tight and so insistent on MOVING. THE. PLOT. FORWARD. you rarely get the chance to see actors just act. It’s an interesting quandary for a medium that is almost entirely based on the assumption that a character is so believable the audience wants to tune in each week to see their story.
As someone who’s watched a ton of television Homicide had all the makings of a fantastic series. What troubled me was how a show like this could have been on for so long during my formative years and yet I never saw a single frame of it until last night. Curious. I’ll have to get a hold of the first season to correct that problem.
