CRIME TELEVISION CASE STUDIES

Homicide: Life on the Street

• Homicide: Life on the Street is an American police procedural television series chronicling the work of a fictional version of the Baltimore Police Department's Homicide Unit. It ran for seven seasons (122 episodes) on NBC from 1993 to 1999, and was succeeded by a TV movie, which also acted as the series finale. The series was originally based on David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Many of the characters and stories used throughout the show were based on events depicted in the book, which was also used for Simon's own series, The Wire on HBO.

• Although Homicide featured an ensemble cast, Andre Braugher emerged as the series' breakout star through his portrayal of Frank Pembleton. The show won various awards in the USA and was the first drama ever to win three Peabody Awards for best drama in 1993, 1995, and 1997.

• Simon said he was particularly interested in the demythification of the American detective. While detectives are typically portrayed as noble characters who care deeply about their victims, he believed real detectives regarded violence as a normal aspect of their jobs. He sent the book to film director and Baltimore native Barry Levinson with the hopes that it would be adapted into a film, but Levinson thought it would be more appropriate material for television because the stories and characters could be developed over a longer period of time and he thought he could bring a fresh and original edge to the police drama genre because the book exploded many of the myths of the police drama genre by highlighting that cops did not always get along with each other, and that criminals occasionally got away with their crimes.

• The series title was originally Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, but NBC changed it so that viewers would not believe it was limited to a single year; the network also believed the use of the term "life" would be more reaffirming than the term "killing streets".

• As opposed to many television shows and movies involving cops, Homicide initially opted for a bleak sort of realism in its depiction of "The Job", portraying it as repetitive, spiritually draining, a threat to one's psyche, often glamor- and glory-free—but, nonetheless, a social necessity. In its attempt to do so, Homicide developed a trademark feel and look that distinguished itself from its contemporaries. For example, the series was filmed with hand-held 16 mm cameras almost entirely on-location in Baltimore (making the city something of a character itself). It regularly used music montages, jump cut editing, and the three-times-in-a-row repetition of the same camera shot during particularly crucial moments in the story. The colours often look slightly desaturated to give the show an edgy feel – something you can on recent shows like Wallander and The Killing. The episodes were noted for interweaving as many as three or four storylines in a single episode. NBC executives often asked the writers to focus on a single homicide case rather than multiple ones, but the show producers tended to resist this advice.

• The show initially had poor ratings, but it won awards and the success of another new crime show, NYPD Blue, persuaded NBC to persevere. Reviews, however, were almost always good and commentators were especially impressed with the high number of strong, complex, well-developed and non-stereotypical African American characters like Pembleton, Lewis and Giardello.

• NBC occasionally pressured the show's producers to write happy endings to the homicide cases, the network gave an unusual amount of freedom for the writers to create darker stories and non-traditional detective story elements, like unsolved cases where criminals escape. Nevertheless, in its attempt to improve Homicide's ratings, NBC often insisted on changes, both cosmetic and thematic. For example, by the beginning of the third season, talented but ‘unphotogenic’ veteran actor Jon Polito had been ordered dropped from the cast and replaced by Reed Diamond, who one critic claimed could’ve walked off the set of Friends,. They also wanted more obviously glamorous female stars and one was introduced Detective Megan Russert – just after an episode where the policemen were wondering aloud about the gratuitous use of women as sexual objects on television! By the time show finished its run, there were more fenale members of the cast: all young; all stereotypically attractive.

NBC were constantly trying to get the producers not only to sex-up the females but to sex-up the action to beat Nash Bridges, a vacuous but popular action-oriented police show on an opposing channel.

• Homicide was noteworthy amongst network TV shows in its multi-dimensional depictions of various African Americans throughout the show. While not specifically an African-American-themed show, it was set in majority African-American Baltimore, Maryland and would naturally display various issues and characteristics of the city's African-American community. Homicide managed to cross several racial barriers that were not crossed on previous television series, and portrayed by and large a more progressive depiction of African-American characters than other previous television series. The show was commended at several award ceremonies themed to African-American cinema, such as the NAACP-sponsored Image Awards which would nominate both the show itself and its major cast members such as Andre Braugher, Giancarlo Esposito, Clark Johnson, Yaphet Kotto, Toni Lewis, and Michael Michele for various awards.

• Out of the initial cast of nine, for example, three were black, including the lead character, Frank Pembleton, and the boss of the squad, Lt Al Giardello; one was a white female; one was Italian; one was Jewish.