Homicide Rewatch: Night of the Dead Living

 

Written by Frank Pugliese ; story by Tom Fontana & Frank Pugliese

Directed by Michael Lehmann

 

In the era of streaming and before that cable, I don’t believe there is a viewer alive who would dare watch a TV show with the episodes out of order. I would think that might be the same even for procedural series like Law & Order or CSI or comedies like Two and a Half Men or 30 Rock. No one would even watch The Office out of the order.

Anyone who is a fan of television knows the greatest sin a network could ever do is show the episodes out of order. There are no doubt fans of Firefly who still hold a grudge against Fox for that. But the fact that they did shows that when the networks had more power then they once did, it was something they would do – not often and not with every series, but throughout the 1990s it happened.

It mostly happened with comedy series where then as now the airing of the episodes has very little relevance to the story. But there were quite a few dramas where this happened. I know because I happened to watch most of them, though I didn’t know that until years after the fact.

The two series that were the biggest victims of this were almost exact contemporaries: Homicide and The X-Files. With The X-Files it wasn’t a huge deal because it mostly involved the Monster of the Week episodes and the mythology episodes were only two-parts episodes. It would make very little difference if you saw Season 6 of The X-Files chronologically or as they originally aired, even though it was frequently arbitrary why they shifted them.

Homicide was a different kettle of fish: because the series was so stylistically different from anything that came before and just as importantly because the ratings for the show were never as high as ER or Law and Order, the networks frequently altered the order because they were nervous about whether certain episodes might isolate the viewer or in other cases, in order to make sure the show could get higher ratings. Consequently in every season but one, at least one and frequently several episodes were shifted out of order. Because Homicide was not serialized the same way shows are today, it almost never made a subsequent difference and often a simple caption at the start of the episode was enough to explain the difference. (I doubt you could ever do this with Succession even in the first season.)

This brings us to Night of the Dead Living. This episode was scheduled to air third in the order but the network heads were so sure it would isolate the typical 1990s viewer that they more or less insisted that it air as the season finale. I’m not the kind of person to have sympathy with the network executive but honestly it’s very hard to blame them.

The first time I saw this episode was when it was in syndication in the spring of 1997. By that time I had been watching the show constantly for nearly two years and was a die-hard fan, becoming used to the tricks that Fontana and his team put me through. But I had a lot of trouble wrapping my head around this episode the first time I saw it and for a long time afterwards – maybe not until my second rewatch of the series – did I finally appreciate what Pugliese was trying to do. To repeat, it took me nearly two decades to realize what a great episode it is. I can’t imagine what a network head would have thought seeing it for the first time back in 1993.

Even now, after critics have defined the bottle episode and so much of the last twenty five years of TV gone by, Night of the Dead Living might be difficult for even the more devoted fans of shows such as The Wire to get behind. Matt Roush, writing for USA Today at the time and later the head reviewer for TV Guide rhapsodized about it: “Imagine a crime show during which no crime occurs. Next to nothing happens, Yet every second counts…Evoking David Mamet, but with none of the macho bravado, Homicide proves minimalist drama can have maximum impact.” He gave it four stars. Michael Lehmann, as some cult fans know, was the director of Heathers and the episode does share some of the dark humor and trivial nature, though it is far less bleak.” But audiences at the time were turned off by it and it had the lowest ratings of Season 1. (I’ll deal with that in a later article.)

I appreciate both the opinion of the critics and the viewers. This is a remarkable piece of television but it’s not the kind of thing that even today’s viewers could handle. People might have tuning in Seinfeld on an average of fifty million viewers a week during this period but a comedy could be about nothing. People rarely want to watch any drama for an hour where nothing really happens, much less a police procedural. And certainly for an audience that had been raised on Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues and was just coming to love Law & Order was not going to be thrilled by an hour long episode where the biggest mystery is who lights the candle at the beginning of every shift.

And given the pace of Homicide had already proven to be leisurely compared to most television to run an episode where everything came to a dead halt for sixty minutes could have been too much to bear for a series that was already asking quite a lot of its viewers. Homicide was a show that was always more about character development than any of its mysteries. And to run an episode where for so much of the dialogue not only has the trivial nature of so much of Seinfeld but takes on the nature of a Beckett play would probably have driven a viewer to tear their hair out. I certainly felt this way the first time I saw it.

Because literally, nothing happens in this episode. There are no murders, even though its incredibly hot and the detectives seem to be expecting for people to snap and start killing each other. And considering that the squad room has no air conditioning, you get the feeling the detectives would welcome a stone-cold whodunit that would be on the board in red forever just to get out of the office. Yet there are no murders. The biggest crime in the episode is a rampaging Santa Claus who spends half the episode threatening to jump off a building, is brought in having squirted the crowd with a water pistol, and then goes rampaging through the building only to fall through the ceiling as a climax.

Every time the phone rings it’s a personal call. (This is, of course, the era before everybody has a cell phone and the only way to reach people is at work.) There are many crises going on throughout the episode, but they’re all emotional ones. And of course everybody in the office is complaining to some extent how hot it is and why the hell can’t they fix the air conditioning.

So everyone in the unit spends the episode sweating and simmering. Except Pembleton who spends the whole episode wearing his tie, drinking tea and seems perfectly calm above the whole thing. In a sense this episode reveals more than any other that cops really are like the kind of people we see on Dunder Mifflin. At work, they talk about the most trivial things, worry about their emotional health and engage in petty feuds. There are two major differences to this, and the fact that they deal with murders instead of selling paper is actually the less interesting one.

