It takes me
longer than usual to deal with loss of actors and people in television and film
that I admire and respect, because I feel that loss so much deeper than so many
others. It took a while for me to comment on the passing of Michael K.
Williams, longer still to deal with Richard Belzer and I have yet to pay
tribute to Lance Reddick, who was perhaps the greatest actor in the era of Peak
TV.
But in the case
of a death that has taken place tonight it is impossible for me not to deal
with it. Because earlier tonight we lost almost certainly the greatest light in
the history of television in my lifetime and one of the greatest actors in the
history of television. Those of you who have read my blog for years will know
just how painful it is for me to announce the passing of Andre Braugher at the
age of 61. The causes of his death have yet to be announced.
From the moment
he appeared on screen as Frank Pembleton in the incredible and beloved Homicide:
Life on the Street, the world recognized one of the great superstars in the
history of television. Thirty years after the fact, Pembleton still regularly
makes the list of the greatest TV characters in history and that is for good
reason. In all the years before and far too rarely since, there have been no
detectives like Pembleton because there never was a show like Homicide.
We knew the kind
of man he was the moment before he entered the interrogation room for the first
time to a long line of suspects. “You are about to witness a job of salesmanship,”
he told Tim Bayliss. “But what I am selling is a long prison term to a customer
who has no useful need for the product.” Policeman beat confessions out of
suspects far too often on police dramas before Homicide debuted. They
still far too often now. Frank Pembleton could get a suspect to confess to a
crime simply by lowering his voice an octave,
Some of the
greatest moments in 1990s TV occurred because of Andre Braugher’s work on Homicide.
Trying to point out his finest hour is an exercise in futility because
there were too many to mention. The one that went down in TV history was one
that is regarded as one of the greatest episodes of all time, according to TV
Guides list of the 100 greatest episode in 2009. That episode is ‘The Subway’
where a commuter going to work gets tangled up and ends up pinned between a car
and the platform. Pembleton goes down to the platform blasely not knowing he is
about to spent an hour with a man who is about to die.
In what was a
tour de force for both Braugher and Vincent D’Onofrio (he received an Emmy
nomination for his performance) we watch as two of the greatest actors in the
medium have to deal with the inevitability of a man’s death. Braugher commits
to it and shows the humanity that lies in every single one of his performances
as he finds himself sharing details of his life with a man who knows death is
coming no matter what. I don’t know if Andre Braugher got his Emmy for his work
in that episode, but if he did he more than earned it.
If it were
merely for his work as Frank Pembleton, Andre Braugher would have earned a place
in the history of the medium. He received eleven Emmy nominations over his long
career in more different categories than almost any actor in the history of TV.
In 1996, he was nominated not merely for his work in Homicide but for
Best Supporting Actor in the HBO TV Movie The Tuskegee Airmen.
Two years after
leaving Homicide, Braugher took the lead role in Gideon’s Crossing, an
ABC medical drama created by Paul Attanasio who had written the pilot for Homicide.
Braugher played Ben Gideon, the head
of the experimental oncology ward who was dealing with the passing of his wife
from cancer. The series featured an all-star casts of Russell Hornsby, Rhona
Mitra, Ruben Blades and the relatively unknown Hamish Linklater. While both
Braugher and the series were highly acclaimed (he received both an Emmy and
Golden Globe nomination) the ratings were so-so and the show was cancelled
after one season.
The next year he
ended up on the intriguing but essential pedestrian police drama Hack as
the former partner of a disgraced detective played by David Morse, who was now
a taxicab driver. The series was
cancelled after two seasons.
Three years
later Braugher received his second Emmy for his work on the Miniseries Thief.
In it he played Nick Atwater, a career criminal trying to mix his work life
with his family life. An intriguing work featuring some of the best African-American
actors of the era, including Malik Yoba,
Albert Hall and Clifton Collins as well as esteemed performers Michael Rooker
and Mae Whitman, Braugher prevailed over a field of memorable performers
including Jon Voight, Ben Kingsley and Donald Sutherland.
