HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET: The Evolutionary Link Between Dale Cooper and Tony Soprano
Twin Peaks invariably gets heaps of credit for moulding TV into what it is today, and rightly so. Today, TV series have become refuges for filmmaker auteurs to weave their stories over a framework of six or more hours rather than within a two-hour film. The likes of Mike Flanagan, Barry Jenkins, Paolo Sorrentino, and Steven Soderbergh among others have done this. Other modern shows follow season-sweeping story lines with impressive cinematic grandeur. Granted, streaming technology allows for a different business model nowadays that just wasn’t feasible 30 years ago—no requisite commercial breaks, no pre-determined episode length, no calendar-dependant season lengths or premiere dates, etc. Back in the 1980s, American hour-long series were 22-packs of mostly cookie-cutter episodes, which relied each week on the same beats for humour, commercial-break cliff-hangers, and happy outcomes. This applied to more serious police procedurals as much as it did to the more rambunctious fare like The A-Team or The Dukes of Hazzard.
So certainly David Lynch and Mark Frost’s teamwork on Twin Peaks—and its initial critical and commercial success—caused network execs briefly to rethink the form of television drama. Among the things in TV Land that Twin Peaks demanded rethinking were primetime serialization of story arcs, the approach to casting, and applying a cinematic – as opposed to boilerplate – attitude to creating episodes. The serialisation concept didn’t take hold with TV executives instantly. On the one hand, many rationalised that Peaks’ season one was an eight-episode lightning-in-a-bottle thing, and on the other hand, some saw its early viewership success as an anomaly of overblown value because a large portion of actual Twin Peaks audience were folks who fast-forwarded commercials using their sexy new VCRs; this is to say that the show’s popularity didn’t coincide with ABC’s advertising clients getting their ad spots seen more. Also, popular belief in the industry was that primetime serialised shows—good or not—would be destined for low viewership since no one would reasonably tune in to an episode during sweeps when the season was already six chapters into its narrative. And then, of course, there was Lynch’s surreal, funky filmmaking aesthetic. In the Class of 1990 “TV Guide” line-up, Twin Peaks was the one kid in the grade-five class photo who hit his puberty growth spurt early and stood out awkwardly from its peers. The truth is, though, that Twin Peaks was actually the mature kid way ahead of the curve.
Twin Peaks’ weirdness and inconsistent second season would do in the Lynch/Frost production. However, over at NBC a couple of years later – incidentally, at the same time that The X-Files began embracing semi-serialised showrunning with its conspiracy episodes – there were executives willing to gamble on reimagining the conventions of a weekly cop show. And miraculously for seven years, they overlooked low ratings while allowing Paul Attanasio’s Homicide: Life on the Street to blend case-of-the-week episodes with full-season story arcs while also showcasing cinéma vérité style and sensibilities in bringing audiences an authentic look at the Baltimore Police Department Homicide Unit. Homicide: Life on the Street is best likened to a detail-obsessed William Friedkin cop film featuring vibrant handheld-camerawork and steady dramatic urgency. Police dramas had never looked quite like this before.
Between Twin Peaks and The Sopranos, it was hard to find any filmmaking aesthetic on television – and even then, Peaks’ cinematic quality was largely confined to season one and the Lynch-directed episodes of season two. In the 1980s, TV’s blah, repetitive nature had become the birthplace of ‘light’ pop culture while film studios were considered to be purveyors of higher culture—which, granted, is difficult to believe when one looks at the growth of Friday the 13th franchise and the rise of the two Coreys. However, that’s the way Hollywood was. This unspoken but totally understood pecking order was clearly visible each year at the Golden Globes, where film stars sat at the front by the stage and had their awards read last with a drumroll while the TV stars sat at the back and had their winners announced before the main course. So, the fact that Homicide: Life on the Streets went about its business in the 1990s blending television form and film style with such a long leash from NBC executives is a tiny corporate miracle. The Paul Attanasio-led series avoided cancellation for seven years while regularly receiving praise for its intensity and craft, and almost no one noticed. David Chase has credited Twin Peaks as an inspiration for The Sopranos; however, Homicide: Life on the Street is the evolutionary link between the Davids – Lynch and Chase – which allowed the golden era of TV truly to begin at HBO.
The source material for Homicide, David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets provided the content, expertise, and procedural depth for the series to explore. Producing and visualising the program with its unique style came in large part from a team of experienced Hollywood filmmakers. Paul Attanasio, two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter (of Quiz Show and Donnie Brasco), credited writer of a handful of other Hollywood hits, and script doctor to countless more was the chief architect of Simon’s literary blueprint. Oscar winner and Hollywood heavyweight Barry Levinson was an executive producer, too, guiding the series launch and directing two episodes including the series pilot. Tom Fontana, who would later become an HBO heavy (penning the Sidney Lumet film Strip Search and create the stunning prison series—and Sopranos precursor—Oz) was also a key producer.
In almost every way, Homicide: Life on the Street pushed back on television convention. Its bold cinematic casting remains one of its standout successes. At the top of the cast list, for its entire seven-season run, Yaphet Kotto was hired as the Homicide Unit’s shift commander, Al Giardello, and is forever one of TV’s boldest and greatest dramatic casting choices. The late Kotto oozed so much charisma, similar in swagger and gravitas to Gene Hackman, during his audition that producers could not NOT cast him in the role of the Italian police commander—despite Kotto’s Cameroonian-American heritage, he undeniably became the Italian-American police commander, and producers refused to rewrite the character around Kotto’s African heritage once he was cast. Attanasio’s refusal to rework or explain the ancestry of a Black Italian American police commander to American audiences is actually a wildly progressive statement for the time. Despite his mega presence in Homicide, Kotto performs Giardello with nuance and documentary-styled authenticity. That Kotto’s work in the show never gets discussed is a travesty. The oversight is partially due to low ratings, of course, but it is also partially because Homicide: Life on the Street has always been perceived as an ensemble success rather than a platform for any of its characters.
Alongside Kotto in the early seasons’ casts were the established character actors Jon Polito and Oscar nominee Ned Beatty. Future stars Andre Braugher and Melissa Leo undeniably owe a great deal of their career success to growing within the Homicide environment. Not just for the career opportunity, but Braugher’s role in Brooklyn Nine Nine seems in part to pay an homage to Yaphet Kotto while Leo’s work on the indie-spirited Homicide set was a strong stepping-stone into her eventual Oscar-winning work in independent cinema. Kyle Secor, Clark Johnson, and Reed Diamond are strong newcomers, and even comedian Richard Belzer, who studio execs imagined would be the series’ comic relief, turned his character John Munch into one of American television’s most iconic dramatic roles. Due to popularity, Belzer’s character survived the death of Homicide: Life on the Street – where he did 122 episodes – and moved down the block to co-star as Munch in 326 episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (plus guest appearances in nine other series including X-Files, The Wire, Arrested Development, and 30 Rock).
Attanasio’s approach in adapting David Simon’s book focused on bringing realism to cop procedurals. Homicide approached casting more as Michael Mann approached casting Heat—it’s all about realism and intensity. In contrast, 1980s police dramas – something like CHiPs – had no such aspiration to mirror reality. Attanasio and company weren’t interested in pretty faces and archetypes so much as fitting actors with personality profiles of real-world detective. Studio execs did push for a female detective to be working on the unit for demographic purposes, whereas Simon’s source material featured no women working in the division, which is where Melissa Leo’s casting came from, but her character had to be vetted by the production’s homicide detective technical advisors. Another stunning element for a cop drama that Homicide showcased—that was unheard of for the 1990s—was that the series always featured at least three Black actors in its primary cast. Furthermore, writers never arbitrarily wrote more screen time for white actors during storylines that drifted towards Black-detective-centered episodes. At the time, this boldness was a move that films or limited series were more willing to make, not primetime drama.
During the 1990s, immersive, character-driven, and relationship-based dialogue from writers like David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino, and Richard Linklater were becoming more popular. With Paul Attanasio’s fingers on the pulse of the screenwriting scene at the time and the show’s mandate for authenticity, it is not surprising that a season of Homicide: Life on the Street featured such strong relationship-writing. Episodes felt more like 45-minute dialogue-driven cop movies. The procedural is in there – and the pacing was still based on commercial interruptions – but it was not common for detectives regularly to drift into lengthy conversations ranging from banal to humorous to serious life observations. Munch’s regular bickering with his partner Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty) over petty nothings made for legendary chemistry that cop series before the 1990s would never touch. Similarly, Kay Howard (Leo) and partner Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) would periodically banter about more serious family fare without it pertaining at all to the plot. The emerging indie-film dialogue of the day allowed this dynamic more easily to reside in Homicide, too. Watching the scene where Andre Braugher’s character Frank Pembleton gets increasingly annoyed as he tries to ‘un-parallel park’ his car after another car boxes him in is realistic-feeling, but mesmerisingly amusing.
