10 ‘Homicide’ Episodes to Watch Right Now
Today, Homicide: Life on the Street officially gave up its title as the Best TV Show You Can’t Stream. All 122 episodes of the Nineties cop drama are now on Peacock, along with Homicide: The Movie, a 2000 telefilm featuring the entire cast — even the ones whose characters died at some point in the previous seven seasons.
Here are 10 episodes to sample if you want to see what all the fuss is about.
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“Gone for Goode” (Season 1, Episode 1)
The Homicide pilot introduces the show’s large, impressive ensemble in a shaggy fashion that should prepare any newcomer for how unconventional the storytelling will be throughout the series. Highlights include Richard Belzer’s John Munch going off on a rant where he accuses a suspect of lying to him “like I’m Montel Williams,” and the initial team-up of the duo who would eventually become the main characters: Andre Braugher’s arrogant Frank Pembleton and Kyle Secor’s vulnerable Tim Bayliss.
“Three Men and Adena” (Season 1, Episode 6)
Pembleton and Bayliss spend the first half of the first season investigating the murder of little girl Adena Watson. In “Three Men and Adena,” written by longtime Homicide showrunner Tom Fontana, the partners make a last-ditch effort to get their chief suspect, local “araber” (Baltimore slang for a produce peddler who drives a horse-drawn carriage) Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn), to confess to the crime. It is an episode-length interrogation, taking place largely inside the interview room known as “the Box,” and it is the entire Homicide ethos taken to its logical, riveting conclusion.
“Black and Blue” (Season 2, Episode 2)
This one, the second half of a two-parter (with “See No Evil”), features the definitive Frank Pembleton interrogation. Upset when Lt. Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) seems to want him to avoid pinning a shooting on a fellow cop, Frank decides to make a point to his boss by talking the victim’s devastated best friend (a young Isaiah Washington) into confessing to a crime that everyone in the room knows he didn’t commit.
“Bop Gun” (Season 2, Episode 4)
The series was adapted from Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, a non-fiction book by then-Baltimore Sun police reporter David Simon. The future creator of The Wire would begin his transition from journalist to future showrunner with his first script (co-written with David Mills), about a tourist (Robin Williams) whose wife is murdered while their family is visiting Baltimore. The episode is peppered with touches a cop reporter would know well, like Williams’ character growing indignant when he overhears lead detective Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) cracking jokes about all the overtime he’s going to make on such a high-profile case.
“Crosetti” (Season 3, Episode 4)
Jon Polito, who played cranky Lincoln assassination conspiracy theorist Steve Crosetti in the first two seasons, had an ugly public divorce from the the series before the third. “The show went from art to mediocrity,” he said after being fired. “I’m relieved that they’ve freed me legally. I didn’t want to go back to another six months of indecision and hurt.” Crosetti at least gets an incredible send-off episode, albeit one Polito isn’t in: Steve’s body is found floating in Chesapeake Bay, and his devastated partner Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) tries to prevent Stan Bolander (Ned Beatty) from declaring it a suicide. Peacock is thankfully going with the intended episode order (which is also what’s been on the DVD box sets), rather than the order in which NBC chose to air things. “Crosetti” is the most infamous example of how that worked: network executives worried that “Crosetti” was too depressing to air during the November sweeps period, so two later episodes were moved ahead of it, one of which has characters discussing Steve’s death before viewers got to see the hour where that death happened.
“Every Mother’s Son” (Season 3, Episode 10)
As straightforward as a Homicide episode gets, but with a tragic wrinkle: As Pembleton and Bayliss investigate the shooting of a 13-year-old boy, the mothers of the victim and his killer wind up sitting together at the precinct, discovering how much they have in common, even before they find out what one of their sons did to the other.
“The Gas Man” (Season 3, Episode 20)
Baltimore filmmaking institution Barry Levinson executive-produced the series and directed the pilot, and was back behind the camera for this unusual installment where an ex-con (guest star Bruno Kirby, a Levinson movie regular) stalks Frank Pembleton, pondering revenge against the man he blames for ruining his life. “Gas Man” debuted when the show’s future was still in doubt, and some fans (this one included) were frustrated that what might be the last episode ever featured so little material with the main cast. But watched with the knowledge that there would somehow be four additional seasons, it’s a terrific change-of-pace, powered by Kirby’s intensity and a killer Seventies soundtrack.
“A Doll’s Eyes” (Season 4, Episode 4)
A great three-part mystery that opened Season Three introduced the idea that Pembleton was a Catholic whose job caused him to constantly struggle with his faith. Rarely was that faith tested more than in this terribly sad episode, where he and Bayliss investigate a shopping mall shooting that leaves a 10-year-old brain-dead, and the boy’s parents struggling to decide whether to donate his organs or keep him on life support.
“The Documentary” (Season Five, Episode 11)
Max Perlich’s crime scene videographer J.H. Brodie, like a lot of the characters introduced in the later seasons, didn’t fit as seamlessly into the world as the members of the original group. He did, however, lead to a memorable off-format episode where we finally got to watch the documentary he’d been making about the Homicide unit. Fontana and Levinson (who has a cameo as himself) didn’t mess around with this one, recruiting legendary documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA) to direct. Because the cops so frequently address Brodie’s camera, it allows writer Eric Overmyer (who would later go on to make Bosch) to work in some passages from Simon’s book that would have never worked as traditional dialogue.
“Subway” (Season 6, Episode 4)
Because of those uneven replacement characters, as well as an often-clumsy focus on the cops’ personal lives, the later seasons are much spottier than the first three. But there are still gems in those years, including what some would argue is the best episode of all. Longtime Homicide writer James Yoshimura was inspired by an episode of HBO’s Taxicab Confessions to craft a classic installment guest starring Vincent D’Onofrio as John Lange, a man pinned between a subway train and the platform. The physical pressure is the only thing keeping Lange alive, and as Pembleton and Lange come to terms with the latter’s impending demise, the cop and the victim find themselves making an unexpected emotional connection.
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