Life and Death in Charm City: A Homicide Retrospective, Intro

You watch television differently when you’re a teenager. You care more for entertainment and something that fits your philosophies. When you’re an adult you watch some TV shows differently. And sometimes there are television shows that help you make a transition from one phase of your viewing to another.

            Up until I was fifteen years Old, my parameters for watching TV were not the same as I would later have. Most of my viewings were children’s shows and cartoon related television like The Simpsons. Three very different shows that I watched would  play a vital role of me growing as a viewer. The first was Picket Fences, David E. Kelley’s quirky drama. While it would contain scenarios that were far-fetched and bizarre, the overall dramatic entertainment combined with the fine quality of the acting would establish a fond place in my memory and would cause me to follow Kelley into several other  well-written shows. It was the first one-hour drama that I watched regularly.

            The second drama was The X-Files. Much has already been written about this show (I have written at length on it several times) so it is enough to say that this series got me into science-fiction on different levels (most of them related to government conspiracies)

            The third show aired at 10:00 pm on Fridays which was Picket Fences’ time slot until the fall of 1995. In order to fill this void, I watched mostly cable shows until January. Then (for reasons which have escaped me) I turned to NBC. And saw a program that I had watched once or twice before but never got involved in. I watched as several detectives in Baltimore tried to stop a serial killer using a sniper rifle and who appeared to be playing ‘Hangman’. For the next fifty five minutes, I was captivated in a way that had never happened to me before and has rarely happened since.  Homicide  had struck a chord with me that I still feel for.

            I would like to say that after this I became an immediate follower of the show, but such was not the case. This story was a two-parter, so I was back the next week. However, I still watched rather sporadically until March when I fell into a pattern of seeing it. I watched it from the Law and Order crossover until the stunning suddenness of Frank Pembleton’s stroke.  Over the summer, NBC reran many of the episodes from the first three seasons , including the Adena Watson case (which we will deal with in due course) By August I was hooked.

            For the next three years, I made sure that I was home Fridays at 10  P.M. NBC had recently coined the catchphrase ‘Must-See- TV’ and this show qualified in a big way. But more than that I began to watch TV drama’s in a way I hadn’t before. At first, it was through programs like Chicago Hope, Early Edition and The Pretender.  Then I began looking for TV series in syndication, the most obvious of which was Law and Order. By the end of my freshman year of college, I was enraptured by several TV dramas --- so many, in fact, that when Homicide  was cancelled it didn’t bother me nearly as much as I thought it would

I caught up on the reruns when Lifetime bought the syndication rights for the series.  Therefore, it wasn’t until April 1997 that I learned the series origins.

            As any loyal fan of the series could tell you,  Homicide evolved from David Simon’s Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets. Set in Baltimore in 1987, the show follows the Homicide unit through a typical year. One lieutenant, three sergeants and fifteen detectives are all given a certain amount of face time. Some are good detectives, others have misfortunes and bad luck and some are not capable. But Simon does a brilliant job of  describing nineteen men dealing with a city that averaged 250 murders a year (a rate which has skyrocketed over the past decade)

            Several of the cases that would form the backbone of Homicide’s first few seasons are related in this book. The  near fatal shooting of police officer Gene Cassidy. The  series of murders arranged by Miss Geraldine Parrish, the ‘Black Widow’ and possibly the dumbest criminal mastermind in Baltimore. The shooting of John Randolph Scott by  persons unknown--- quite possibly a policeman. And the investigation into the murder of eleven-year old Latonya Wallace, a tragic murder which remains unsolved to this day. Overseeing everyone’s actions is ‘the board’, a listing of the number of homicide investigations a detective has open and how many they have solved.

            Many of the characters on the show also sprang form the pages of Simon’s book.  Tom Pellagrini, a rookie police detective on the job three months was  mirrored in the character of Tim Bayliss. Donald Worden, the twenty-five year veteran on the job would help originate the character of Stanley Bolander. Lieutenant Gary D’Addario and his command over the squad would evolve into shift commander Al Giardello. And Harry Edgerton, the aloof loner with a brilliant mind  for police work would help originate the shows most enduring character, Frank Pembleton.

            For merely paying strict attention to the book helped  ESTABLISH a great mood for the show. But attention to detail only goes so far. What made Homicide an exceptional show was the high quality of the writers. This was due to the presence of the producers of the show Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana. Fontana was a brilliant writer who had already won recognition for his work on

St. Elsewhere. He helped assemble a superb writing staff, featuring Simon, James Yoshimura, Julie Martin and Henry Bromell. They also assembled one of the most exceptional casts on television, a mix of veteran actor and new stars, all the while maintaining a lineup which bore a striking resemblance to the Baltimore Homicide unit.

            All of this helped make Homicide  a brilliant show that received almost universal critical acclaim. But television is a strange beast, and while the show did have a  loyal following, it never delivered the audience that one would have expected of it. Furthermore, it never received  recognition from the Emmy’s. In its entire seven-year run, the show was never nominated for Best Drama. Part of this was due to its lackluster numbers but a lot of it was because NBC never seemed to appreciate what they had. They showed enormous patience (otherwise the show would never have lasted two years, let alone seven ) but they didn’t treat it with the  respect  that it deserved. And because of their cavalier treatment of the show, many actors and writers would leave the program not because they were unhappy with the work but because they didn’t know if they would be on the air from season to season.