Why is “Homicide: Life on the Street” so underappreciated?

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http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/why-i...preciated.html

Though it ran for seven seasons, the NBC cop drama was never treated right by NBC.
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/tv-tattle#SDx86xaGawyTk56U.99

[principehomura]

The show is finely produced and written... except for its characters.
They are unbearable and in the long run without the watch becomes unpleasant, also because the writers sadisticaly insists with the worst ones.

[icecream]

I have never seen Homicide proper. But I haven't liked any of its crossovers with Law and Order.

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David Simon's The Wire glorified real-life detectives whose cases are falling apart

HBO's The Wire and NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street, based on Simon's 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, immortalized Baltimore's "murder police" — an expletive-spewing, gallows-humored brotherhood of homicide detectives. But a number of those homicide detectives have "coerced witnesses (including children), fabricated evidence, ignored alternative suspects, and buried all of that information deep in their files," according to ex-convicts exonerated for their crimes and their attorneys. "Since 1989, 25 men convicted of murder in Baltimore have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Official misconduct was present in 22 of the cases," reports Lara Bazelon, in a story written for New York Magazine and the Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing. As Bazelon recounts, "At 7:45 p.m. on December 27, 1986, Faheem Ali was shot dead in the streets of Baltimore. No physical evidence tied anyone to the killing, and no eyewitnesses immediately came forward. But Baltimore homicide detectives Thomas Pellegrini, Richard Fahlteich, and Oscar 'The Bunk' Requer were not going to give up easily. Requer was later immortalized as a central character in David Simon’s iconic HBO series The Wire. As Simon wrote in the afterword for his acclaimed 1991 nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Requer 'lives on in Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of the legendary Bunk Moreland on The Wire, right down to the ubiquitous cigar.'

Pellegrini, meanwhile, was the jumping-off point for Detective Tim Bayliss, a character in the long-running television show Homicide: Life on the Street, which was inspired by Simon’s book. Requer and Pellegrini are among a constellation of Baltimore Police Department officers who have, through Simon’s work, defined what it means to be a homicide detective in the popular imagination — and whose biggest cases are starting to fall apart or have been overturned. Determined to find out who killed Faheem Ali, Pellegrini, Fahlteich, and Requer homed in on 12-year-old Otis Robinson, who was outside when the shooting happened. They allegedly brought Robinson and his mother to the police station and separated them, questioning the seventh-grader alone. Robinson told the detectives that when he left his house to go to the corner store, he saw a few men across the street in conversation, though he didn’t notice much in the dark. As he continued walking toward the store, he heard a gunshot and fled. Even though Robinson insisted he could not identify a shooter, the detectives showed him an array of photos, including one of Gary Washington, a 25-year-old Black man, according to a lawsuit Washington filed against the city and the detectives in 2019. Robinson knew Washington, but he made clear that he did not see who shot Ali. The detectives wrote down this statement. Then, according to the lawsuit, the questioning took a turn. 'Cooperate,' the detectives allegedly told the 12-year-old, 'or you’ll never see your mother again.' Unless Robinson identified the shooter, the officers allegedly continued, he could be charged with homicide. Robinson 'crumbled under the pressure' of threats from the detectives, according to the lawsuit, and signed a second statement falsely identifying Washington as the shooter. His first statement was never turned over to prosecutors or defense attorneys for Washington. (Attorneys for the defendants have denied liability in court pleadings but declined to comment, stating that they were 'constrained to speak only through the judicial process.') Robinson recanted his testimony in 1996 to an investigator for Washington. He did the same in court in 1999 and again in 2017, explaining he had been strong-armed by detectives. In 2018, a judge overturned Washington’s conviction.