No in this episode we get our insight into the kind of people many of the detectives are and much of the time it comes what they talk about. And many of the discussions that we here will be critical not just during this season but throughout the entire time each character is on the series. For the first time we learn about Munch’s (forever unseen) girlfriend Felicia. He has bene divorced twice (later seasons will up the number by one) and he is a hopeless romantic, emphasis on hopeless. At the start of the episode he and Felicia have just broken up, and we get the feeling this isn’t the first time this has happened. He spends the episode denouncing love in all its forms (at one point calling himself such things as ‘The Bob Eucker of love!) only to come running when Felicia calls him. Before the episode is over they get into another screaming argument and he says he never wants to see her again but by the next episode the two of them are back together. Munch is an unlikely Lothario and his love life will be one of the great sources of humor for the length of the series.

By contrast Bolander is trying to work up the nerve to ask Dr. Blythe out on a date. He hasn’t asked a woman out in more than twenty-five years and he’s terrified of doing so. He’s afraid she’ll say no; he’s afraid she’ll say yes. And he’s still very upset about how his marriage ending. In a monologue we can relate to, he tells on how he wants to get the urge to call his wife and then inevitably they end up fighting and he throws a telephone in the wall. According to him, he went through six telephones before he learned his lesson. There’s something charming about seeing Ned Beatty, who is usually so glum and depressed, acting with such childlike nervousness about calling a woman he has a crush on. And when he finally gets up the courage at the end of the episode and asks her on a date – and she says yes – the smile that crosses Beatty’s face is one of the best moments of the show.

We also get the first sense of the state of Beau Felton’s marriage and that state is troubled. Felton discusses the kind of conversations he has with his wife and how he doesn’t like the dialogue. When he calls her at the end of the episode and tries to sound about being romantic, it’s sweet but we remember the kind of ranting he said earlier. We know that Crosetti and Bolander are divorced and both of them talk about how much this job costs them. There will be many marriages that end during the length of the series but in the case of Felton, there’s a good chance the problems are not entirely on him.

Howard is dealing with a family crisis too – for the first time we hear of her sister Carrie, who was diagnosed with a tumor on her breast. Kay doesn’t like appearing vulnerable in front of the guys so she goes to the locker room to cry in private. There are moments in the episode she will demonstrate her feminine wisdom but she truly wants to be respected as a cop so she rarely shows this weakness in public.

We also get a sense of more of the partnerships in play: Bolander has clearly gotten used to and is exhausted by the kvetching of Munch and constantly claims that ‘he rides with Munch. Mitch was his partner.”  Munch takes this personally and Bolander insists that when you meet Mitch, you’ll understand. (And we do meet Mitch, and we do understand.) Felton and Howard’s dynamic is trickier: Felton puts out the line “I’m your partner and I’m your friend”  and its clear that the former is more important for Kay then the latter. But Felton clearly does respect Howard as a detective and Howard does think that Felton is capable of sweetness.

This episode is the first time we get a deeper look at Crosetti beyond his partnership with Lewis. He gets a call from his ex-wife and he learns that his daughter has brought her boyfriend home, something that bothers him. He calls both his ex-wife and his daughter and tries to seem like a caring person. Crosetti is, if anything, more bitter about his divorce than Bolander is but he also wants to be a loving parent. He knows his daughter has sex but he still can’t think of her doing so in the bed he bought stuffed animals for her. Crosetti comes across as such a warm and caring father in this episode that his eventual fate came as hard for some viewers to accept.

Bayliss, however, is still exactly where he was in the last episode: trying to crack the Adena Watson case. He starts the episode sure he has the killer because they found the fingerprints of whoever had the same library books Adena was carrying. He has demanded they bring him in for questioning. Then Thormann shows up and tries to give Bayliss warning but Tim says he has the killer.

And in walks an adolescent. Bayliss tries to save face and the kid is terrified. Pembleton is gentle with the kid (he took the books out two years previous) and then justifiably mocks Bayliss. “Next time, you put the case down. Put it down.”

The problem is Pembleton is serious even when he’s mocking Bayliss. Throughout the first half of the episode he openly taunts Bayliss’s ability as a detective and says he’ll never make it in Homicide because he doesn’t think like a criminal. (He’ll expand upon that in the next episode.) He doesn’t think Bayliss is capable of asking the right questions. Bayliss by contrast has settled on a suspect, who we briefly heard about in the first episode – the Araber, Risley Tucker.

Pembleton utterly discounts the idea because Tucker’s barn burned down. Bayliss is certain of it because Adena’s mother insisted that her daughter stop working for him because ‘he was getting too friendly with her’. The investigation takes another turn by the end of the episode – again following the avenue the actual investigation took – but Bayliss has no intention of letting go of this bone.

What’s the most striking thing about ‘Night of the Dead Living’ is how cheerful it seems to be in contrast to so much of the rest of the series. It’s not just the humorous tone or the way the dark story of the episode (the baby found in a cage and who it belongs too) is resolved remarkably quickly; it’s that for the minimalism, it does play like a cross between Larry David and Samuel Beckett and ends with a note of bonding we never see on the show. And it balances that at the end of the episode by revealing the mystery that the detectives were never able to solve about the candle. I’m not going to reveal it here, except to say that reveals that someone who we spent much of the series being shallow is capable of deep introspection and even mourning. Of course, the episode undercuts it with the fact that now the shift is over, the air conditioning finally started working. This is Baltimore after all.

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

 

Detective Munch: Almost everything he does or says in this episode, frankly.

This episode won the WGA Award for Best Episodic Drama for 1994 beating out, among others, the Pilot of Homicide.