In the spring of 1997, not that long after I was becoming truly
obsessed with Homicide, the show began airing in syndication for the
first time. Its reruns aired on Lifetime a network that then and now prided
itself on female oriented program. (Indeed in 1997 it’s slogan was ‘Television
for Women’.)
Up to that point Lifetime, like
most cable networks in the 1990s, was built entirely on syndicated series. Most
of the series were some of the best shows of the 1980s and 1990s – China Beach,
L.A. Law, thirtysomething – but given the tenor of the kinds of roles women
were limited to back then, even the more complex roles on network TV had the
woman as basically a caregiver as well as professional and most of those series
had a fairly closer ratio between female and male co-stars then Homicide did
to that point. There was only one female regular the first two seasons and only
two the next three. I already knew that Homicide was a masterpiece
but airing it on the same network known mainly for airing reruns of TV Movies
adaptations of Danielle Steel and Judith Krantz seemed to be pushing the term. And
that seemed to be how Lifetime viewed it. It only aired late at night for the
rest of 1997, moved to the very early morning in 1998 and by the start of 1999
Court TV – a more fitting home for it – was airing the reruns instead.
Today, much as thirty years ago,
Lifetime is still fundamentally dominated by reruns of female dominated TV
series. But there’s a significant difference in the kinds female-centric shows.
Now most of their programming is devoted to Rizzoli & Isles, The Closer and
it’s spinoff Major Crimes and Castle, where the major character’s
focus in on NYPD detective Kate Beckett. Correlation does not equal causation,
but it’s difficult not to see these kinds of female led procedurals (and as we
knows this is just the tip of the iceberg) without some of the work of the groundbreaking
character that Homicide created in the 1990s.
Homicide never had the same
kind of representation of female detectives and other professionals that we ended
up seeing on its far more successful procedural NYPD BLUE. During the
six season the two series were contemporary Blue had seven different
female cast regulars and five of them were either detectives or police
officers. There were more to come after Homicide was cancelled in 1999;
four different female regulars appeared on the series, and three of them were
detectives. But there were key difference between the female detectives on Blue
and those on Homicide.
For one thing, all of them from Amy
Brenneman to Jacqueline Obradours were all closer to the kind of sexual beings
that network TV relies on for female leads of any kind. No one could call actresses
like Melissa Leo or Callie Thorne unattractive but you couldn’t mistake
them for runway models. For another, almost every female character – even when
they were as brilliantly layered as Kim Delaney’s Diane Russell – was as much
part of the series because of their sexual partnerships with the detectives as
their prowess as investigators. Leaving aside the nudity and sex that made Blue
so controversial, that wasn’t the kind of show Homicide was. All of
the female characters had sex lives, but that was never part of their identity
the same way it was on Blue. (Generally speaking, it mostly wasn’t part
of the male characters identities either.)
I have written many articles about Homicide
over the past several years and will write many more but I found that I
have not given enough due to the
actresses on the series. This isn’t intentional but considering how much
of the industry seems to be looking at the kind of perspective it looks at how
female characters are portrayed in a culture of ‘toxic masculinity’, I think it’s
time to look at the women of Homicide. There were very few female characters
(such was the case of television in the 1990s) but what they lacked in quantity
they more than made up in for quality. And it’s only fitting to begin with a
female detective without whom we wouldn’t have the Olivia Bensons or most of
the females who are at the head of procedurals in the last twenty years – but who
TV still hasn’t been willing to try and make another of.
One of the first characters we meet
after the opening credits of Homicide comes when a doe-eyed Tim Bayliss walks up to
a desk and says: “Excuse me. Is this Homicide?”
A red headed detective looks at him
and cynically says: “Homicide? We work for God.” With her very first line of dialogue it was
clear that Kay Howard was not going to be the kind of policewoman that we had
seen before on TV, though to be fair, there had been very few to that point.
When Homicide was being
cast, there were originally no women on the show. This was mainly because in
Simon’s book he had not followed any detectives. (There was one female
detective in Baltimore at the time, but Simon had not been permitted to cover
the shift she was working on.) NBC, frantic to avoid charges of sexism,
demanded a female character be developed. The character of Kay Howard was
created and the cast in the role was Melissa Leo on her way to becoming one of
the greatest character actresses of all time.
The usual model for policewomen to
that point was to have them be sexual beings first, incompetent at their jobs
and needed the instruction of an older male detective. (Think Heather Locklear
on T.J. Hooker and you’ll get the idea.) Shows like Cagney & Lacey had
been an outlier and Hill Street Blues had fundamentally been dominated
by male police with the few women being officers rather than detectives. In the
partnership of Kay Howard and Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) Fontana and his
writers flipped the script. Howard was the consummate professional and Felton
was the one who was barely treading water. The first time that the phone rings,
he’s terrified to pick up because his clearance rate is so low and Howard at
the time has closed 12 consecutive cases. Howard picks up the phone and is
called in to investigate the death of Henry Biddle. They know who the killer is
and, in keeping with the nature of the show, he actually calls his house and
the detectives invite him to meet with him. “You’re amazing,” Felton says in
admiration.
