Homicide Retrospective: How Homicide and NYPD Blue Revolutionized TV in Their First Seasons

 

There’s an argument that the seeds that would lead to the Golden Age of Television coming to fruition on HBO were planted in 1993. Few would argue that, in hindsight, it was a spectacular year for groundbreaking series.

The year started with Homicide debuting after the Super Bowl. During the fall season Frasier, the spin-off of the just departed Cheers debuted on NBC’s first lineup of Must-See-TV on Thursday. It capped a lineup of Mad About You, Wings and Seinfeld. That year Frasier would win the first of a record five consecutive Emmys for Best Comedy Series.

Less noticed was a debut of a small series on the still fledgling Fox network Friday night at 9 pm written with two basically unknown leads: David Duchovny known only for his work as a guest role on Twin Peaks and Gillian Anderson who network heads had argued with Carter was not ‘drop dead gorgeous enough’ to be a female lead. The X-Files was barely noticed that first few months on the air and barely got renewed.

But the series that drew the most attention before it even aired a single episode was a police drama whose Pilot was so controversial that creator Steven Bochco had had to use all of his pull with the network to even get it put on the schedule in the first place. Before it premiered parents groups and the religious right – who had far more power over television back then than they do today – had raised such a huge protest and outcry that they had threatened boycotts if ABC dared to air it. Many affiliates who even considered showing it received a huge notice of letters and outraged calls.

And when it finally debuted, it was watched by 22.8 million viewers easily winning its time slot. By the time NYPD Blue’s first season ended it received what was then a record 26 Emmy nominations, more than the previous leader Hill Street Blues (Bochco’s first big hit) had gotten in its first season.

I’ll be honest for much of my formative years I took a dim view of Blue particularly compared to Homicide. I didn’t watch much of it until well after it was in syndication and while I was impressed by much of the acting and writing, it always seems to pale in comparison to Homicide. Much of it may very well have been due to envy at the former show’s success: NYPD Blue was nominated for Best Drama its first six years on the air; Homicide was never even nominated once in that category. NYPD Blue seemed to have earned its place in TV lore because of how flagrantly it broke the rules in pushing the boundaries of television, something that I considered baubles compared to the way Homicide was. And perhaps most telling I had not yet become comfortable with the dialogue and writing of David Milch yet. In an early article I wrote I said: “The characters on NYPD Blue speak like they’re characters in a police drama. The characters on Homicide speak like real police.”

In the decades that have passed I have seen and in fact adore much the work of Milch as much as David Simon and Tom Fontana, the writers behind Homicide who, like Milch, would create two of the groundbreaking dramas that put HBO on the map and started the revolution. I eventually saw most of Hill Street Blues and the work that Milch did for that incredible series and I’ve written an entire episode guide for Deadwood, one of the all-time great shows. But I still have had trouble appreciating Blue years after the fact. And it wasn’t until fairly recently that I put my finger on why.

However I think we must give credit where it is due and the fact remains NYPD Blue was one of the most groundbreaking dramas in TV history. It is impossible to imagine that without it so many of the great dramas that happened in its wake – both on network television and cable – could have existed. So let’s look at Blue and Homicide in regards to their first season on the air: how they both utterly revolutionized what TV at the time was capable of, their similarities and differences in that approach, and why Homicide is far more likely to age better than Blue’s after 30 years.

Note: For the purposes of this article I’m going to consider the first two seasons of Homicide as one season. Considering that they were 13 episodes combined and that they aired during the same period as Blue’s first season, I think I can be allowed critical license.

First of all I need to make a point that a generation used to even such mild costumed dramas as The Crown and The Gilded Age coming with viewer discretion warnings and raised on TV ratings just how shocking Blue was when it debuted in 1993. There had been protests over TV episodes and shows before, but most of them had been in regard to actors behavior as well as certain taboo subjects. Some of them involved ridiculous reason (even talking about religion could get death threats) some of them darker (sex in any form was a subject of attack). But most of them involved just one or two episodes and were almost always overblown.