One of the his
most atypical roles came not long after when he ended up one of three leads on
the superb dramedy Men of a Certain Age. A whimsical series about for
men in their forties facing aging, Braugher co-starred with Ray Romano and
Scott Bakula as a car salesman trying to come out from under the shadow of his
father as well as deal with a troubled marriage. Frequently acting with Albert Hall as his
father and the superb Lisa Gay Hamilton as his wife, Braugher deserved received
two consecutive Emmy nominations for Best Supporting Actor in 2010 and
2011. Both times he competed in two of
the most super collection of nominees in the history of the Emmys. In 2010, he
was nominated against Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson for Lost, John
Slattery for Mad Men, Martin Short for Damages and Aaron Paul for Breaking
Bad. Paul
won for the first time but there were no bad choices in that category. The next
year Braugher was up against Slattery again but the rest of the category was
completely different, with Josh Charles and Alan Cumming competing for The
Good Wife, Walton Goggins for Justified and Peter Dinklage for Game
of Thrones. This time Dinklage prevailed. (Paul won twice more; Dinklage
won three more times.)
But on a network
that was primarily driven by procedurals Men of a Certain Age could
never find an audience and the show was cancelled at the end of 2011. Then
Braugher return to a completely different kind of police show and received his
greatest level of recognition.
On Brooklyn Nine-Nine,
Braugher was for the first time in his storied career a regular on a comedy
series. He spent the entire run of the
show playing straight man, often to utter absurdity. In a very real sense
Braugher had reached the confidence in his career to satirize himself,
something that he did incredibly well and with great joy. On a show that was
beloved by a very small but devoted fan base, Braugher was nominated for Best Supporting
Actor in a Comedy four times, three years consecutively between 2014 and 2016. This field, if anything, was tougher than his
years in drama: he lost to Ty Burell from Modern Family, Tony Hale for Veep
and the great Louis Anderson for Baskets in 2016. His last time out,
he lost to Dan Levy for Schitt’s Creek.
That was his
last Emmy nominated role but in the last two years of his life Braugher was
still working in TV. He joined the incredible series The Good Fight for
its final season as Ri’Chard Lane. He received a Critics Choice nomination for
it.
Braugher’s influence
on TV was great among African-American actors. When Sterling K. Brown became
the first African-American to win an Emmy for Best Actor in a Drama in 2017, he
name checked Braugher by paying tribute to Frank Pembleton. Braugher’s career
would also mirror the rise of diversity in television. When he received his
first Emmy nomination in 1996, out of the sixty nominated performances in every
major category, only three nominees besides Braugher were performers of color.
In 2020, the year of his final Emmy nomination, in Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy
alone, there were three other African-American nominees. That night, four
different African Americans won Emmys. Prior to his passing, he was working in
a TV mini-series called The Residence with Uzo Aduba as the lead. Aduba,
one of the more brilliant actresses of the last decade, won her first two Emmys
for Orange is the New Black the first two years Braugher was nominated for
Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The series is the creation of Paul William Davies
who wrote and created For The People, a series that was made under the tutelage
of Shonda Rhimes, the most prominent African-American in TV today.
Braugher served as both a pioneer in an era
where most African-Americans in television were the token black characters and was
a guiding force to an era where equality and diversity are at a level in TV
that he could not even have dared hope for when he was starting out in
Hollywood. For a man who would shoot to stardom for playing Jackie Robinson in
his first major role in a TV movie, it is fitting that all of television, whatever
role they play, whatever race they are, is working in a field that Braugher
helped make his own.
I would like to
end this tribute to Braugher with a personal plea. Even before the controversy
about police procedurals, Homicide had never been on a streaming
service. It has not aired in reruns on any cable channel since the mid-2000s
when it had a brief run on several networks that no longer exist. And while it
was one of the first major series to be put on DVD in its entirety with the
near demise of the medium in the past decade, there is little likelihood this
generations has seen. This does a disservice not merely to Braugher but the
entire cast and group of writers who appeared on one of the greatest shows in
television history.
I humbly request
that services such as Netflix or Amazon begin posting not merely Homicide but
all of the other series that Braugher appeared (all but Brooklyn Nine-Nine are
unavailable anywhere.) For a performer who was such a dynamic force in television
for more than thirty years, we owe it to him and the talent he represents.
Actors such as Williams and Reddick could
not have had the careers they did in TV without Braugher’s influence and we owe
it to today’s audiences for them to see his work.
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