For years, television nerds have bemoaned the unavailability of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” a low-rated but acclaimed cop show that aired for seven seasons on NBC in the 1990s. Based on a book by David Simon, a Baltimore reporter who would later create the beloved HBO series “The Wire,” it was broadly influential on what became known as Peak or Golden Age TV.
Finally accessible via the Peacock platform, “Homicide” (on which Simon wrote and consulted) follows a colorful assortment of hard-bitten detectives in the Baltimore Police Department as they work cases in a crumbling city with hundreds of murders a year, while juggling the messes of their personal lives.
The reputation that preceded the series’ reintroduction is that it was a landmark of its time, important but dated to that era. But this gravely undersells the product. “Homicide” could debut today in almost its exact condition and it would still feel groundbreaking. It’s probably better than anything new the major streamers are offering right now.
It is common to view “Homicide” as a precursor to “The Wire,” a panoramic urban drama that explored how a city’s failing institutions — its cops, its politicians, its unions, its schools, its media — intersect to destroy the lives of struggling people.
“The Wire” has aged well, but it can come across preachy and didactic. The series, which concluded in 2008, endures as a prescient work of social commentary but, just as much, as a punchline about white-person virtue-signaling.
“Homicide” requires no such disclaimers. The performances are just as compelling, most notably Andre Braugher as a charismatic detective and Yaphet Kotto as the department’s beleaguered lieutenant, plus a roster of great character actors in cop roles: Daniel Baldwin, Richard Belzer, Melissa Leo, Ned Beatty and several others.
There are no shootouts or car chases. Most of the action is centralized at the precinct, where a dry-erase whiteboard serves as a framing device. There, the name of a victim is written in red, where it remains until the case is solved and the name is rewritten in black, almost like a financial statement.
The generally distressing red/black radio prompts dialogue that is as philosophical as it is crude, informed by the brokenness of a system that reduces lost lives to scribbles on a wall. Because no matter how the day goes, they’re all one phone call away from adding another body to the list.
Fans of the show advise sticking around until at least the sixth episode of season one, “Three Men and Adena,” before deciding whether to continue. It is set in an interrogation room, where detectives played by Braugher and Kyle Secor try to extract a confession from a man they believe murdered a child.
This kind of “bottle” episode became common in the decades of prestige TV that followed. But when it aired in 1993, both its structure and its moral ambiguity — two protagonists repeatedly violate a suspect’s constitutional rights and don’t even close the case — were radical departures for a genre that unwaveringly valorized the police.
A less-celebrated season-one episode, “Night of the Dead Living,” is more representative. The air conditioning is busted on the hottest day of summer, and a baby turns up at the precinct, apparently abandoned.
After the detectives call social services to take the child away, they learn it belonged to a woman hired to clean the office, who brought her son along because she couldn’t afford daycare and, through no fault of her own, must now navigate a maddening bureaucracy to get him back.
“Homicide” feels less like a prelude to “The Wire” than a companion work that in some ways is even better. “The Wire” explains, in laborious detail, why the air conditioning is off, why the young mom has to bring her kid to work and why the homicide cops are so distracted that they inadvertently break up a family.
In “Homicide,” those explanations are all subtextual — background that, like in any well-written story, is shown instead of told. We’re painfully aware that even if they manage to fix the AC, that phone is going to ring again soon.