NYPD Blue may very well have been one of the few times in the history of television where the shock was at least understandable if not merited. This was a series which began with Andy Sipowicz yelling at the DA whose case he just ruined with bad behavior: “Ipso this, you bitch!” and grabbing his crotch. Profanities that hadn’t been heard anywhere on network television  - ‘dickhead, douchebag, asshole’ were being used every two minutes, almost all of them coming from Sipowicz who was painted as a misogynist, racist and clearly a drunk. Halfway through the episode Sipowicz is having sex with a prostitute when a gunman comes in and shoots him. There’s also nudity that went beyond the level of what network TV could get away with, mostly in terms of women, just as much men. This was not the kind of thing you saw Magnum P.I or T.J. Hooker try to do.

And there had never been a character who was essentially the lead like Andy Sipowicz, played memorably by Dennis Franz for twelve seasons and four Emmys for Best Lead Actor in a Drama. In later seasons his edge would be softened by marital bliss and numerous tragedies but when the show was at its peak (when David Milch was writing for it) he made it very clear that Sipowicz was not a teddy bear. He would curse and growl obscenities, clash with his African-American boss Lt. Fancy (James McDaniel) who thought he was a racist and who was not unwilling to use racial epithets when he saw fit. Even when he sobered up  - his character went to AA in Season 1, though he would periodically fall off the wagon when tragedy struck -  Sipowicz was not a man who was easy to like, much less be a hero.

Milch had wanted to do a show with an antihero before but TV wasn’t ready for it in the 1980s. And while the show would be willing to make clear Sipowicz was the lead, he and Bochco hedged their bets by making the central character in Season 1 the more conventionally handsome and less edgy John Kelly, played by David Caruso. Milch very quickly regretted that decision. In a book written not long after Milch made it very clear what a prima donna Caruso was on the show, even claiming that dealing with him led to his suffering a heart attack during the show’s first season. Indeed news about the behind the scenes yelling between Caruso and the show’s writers became nearly as prominent as the raves for the episodes and the controversy of what was being seen on the screen. By the time Season 1 ended Caruso either quit or was fired (it depends on who you ask) and was replaced by the more stable Jimmy Smits as Bobby Simone four episodes into Season 2.

By the time Smits arrived the entire cast was different: Sherry Stringfield, who played Kelly’s ex-wife in the first season left to star in the pilot for an unknown series called ER. Amy Brenneman, who’d played patrolwoman Janice Licalsi – who became Kelly’s lover – was written out of the series after two episodes. Both Stringfield and Brenneman have had tremendous careers in TV since leaving the show but it remains unclear if the two of them left to pursue other options or whether Caruso’s behavior became so intolerable they resigned.

Caruso tried to pursue a film career but it ended up being so disastrous that it was joke in the pilot of South Park. He eventually returned to TV and found a different set of stardom playing a very different kind of law enforcement officer on CSI: Miami.

It’s clear now in hindsight that Milch was using the profanity and nudity as draws to try and tell the kinds of stories he’d never gotten a chance to before, certainly not on Hill Street Blues. Many of them were highly serialized, playing out over several episodes or perhaps even the course of an entire season. And in many of them he was clearly willing to break the bounds of what we came to expect from police dramas. The pilot of NYPD Blue ends with Licalsi, who we’ve just met having a meeting with a mobster we know is connected to crimes – and shooting him in the chest with no apparent provocation. Milch would eventually give her one  -  in 1993 protagonists on network TV couldn’t get away with murder – but it’s not hard to see a line from this moment that doesn’t end in Vic Mackey shooting a fellow cop in the face in the first episode of The Shield nearly a decade later.

Milch spent much of his tenure of the series making clear, just as he had on Hill Street, that all of his detectives were flawed. Most of the time this played out with the male detectives but he would do so occasionally with female character. Diane Russell, played by Kim Delaney with searing intensity for seven seasons, was the best example of this. Just as much of an alcoholic as Sipowicz was she was also intensely sexual, instigating an affair with Bobby Simone not long after they first met. And there was clearly a troubled past: the insights we got into her family life showed two parents who were always fighting and constantly involved in domestic violence. Diane finally revealed that she was the victim of sexual molestation from her father, something she had never been able to face. That was something that characters just didn’t admit on television in the 1990s.

