Homicide – Life On The
Street (TV Box Four, Season Five)
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: B- Episodes: B
Homicide – Life on the Street found a
new style as it moved on and did a great job of staying vital and fresh during
its fifth season in this fourth box set of the show from A&E. The Complete Fifth Season has some
more money in it as NBC was hoping the show might finally pick up the larger
audience it deserved. Also, the style
and feel that would come to be associated with Barry Levinson’s groundbreaking
HBO series Oz starts to surface here, even if NBC was trying to
“domesticate” this show somewhat. In
all this, the show still got more streamlined and less gritty, including
pulling back on that shaky camerawork a bit.
The show had essentially reinvented itself and needed to
after the previous season’s dramatic cliffhanger. This DVD boxed set takes six more DVDs, 22 shows in all, to
contain the fifth season. That the show
continued to be as smart as it was at this point easily makes it one of the
best police dramas in TV history, a point made clearer when watch many such
British shows of late. You would think
they might be better than there American counterparts, but doing this kind of
storytelling is more complex than one would think for how commonplace such
shows are.
Ned Beatty, Jon Polito and Daniel Baldwin were sadly gone
by now, but most of the original cast continued, including Yaphet Kotto as the
head of the detective unit, Richard Belzer, Clark Johnson, Melissa Leo, Kyle
Secor, Isabella Hofmann (occurrently) and Andre Braugher. Michelle Forbes, Reed Diamond and Max
Perlich came to the forefront. The cast
was more than used to the show by now and guest stars like Charles S. Dutton,
whose Prison Riot episode is a highlight of the entire series and a big
precursor to Oz. Dean Winters
became the star of that show, and he is really good here. Zeljko Ivanek (Hannibal, as a
semi-regular), Edward Herrmann, Rosanna Arquette, Polly Holiday, Elijah Wood,
Joan Chen, Eric Stoltz, Mekhi Phifer, Melvin Van Peebles, Neil Patrick Harris,
Edie Falco, John Seda, comedian Lewis Black and even Barry Levinson himself.
The 1.33 X 1 full screen image and Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo remain just above average. The
image looks slightly better than the fair-but-problematic and not as impressive
first box. This is also still better
than watching it on TV, VHS, or Cable.
The image still has digititis pixelization from being over-tampered with
in the transfer, causing softness and smearing where there does not need to be
any. This time, there may be less of
that, but some of the darker colors have a slight noise to them, so whatever
changed is obvious, but its cause is not.
This is not showing off the cinematography to its best advantage, but
maybe HD-DVD versions will correct this.
That is unless it shows more flaws, but that is a while away, style of
the show or not.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo sound is not perfect, still
with Pro Logic playback like the previous sets, but it often sounds unintended
or as if it were bleeding. Any
surrounds are limited, as dialogue is a bit too much in the center channel, but
there is ambient sound and non-spillover sound in the surrounds when the
dialogue plays back, and it is does not have Box One’s troubles. Extras include head writers James Yoshimura
and Eric Overmeyer on DVD 3’s episode “The Documentary” in which the
co-workers get captured on tape. DVD #6
that has the few remaining extras, including cast/crew biographies and an Inside
Homicide interview featurette with David Simon and James Yoshimura, which
is good, but not as extensive for such a big set as it could be. However, the episodes justify the set,
especially in these slender cases.
- Nicholas Sheffo