In 2019, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges against him. Lauren Lipscomb, the deputy state’s attorney who oversees both the Conviction Integrity Unit and Police Integrity Unit, stated, 'We respect the finding of the judge who found Robinson’s recantation credible. Evidence insufficiency is not the same as factual innocence and evidence insufficiency is the reason we dismissed. Washington, now 57, walked free. He spent more than three decades in prison. Whether the detectives who put him there will face any repercussions remains to be seen." Asked to respond, Simon points out that his follow-up book to Homicide, The Corner, takes the point of view of those ”being policed and hunted” during the height of the war on drugs. (Simon turned The Corner into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries in 2000.) He also notes that The Wire provides a kaleidoscope of perspectives from beautifully drawn characters, including cops who are blatantly violent and racist, which is central to why the show was groundbreaking and beloved by so many. “I believe in writing from the point of view of characters as a function of embedded narrative,” Simon said. “This doesn’t mean you don’t include the bad with the good, or change outcomes, but it does demand that you do your job and deliver the worldview of your protagonists for all to see.” Simon said that in both Homicide and The Corner, “the same process of empathetic embedding was employed regardless of where I stood.” Meanwhile, Simon's next HBO series, We Own This City, will tackle Baltimore police corruption.

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Why cop show Homicide: Life on the Street was revolutionary

When the first episode of Homicide: Life on the Street aired on US network NBC on 31st January 1993, the crime drama looked like very little on TV at the time.

The series was based on David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets which documented his time spent with the homicide unit of Baltimore Police Department; Simon would go on to create The Wire, still regarded as one of the best TV dramas ever made, but having started his career as a reporter, he made his name with this vividly written account of his time shadowing a shift of homicide detectives in 1988 as they investigated murders. As with his book, the show captured the day-to-day reality and often grim humor of a group of people whose job puts them in regular proximity with death.

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When Did Homicide: Life on the Street Jump the Shark?

Today, we look at when (or if) you folks believe that Homicide: Life on the Street “jumped the shark.”

This is “Just Can’t Jump It,” a feature where we examine shows and whether they “jumped the shark.” Jumped the shark (coined by Jon Hein) means that the show had a specific point in time where, in retrospect, you realize that show was going downhill from there (even if, in some rare occasions, the show later course-corrected). Not every show DOES jump the shark. Some shows just remain good all the way through. And some shows are terrible all the way through. What we’re looking for are moments where a show that you otherwise enjoyed hit a point where it took a noticeable nose dive after that time and if so, what moment was that?

Something that is a bit hard to really conceptualize once time has passed is how much a TV show’s history can be impacted by, well, the other shows on that network. For instance, let’s say that NBC was doing really well in 1982, perhaps they never would have renewed Cheers for a second season. Since the network WASN’T doing that well, Cheers had more freedom and, of course, it all worked out quite nicely. A similar situation took place at NBC in 1994, when L.A. Law was struggling to get back to normal in its eighth season, and a critically acclaimed drama, Homicide: Life on the Steet, seemed poised to get the 10pm slot on Thursday (it literally DID get the slow for a brief period). Well, then NBC had this pilot called ER, and L.A. Law got the boot officially and Homicide lost its plum time slot, and ER went on to become a blockbuster. If ER wasn’t around, would Homicide have kept the Thursday at 10pm slot, with all of that Friends and Seinfeld attention? Would L.A. Law have been given a ninth season? Interesting What If…?s.

Anyhow, Homicide: Life on the Street was a brilliant police drama based on David Simon’s book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, where Simon followed the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide detectives around for a year. The show was created by Tom Fontana, and it was a brilliant look at detectives, specializing in the verisimilitude of the series.

So first…DID IT JUMP THE SHARK? I’m going with no.

WHEN DID IT JUMP THE SHARK Here’s the thing. The network hated how unconventional Homicide was, and pushed the show to add “pretty” actors constantly, and the show really struggled with those silly demands, and by the final season, the cast was practically unrecognizable, especially when Andre Braugher left the show (he won an Emmy for Best Actor as Detective Frank Pembleton). However, the show was still good! It wasn’t as good as its earlier years, but it was still a good show! Simon had actually joined the writing staff of the series by this point, and the shoe was still well-written, just not AS good as it had been before. For longtime fans, the final season was annoying, but it was still a good show! So I say never jumped.