But for all the incredible performances, grit and darkness there were always troubling elements to the show that bothered me when I watched it in syndication and that in the era of reckoning with police may make an entire generation view it as unwatchable. Because while Milch was revolutionary in many ways, when it came to how he let his cops interrogate suspects he was practically a dinosaur.

The Pilot begins with Kelly, the man we’re supposed to consider a hero, showing the rookie to the squad James Martinez (Nicholas Turturro) the correct way to beat a confession out of a suspect without being caught. Future episodes will rarely be this direct with their violence but so much of Blue’s police work involves watching Sipowicz berate, bully and come as close to the verge of beating a confession out of a suspect as he can. It bothered me in my twenties, particularly in comparison to Homicide; I don’t think I could go anywhere near it today. Considering how much of it involves white detectives bullying women and minorities – and not long after everything that involved the Central Park Five that was unfolding – I can’t imagine anyone from Gen Z being able to watch it.

NYPD BLUE was the first show I remember where every single episode opened with a viewer discretion warning but I’m pretty sure it was for the language and nudity and not the plots. That was, in a sick way, the most traditional thing about Blue that it considered violence and rage against its suspects not only to be tolerated but silently approved of by the bosses. The show was offering what amounted to trigger warnings before they were formed but giving the kinds of material we see on even network TV; the violence and profanity would not even cause most teenage viewers to blink. The offensive attitude towards minority suspect, the dismissive way they are treated by the police, that would be the thing that cause protests today among viewers.

Homicide was in many ways just as revolutionary in its first thirteen episodes as Blue was but whereas Blue was all action and energy always moving forward what made Homicide revolutionary was how measured it was towards policing.

There’s no gunfire in the first episode. Every time the characters pull guns its for safety purpose and they announce themselves. (Guns don’t even go off until the third season, and a detective won’t even fire his weapon until late in Season 4.) All of the characters look relatively ordinary: there’s a woman detective but as I’ve written before while Melissa Leo is attractive she is not drop dead gorgeous the way that almost all the female leads on Blue will be. There’s no handsome leading man having sex in the pilot. There’s no leading man at all. Indeed for the first thirteen episodes while there are certain arcs where characters are used more, you’d be hard pressed to say if the show has a lead. (Frank Pembleton doesn’t begin to become the standout character until Season 3.)

The characters in NYPD Blue always seem to be agitated to the point that they are always snapping. The detectives in Homicide are agitated and angry too but the mood that you find for all the characters is world-weariness bordering on exhaustion. This is frequently masked with a dark humor bordering on theater of the absurd: our introduction to John Munch shows him trying to interrogate a suspect who can’t even seem to be bothered to come up with a credible story. Munch gets angry at him mainly at the stupidity: “I’ve been a murder police for ten years. When you lie to me, you lie to me with respect.” It’s hard to imagine Sipowicz – really any detective in Blue  - reacting to a suspect with such mockery at their own stupidity.

The other critical thing that is different about the suspects in Homicide is one that would never be seen in Blue. The criminals on Blue are at least clever enough to manipulate the detectives. From the very episode we learn what will be one of the classic lines from Pembleton: “Crime makes you stupid.” This plays out time and again throughout the pilot and so much of the series as a whole. Howard and Felton find a dead body in the cellar and the suspect actually calls the victim’s house and volunteers to come down for an interrogation. We meet a ‘black widow’ who kills her husbands for the insurance policies and tries to kill her niece three separate times. A bodyguard shoots his boss when a gunfight breaks out and one of the suspects puts his gun to his client’s head. He shoots through his boss to get to him. “Very commendable,” Munch said when he learns why.