Leo was attractive but not drop
dead gorgeous the way most of the woman on Blue were and within two
seasons, Howard stopped wearing makeup altogether. This was never officially
spoken of on the series but the implication was that this policework was more
important to her than glamor. It would be nearly a decade before Mary Lynn Raskjub
broke a similar mold on 24 as Chloe, the blunt professional who didn’t have
time to get dressed up and by Season 6, she had become more glamorous.
Howard’s portrayal could be more
maternal than anything; she spent the pilot prepping Bayliss for his first case
as primary and often was a sympathetic ear to her fellow detectives. Her
relationship with Felton was often problematic, mainly because his personal
life was perpetually falling apart. Howard had empathy for Felton, but it was
also built on concern for her job; she was angry when he was sloppy because it
affected her ability to close cases. When he showed up hungover having lost
crucial evidence she berated him as being a sloppy drunk. “Why don’t you go
across the street and have another drink?” she sneered at him.
Nor did this sympathy extend to fellow
female police. At the start of Season Three with the promotion of Megan Russert
to shift lieutenant, she initially spoke in admiration and respect of her. By
the end of the episode, she was calling her ‘bitch’ under her breath.
Furthermore she learned that Russert and Felton were having an affair (he had
told her) and she confronted Russert angrily about it. She didn’t care so much
for Felton’s wife – the few times we saw her, Beth Felton was clearly
unbalanced – but she resented being stuck in the middle of their separation and
she knew how the Baltimore department worked. She had no intention of having
her ability to do her job impeded because her partner was having an affair with
a superior and she told her so.
That’s not to say Howard wasn’t a sexual being
– she was, but mostly she kept her private life private. She had relationships
on the show, the most public being with States Attorney Ed Danvers (Zeljko Ivanek)
in the first two seasons. One of the most hysterical scenes in the entire
series occurs when Kay is trying to quit smoking. (Homicide may very
well have been the last network show where almost every regular smoked at one
time or another.) Pembleton, the one person she respects and a fellow smoker, says
this is about sex or money. “The only two things more powerful than tobacco,”
he says wryly.
He talks to her about her
relationship with Danvers and she starts to blush a little. “Ed Danvers is a
stallion among ponies,” she then brags. “A man larger than life,” she says
after Pembleton doesn’t seem to get the hint. Frank, rarely, is baffled –
Danvers is not exactly a model. “He makes me see stars,” she keeps going. “He
makes me feel sweet pain. I had to set boundaries…He can’t touch me in a church.”
Frank, who he even then always had
something to say, is momentarily dumbstruck. Then Howard says she did quit smoking
for Danvers: “I did it for me.” Frank looks her relieved and says: “So all of
that was just…” Howard nods and says: “Yes.” Then she smiles and says: “No.” “Oh,
come on!” Frank says. Howard smiles and says: “I guess you’ll never know.”
In the days before Sex and the
City, I don’t think I’d ever seen any female character on TV before – and rarely
since - engage in such blatant locker
room talk with a male character and leave the male character wanted to blush.
That it involved Andre Braugher makes the joke even funnier.
The one trait about Howard’s
character that might be something to nitpick was that during her entire run on
the show she had a 100 percent clearance rate. To be fair, Howard was the only
character in the entire run of the series who had a perfect clearance rate; it
was certainly obvious on the board that the red ink was prevalent on every
other character. But it was the rare misstep for a series that was almost
always purely authentic. Homicide, to be fair, never made a big deal
about after a certain point and indeed, it eventually became significant only
after Howard had an open case she couldn’t close.
But in retrospect that may have
been by design. It was clear watching Homicide how proud Howard was of
having a one hundred percent clearance rate and when she was assigned the case
that broke it (one of the open investigations after Crosetti’s death) she
publicly bitched about. “It’s a dog,” she told Gee. The episode ‘Nothing Personal’
featured some of Leo’s best work as she pursued a case that had been cold for
six months with the approach of someone determined to close it out purely out
of pride rather than the pursuit of justice. She spent that episode snapped at
everyone, starting with Lewis (Crosetti’s partner) for not doing a good job
investigating, berating Felton for bad procedure work and sniping at anyone such
as Bolander or Russert who offered help. Only when Bolander told her: “A good
detective sometimes knows when to move on” could she let go – and the case
remained a thorn in her side for the next year, something her colleagues needled
her, albeit good-naturedly and which she always responded personally to. “It’s
open until I close it,” she kept saying.
During Season Three Howard,
Bolander and Felton were shot while serving an arrest warrant on a pedophile
name Glenn Holton. Howard was shot in the heart and not expected to recover. Felton,
who was only minorly wounded, spent the next two episodes upset because he was
the better shot and he felt if he’d gone in first, this wouldn’t have happened.
When Howard regained consciousness, she reminded him that she had insisted on
going first because she was the primary and she would do it again.
