Homicide – Life On The Street (TV Box Two, Season Three)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: B-     Episodes: B

 

 

Homicide – Life on the Street kicked into higher gear with a new group of writers joining the already existing staff, including Co-Executive Producer Henry Browell, when it got to its third season.  In some ways, it is more like its first full-length season.  This second DVD boxed set offers that third season on six DVDs, with 20 shows in all.  The original cast continued, including Yaphet Kotto as the head of the detective unit, Ned Beatty, John Polito (The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing), Daniel Baldwin, Richard Belzer, Clark Johnson, Melissa Leo, Kyle Secor, and the actor who put the show over the top: Andre Braugher.  Isabella Hofmann became the biggest acting addition this time out.

 

The writing heart of the show remained Tom Fontana (also a St. Elsewhere alumnus) and James Yoshimura, who continued with fellow writers Noel Behn, David Mills, Frank Pugliese, Jorge Zamacona, David Simon (who wrote the book the series is based on) and series creator Paul Attanasio), Fontana and Yoshimura laid-out the show in “tele-terms”.  All this talent behind and in front of the camera lands up meshing together in a way we rarely se in any medium, which always makes this show fascinating to watch.  The late Ted Demme and longtime TV and feature film veteran Peter Medak (The Krays) joined the roster of new directors joining surviving ones form the first two seasons.  Though the long list of character actors turning up on the show was impressive, only Steve Buscemi (“End Game”) made any name guest appearance of note.

 

The show’s new talent and the already established set-up and characters allowed the storylines to expand, but it also began to fall slightly into a soap opera-like running of storylines that kept tying into each other more so than the previous seasons.  This never gets out of hand, but does cut into the immediacy of the detectives finding themselves in sudden, new, unique crime situations.  The semi-nervous camerawork suddenly is less needed and has a bit less effectiveness.  The outright use of raw videotape totally ruins this mood when it surfaces, meaning not going back to film, looking almost like a bad infomercial.  Yikes!

 

The full screen image and Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo are still 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.  The blatant use of raw videotape looking like videotape will always be obnoxious.  The sound is not bad for the age of the show, still with Pro Logic playback like the previous set.  There is less bass or bass issues.  The 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 not quite as bad as Box One.

 

Extras include song listings on all six DVDs, but it is DVD #6 that has the other great extras, including a Levinson/Browell commentary on final season (and assumed at the time final) episode “Gas Man”, decent cast & crew biographies, Homicide – Life in Season Three interview with Levinson, Browell, Yoshimura, Simon and Fontana narrated by Baldwin, and a look at “the board” that becomes a series motif and the place where all the characters center around sooner or later.  That is where all the names of who is on or out are written in color marker.  Reminds one of the peg board on Barney Miller, the great 1970s serio-sitcom about police that ran about as long as this show.

 

The show may have gained in scope, but still held its intelligence, not getting watered down.  You can actually feel the difference new writers made, though.  It does not drift away form the social realities or commentary about them either.  As a matter of fact, the territory it covers that we have seen before does not seem stale due to the care the producers took in constructing the show.  It was rolling forward into the kind of realism TV in the 1980s all but destroyed, and that alone is such an important contribution this show can be thanked for.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo