In the world of television, there is hardly a more influential Murder: Life on the StreetThis police series, which ran for seven seasons on NBC from 1993, was the beginning of the television career of David Simon, the creator of TheWireand began his work mapping the everyday tragedies of crime in the city of Baltimore. It was a foretaste of the moral ambiguity and complex characters that would define the prestige television era in shows like HBO’s The Sopranos half a decade later. And it created an urgent new visual language for television, full of jump cuts and intimate, restless handheld camerawork that was often imitated by companies like FX. The shield. Moreover, all this happened within the framework of a traditional crime series.
But killing struggled for much of its time with poor ratings, network glitches, and the threat of cancellation. Recently, its status as a classic has been in jeopardy for the simple reason that it was very difficult to watch. The series was mysteriously absent from streaming services, and even its availability on DVD was patchy. It felt like killing could be forgotten.
Fortunately Problems with music rights that held killing Offline were finally put to bed, and all seven seasons of the show, plus 2000s Homicide – The Movie
Something else that killing What was special then (and still is today) is that it is imbued with journalistic spirit. The show is an adaptation of Simon’s classic non-fiction book Murder: A year on the streets of deathwhich chronicles his experiences as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, working for a year in the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit. Cases, incidents and detectives from the book inspired the show’s characters and storylines. As a result, it is as true to life as network television cop dramas get. The fluid, unpredictable structure keeps viewers on their toes and defies the comfortable rhythm of fiction, especially traditional crime shows; you never know if a murder will be solved in a single episode, develop into a whodunnit that lasts the entire season, or never be solved at all.
This grim realism is further enhanced by killing‘s vérité filming style, developed by Baltimore-born film director Barry Levinson (Rain Man), who produced the show and directed key episodes. killing was shot with grainy 16mm film cameras, mostly on location in Baltimore and often handheld. The editing is loose and improvised, bringing you closer to the characters and creating a documentary feel.
But it was not all innovation. Just as important is killingThe brilliance of the film – perhaps even more so – lies in the fact that it is caught up in good, old-fashioned television art. The detectives are brought to life by a dazzling cast of perfectly cast character actors. The great Yaphet Kotto (Parker in Foreigner) is the intimidating Homicide Chief Al Giardello, who looms over his detectives and yells at them with a mixture of cruelty and love. Richard Belzer’s cadaverous Detective Munch is an unforgettable creation, using his nagging complaints as a weapon against the department’s suspects; Munch survived the show and migrated to the cast of Law and Order: SVU for no less than 15 more seasons.
The list of familiar, characterful, real-life faces goes on: Ned Beatty, Melissa Leo, Clark Johnson, Jon Polito, one of the lesser-known Baldwins (Daniel, to be precise). They are strong characters, flawed but lovable, always in weary but inexhaustible conversations with each other about the nature of police work. They are not all good cops, but they seem authentic. It’s a classic ensemble show – and yet one detective stands out from the crowd.
Frank Pembleton is young, black, educated, sophisticated, dazzlingly dressed and deadly serious. He is the most brilliant detective on the team and he knows it; his arrogance is his weakness. In a twist that will be surreal for younger viewers, he is played by the late Andre Braugher, whose Captain Holt in Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a parody of the grumpy police chief Kotto in killing. If you know and love Braugher for his dry comedic timing and painful authority, it will be an eye-opener to see him as an effortlessly cool young sharpshooter burning with frustrated intensity. It is puzzling that killing didn’t make him a big star (or maybe it didn’t; variety on 90s television was limited, after all).
Perhaps killingThe show’s real genius, though, lies in two simple elements of iconography. “The Box” is the windowless room where the interrogations take place: stark and claustrophobic, it is the stage for countless brilliantly written, ambiguous confrontations, some of which span entire episodes. And “The Board” (taken directly from Simon’s book) is a white board with the victims’ surnames written in capital letters in columns beneath the detectives’ names – black for closed cases, red for open ones. The board eraser keeps erasing, and the names are moved up the list: red, black, red, black, red. It’s a tally of the squad’s success rate and the city’s human tragedies. They can never all be erased.