One of the grudges I bear against Homicide
during Season 4 and 5 was that after Baldwin and Ned Beatty departed, instead
of being put more in the spotlight, Howard was actually used less. In the
opening of Season 4 she took the sergeant’s exam which she passed but that role
actually led to the diminishment of her character on the series rather than
expanding it. There were clearly possibilities as a detective who now has a higher
rank that the detectives she works with and the difficulties her character
faced. Instead Howard essentially faded more into the level of support, and
never investigated a case as a primary for the remainder of her run on the
series. It was never clear why this was decided; Howard’s name was still on the
board and her perfect streak was still going on but for whatever reason, Leo
was less central to the action in her final two seasons then she was in the
first three.
That didn’t mean there still weren’t
opportunities for Leo to shine. In ‘Heartbeat’ she and Munch (another character
who was never utilized as much as he could be) investigated the entombment of
Eugene Elwin in a wall in what was a tribute to Baltimore’s poet laureate Edgar
Allan Poe. Munch spent the episode confiding in Howard in a way he didn’t usually
and we also saw her superstitious side when a black cat entered the squad room
and she frantically began a ritual. Her interactions with Gee became more
central to the series and it was often fun watching her work between covering
for her detectives and keeping her boss in the loop.
And in the two-part Season 5 finale
when Beau Felton, who’d been gone from the force for two years, was found with
his head blown off, Howard went back in the spotlight. As she dealt with the
death of her former partner Leo was shown off to great extent. But the final
episode also demonstrated the kind of sexism we rarely saw in regard to her.
When the investigation was ruled a
murder Pembleton who was the primary got into a pissing contest with Howard
about how to handle the investigation. Howard erased Felton’s name from his
part of the board and wrote it under hers. “Problem solved,” she said as Frank
burned. Gee then called her into his office and told her outright she could not
investigate because this case was ‘too personal’.
As the investigation stalled she
demanded to be put on the investigation and pointed out a clear parallel: when
Crosetti had committed suicide Lewis had abandoned an active murder and had openly
hampered the investigation at every turn. Ironically Felton, with Howard’s
help, had closed the murder Meldrick had been investigating something Gee had
told Lewis. Not only did Giardello not back down, he refused to acknowledge he’d
made a mistake then. It was the rare example of Giardello not being willing to
see false equivalences based on gender or race.
At the end of Season 5, Leo (along
with co-star Max Perlich) was written out of the series. No explanation was
given at the time as to why. Leo was in the middle of a tabloid spat that was
going on with John Heard at the time, but Fontana said that he “had gotten tired
of writing for her character.” This went over badly with fans of the show at
the time; despite the diminished role of Howard over the last two season, I was
angry at the decision. The explanation the show gave was based in a new process
being introduced by the Baltimore P.D. at the time; detectives were being
shifted from crime to crime on a three month basis. (We’ll see how Homicide handled
it when I get to the second part of the article. When Season Six premiered, all
of the detectives who spent the last three months on rotation returned to
Homicide, except Howard who was still on the fugitive squad. Leo never returned
to the show during the remainder of its original run.
It took a few years for Leo to get her career
going again. She spent the next several years mostly in small roles in mediocre
films or guest shots in TV series that were one-offs (Criminal Minds,
Veronica Mars, Law and Order. Then in 2008, she was given the lead role in
the brilliant independent film Frozen River. She got her first Oscar
nomination for Best Actress and won the Independent spirit award for Best
Female Lead.
Then her career got launched into
the stratosphere. In 2010, she took the supporting role of Alice Ward in The
Fighter and won basically every award leading up to a Best Supporting Actress
Oscar. That same year she reunited with David Simon in his follow-up to The
Wire, Treme. She played Toni Bernette, an attorney doing everything in her
power to learn the truth of what happened to the dead in the aftermath of
Katrina, the suicide of her husband and the deterioration into drugs of her
daughter.
For the next ten years she has
become one of the most regular working character actors in film in television,
playing Lady Bird Johnson in All The Way and Madeline Murray O’Hair in The
Most Hated Woman in the World. She won another Emmy for a Guest appearance
on Louie, has starred in such brilliant limited series as Mildred
Pierce and I know This Much is True and had an exceptional role as
Goldie in I’m Dying Up Here where she played a character as close to an
antiheroine as she had managed to find in her career, as a bullhead 1970s owner
of a comedy club who loves to control every aspect of the comedians she says
she nurtures. In between she has appeared in such undervalued masterpieces as Prisoners,
The Big Short and Flight.
I’m always gratified when a
performer I respect from a series I watched years ago achieves success in another
series or show. This has been a constant truth for most of the cast of Homicide
but few are more deserving than Melissa Leo. Her work helped create a model
for female detectives for the last twenty five years but there still have been
very few detectives like Kay Howard and that is a tribute to her work.
In the next part of this article, I
will deal with the female detectives who appeared in the seasons that followed
Howard’s departure and created some of the more iconic moments in the last two
years of the show.
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