The character development and moments in Homicide: Life on the Street are more akin to what you’d find in film, and these moments slowly paved the way for cinematic style to creep into TV storytelling conventions by the time HBO began its showrunning in the 2000s. Nuanced characters and season-long development of their arcs are staples today in binge-worthy series. Not so, 25 years ago. Once upon a time, TV characters were static, predictable entities. As a contrast, Homicide writers were scared of stagnation. When Andre Braugher expressed concern to Tom Fontana of his character growing stale after three seasons, Fontana agreed, and showrunners wrote Braugher’s intense character to suffer a frightening stroke during an interrogation. The choice had season-long ramifications for the character and the entire squad room—on top of providing a harrowing and deeply upsetting scene unusual for primetime drama. The brilliant scene (seen here) features top-tier acting in close quarters with a roving handheld camera, unusually stylish editing, and penetrating but simple music. Scenes like this—and so many others in that iconic beige-brick interrogation room—belonged on the big screen.
In most seasons, Homicide: Life on the Street not only managed year-long story arcs but also volleyed in one or two truly magnificent, large-than-life, standalone episodes into the fray. This may have been an concerted effort by NBC to draw big-time attention to its underseen critical darling, or it may simply have been that Homicide, similar to the excitement that The X-Files was generating at the time over at Fox, was growing into a cool, progressive, stylish series that film people and TV people alike wanted to be affiliated with. One such episode was the season 2 premiere, “Bop Gun” guest-starring Robin Williams (and a young Jake Gyllenhaal in an episode directed by his dad). In this episode, Williams plays a tourist whose wife is killed in front of him, and he must coordinate with homicide detectives while dealing with his own grief and his young children’s confusion. In this episode, Williams’ character confronts lead detective Felton after overhearing him callously referring to his family as stupid tourists. Kotto’s character intervenes somewhat how a Customer Service Supervisor would, and the tense drama that unfolds is gut-wrenching, sensitively handled, raw human interaction, and something American primetime was just not accustomed to. It arguably stands as some of the best dramatic work of Williams’ career.
“The Subway” is another such standalone episode from season 6. The episode won a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. Vincent D’Onofrio co-stars and Gary Fleder directs this episode where a businessman (D’Onofrio) gets bumped in front of a subway as it approaches the platform, and he becomes disturbingly wedged between the platform and train. Homicide detectives are summoned to investigate because even though the man is alive, he only lives because the weight of the train is holding his body together. When the train is removed, the assault will become a homicide. D’Onofrio’s character spends the episode troublingly crushed in place, contemplating his life. As Braugher’s famously antisocial character makes conversation with the doomed man, the episode contrasts this gravity via two other detectives strolling around a public park chitchatting about the minutiae of their lives while half-heartedly looking for the subway victim’s girlfriend who is out for a jog. If someone like Neil Labute or Quentin Tarantino focused his writerly attention on heart-breaking tragedies from the daily newspaper, one might get a tense, harrowing hangout story something like this cutting episode.
Unlike television dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, Homicide: Life on the Street thrived on sophisticated thematic conversations. Race relations, mental health supports, workplace suicide, school shootings, grief, and even bioethics – specifically, whether or not to administer medical care if someone brings injury to themselves – these were daring, atypical conversations for network TV, and Homicide: Life on the Street raised them weekly. These certainly weren’t the topics around the water cooler on the morning after an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger, but they were among the few people who were watching Homicide.
David Simon was a crime journalist for over a decade, so his book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was built around the authenticity of the issues that arise during people’s lowest moments and how law enforcement engages them. That Simon’s text was developed into a network series by Attanasio, Levinson, and Fontanta and that they were willing to champion documentary-style camerawork, naturalism of dialogue, and above all a commitment to real-world detective life is hard to fathom looking back at television of the time. Homicide: Life on the Street certainly struggled to find its audience given its non-traditional qualities. As it turned out though, David Simon’s book actually gave birth to two offspring—firstly, Homicide, but then a decade later, The Wire, which was developed by Simon himself. The HBO show would ultimately receive the acclaim and audience that Homicide did not. The Wire may be the child that most will remember, but it was adopted into a better home and grew up in a better neighbourhood, while Homicide had a tougher upbringing in a harsher TV environment. The Wire had more freedom and better resources at HBO and was part of a more obvious rewriting of TV’s conventions, but it would never have become the brilliant piece of television, and filmmaking, history that it did without its older sibling paving the way and passing on its lessons.
The cinematic flavour that became present in television with HBO’s work on The Sopranos and The Wire, which is now a TV norm, was certainly teased by Twin Peaks in 1990. However, today’s auteur-driven and cinematically styled streaming series became feasible creatively only after the seven-season experiment that was Homicide: Life on the Street, which arguably featured some of the best, most consistent filmmaking of the 90s (each week, Fridays at 10).