And if NYPD Blue was famous for all speed forwards one of the most groundbreaking episodes came in ‘Night of the Dead Living’ when we spent a night in the squad room where the heat is brutal, the air conditioning is broken, and there isn’t a single murder to get the detectives out of the squad room – something they spend the night complaining about. The episode deals with domestic issues: Felton’s struggling marriage, Munch’s messy relationship with his girlfriend Felicia, Bolander trying to work up the courage to ask the new M.E. on a date. Crosetti spends the episode worried about his teenage daughter. The biggest mystery is who lights the candle at the beginning of every shift: one that the detectives don’t solve but the viewer learns the answer to. Homicide did many revolutionary episodes in its run that tweaked the format of the cop drama and sometimes that involved the fact that there are shifts when nothing happens at all.

An even more revolutionary approach was the show’s approach to confessions. In the pilot Pembleton tells the rookie Bayliss: “I’m about to embark on a job of salesmanship…But what I am selling is a long prison term to a client with no genuine need for the product.” There is no effort to bully or provoke and certainly not beat the suspect into submission. Most of the tension in Pembleton’s first interrogation is when the suspect asks for a lawyer and Pembleton has to convince him that he doesn’t need one.

This is witnessed by the rookie Bayliss who is outraged – in his mind the suspect asked for one. Pembleton reminds of the circumstances: the victim is an old man who was robbed of his car by a younger man in what was clearly a hookup.

“Okay when this gets to the DA, he’s going to claim that he changed his mind about the sex. And there’s not a jury in the world who’s not going to think Berger was a dirty old man who got what was coming to him. So the DA’s gonna plea bargain down to five years. He’s gonna do a third of that. And you think I was unfair?”

Perhaps the most iconic moment of the pilot – the one that truly sums up what is about to come – shows up in the penultimate scene. Munch, Crosetti and Lewis are bitching about the job and they notice that there’s a man whose been eyeing them and the car for a while. They’re annoyed that no one can tell they are cops. Finally Munch walks up to him: “We’re murder police. Go rob somebody else.”  No fight, no arrest, no entreaty to lead an honest life. Just a request to go away and leave them alone. They’re not going to bring this criminal in. There’s too much paperwork involved.

Homicide’s approach to police work was fundamentally different from Blue in a way that I truly believe makes it hold up incredibly well even as we have a reckoning about the police procedural. It is one of the reasons I could never tolerate not only Blue but so many procedurals that followed where cops would browbeat and abuse suspects into admitting their horrible crimes. So much of what happened on Homicide when it came to the murders they investigated was almost anticlimactic. I lost count of how many times the detectives knew who the suspect was and had enough to get him well before the episode truly began. Giardello never tolerated violence in the squad, but watching so many interrogations it would have been wasted. Why beat a confession out of someone who’s more than happy to tell you for a cigarette?

Much of the reasons Homicide seemed more authentic was because it was shot on the streets of Baltimore and was in its way as much a character as all of the detectives involved. This played out with the fact that this was by far the show with the most African-American cast to this point in TV history, something that the writers never made you think about – and that sometimes even shocked the cast members themselves.

And maybe that’s at least one of the reasons that while both shows were critically acclaimed during their runs, Homicide was watched by fewer people and received fewer awards. There’s always been a subtle racism in regards to how the Emmys and viewers watched so many of Simon and Fontana’s shows in the 21^st century compared to other almost entirely white HBO dramas – The Wire had to struggle for survival in a way The Sopranos never did and subsequent Simon dramas like Treme and The Deuce never got anywhere near the audience or awards that inferior but far whiter HBO dramas such as True Blood and The Newsroom did.

In the weeks to come I intend to begin an official rewatch of Homicide which has in the past month begun to finally stream on Peacock, one of the last great shows of the 1990s that had yet to appear on any streaming service. I look forward to revisiting it and I expect that it will still hold up. I last revisited the show roughly eight years ago (I needed it to get through the first half of the Trump administration) while I was also revisiting Blue. Homicide still brought be the same pleasure it had when I first watched it and Blue seemed even more problematic even though by then I fully appreciated the other work of David Milch and Steven Bocho. Both series were groundbreaking and both are worth revisiting. But I suspect those who watch Pembleton in the box will have far less trouble with his interrogations then they will with Andy Sipowicz’s. It was true for me twenty years ago; it’s exponentially truer now.