Homicide Rewatch Season 4 Prologue: The Show Becomes Mainstream - Sort Of

 

 

I may have mentioned this is in an earlier post on Medium but for the purposes of this series I'll restate it. Season 4 was when I became what was referred to online as a 'Homicidal  maniac'. I'd watched a few random episodes before but the show was up against Picket Fences which I was devoted to. Sometime in 1995 – I'm not sure when exactly – CBS made the decision to move the series to another time slot and I began to follow Homicide more closely. (I'll note the exact episode later in these reviews.) During the spring of 1996 and summer I would end up watching not only most of Season 4 but quite a few of the reruns from previous seasons. (NBC wisely was airing repeats of the show during the spring and summer of that year, right up until the Summer Olympics.) By the following fall I was locked in and would not miss another episode for the remainder of its time in its original run.

It was something of a miracle  that Homicide was picked up for a fourth season. As I mentioned at the prologue of Season 3, during this period Homicide's ratings were still dismal, particularly in comparison to the rest of NBC which had officially become the number one network after several years of trailing badly in the ratings. And while Homicide had indirectly been responsible for it, viewers still weren't watching the show in great numbers. The Season 3 finale had been watched by barely 8 million people, barely half those that had tuned in for the season premiere.

But rather than cut bait with a show that wasn't drawing in immense numbers Warren Littlefield now had the freedom to give a show he was still a booster of room to grow. So he gave it a full renewal of 22 episodes. That renewal, however, came with strings: the show had to start drawing in viewers or it wouldn't get a reprieve.

So as a result Season 4 was radically different from any of the previous seasons. First came the major cast change. Ned Beatty and Daniel Baldwin, still the biggest names associated with the show when it original premiered, had made it clear while the show had been in hiatus that they were done. At the start of Season 4 the show would deal with it – but not in the most even-handed way possible. (I'll deal with that when we get to it.) In order to reach a younger demographic the show would end up introducing the first new detective the show had since the series premiere.

With the official hiring of Reed Diamond, it could no longer be said that Homicide was a series that catered only to ugly people the way it had been said at the start. More objectional to some was the way it alters its format. The serialized stories would more or less be completely gone in Season 4 and replaced with a new series of storytelling: two part investigations. This followed a more traditional format and would usually follow the format of 'red balls'. There would be three of them in Season 4 and nine during the remaining four seasons of the show. And rather then red balls dealing with a single important murder, they would frequently deal with more sensationalized killings by a single individual. This troubled many of the purists and it must be said some of the remaining cast members and writers.

From a personal standpoint having rewatched the series several times over the years I never noticed much of a decline in quality. Perhaps it was because those 'sensationalized' stories were what drew me in as a viewer in the first place. And considering that the ratings during Season 4 were by far the highest during the show's run, it would appear that viewers agreed with me.

More to the point I never saw much of an overall decline in quality from this point on then in previous seasons. To be sure usually around sweeps month we would get a sensationalized story to draw in ratings but frequently that would be balanced by several episodes that were closer to 'old school' Homicide. Indeed several of the episodes during this season show the writers more than willing to use the format to tell the kind of banal stories we were used to before, only with sensationalized trappings.

And it's worth noting that in the 1990s, TV shows that had two part episodes were still relative rare on broadcast television. We were still a few years away from serialized storylines on a regular basis and at this point the only shows that were doing two part episodes at this frequent a basis were Homicide and The X-Files. (Most serialized stories during this period were still nighttime soap operas such as Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210.) So even this part of it was hardly radical.

In hindsight the biggest problem with Season Four was part of a missed opportunity. With Baldwin and Beatty now gone from the show, this should have been an opportunity for other cast members to move in to the limelight. Instead Bayliss and Pembleton were put more front and center and some of the older cast members began to fade further into the background. The show would make attempts to influence the dynamic with two of the regulars and in both cases it didn't work very well. While this continued the show began to try and world build a little, introducing a recurring character early in the season that would become a series regular the following year and another character who would appear to be a one-off but play a vital role in the final two seasons.

Perhaps the most significant event was being planned in the early stages of 1995. That May Tom Fontana was having drinks with two of his old friends: Ed Sherin and Dick Wolf, the producers of Law & Order. By this point the latter show was starting to become the phenomena it is today with the ratings going up steadily to match the critical acclaim. Littlefield wanted to discuss the possibility of a crossover event. All of the producers were mixed about the idea but Littlefield eventually persuaded them and by February of 1996 the first Law & Order: Homicide crossover debuted. That partnership would not only become a yearly event but more or less lead to the greatest legacy Homicide would leave on the pop culture Zeitgeist. We'll talk about it – both episodes – down the road.