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Homicide: Life on the Street, the pre-Wire TV show of homicide cops on the job in Baltimore, has been one of my favourite creative works in any medium since I watched the first episode the night it was broadcast in NZ, back in 1994. It electrified me – a police procedural that didn’t focus on the procedure, instead using the pointedly mundane details of policework as a canvas on which to draw some multilayered and fascinating characters. There hadn’t been anything like it before.
But the later seasons of the show came through at a time when I was greatly disaffected with broadcast TV, and the series-on-DVD and download-off-the-net options were still years away. So I missed big chunks of season six of Homicide, and the entirety of season seven, which also turned out to be the final season.
A couple years ago Cal and I started watching Homicide again. It has taken us until very recently to make it right through to the end, and for me to see Season 7 for the first time. Its reputation preceded it: on the Wikipedia link above it is noted that “the seventh season is widely regarded as the weakest…” and that without Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton anchoring the cast, it had Jumped The Shark. When Cal and I reached these discs I warned her, don’t expect much from these ones. Partly I was warning myself too.
Well, turned out I shouldn’t have been so worried. Even poor Homicide is great TV, and this season well and truly exceeded my expectations. It was a particular pleasure to have no idea where the episodes were going, and to be genuinely shocked by some of the twists in the tale. The high points are presumably well-known to Homicide aficionadoes:Shades of Gray, in which a riot leaves a bus driver dead; Kellerman, PI, in which an old member of the squad stirs up some trouble; Lines of Fire, a whole episode devoted to one nailbiting hostage negotiation.
What surprised me though was how much forgiveness I felt towards the derided aspects of the show. Detective Falsone, the cheapskate Italian sleazeball; Detective Stivers, who gets nothing to do all season except sit around the squad room and make snide remarks; and especially Detective Sheppard, the tall and beautiful man-magnet. The way the show handled Sheppard particularly surprised me – first of all, she was played straight as the beautiful woman coming to work in the department and getting hounded by all the men. There was something fresh in the fact that every single guy in the show had an eye on her – normally shows settle for triangles, but this just went all out and portrayed its male characters as clueless hound dogs.
Then the show took a left turn and Sheppard was on the receiving end of a vicious beating. This cast a long shadow over the remainder of the season, as all the characters discussed the events, whether Sheppard had been at fault, and what it meant for having women on the job (but usually men only talking with men, and women only talking with women). I was also pleased to see that while they let Sheppard reclaim her job, they never let her off – at the end of the season it was still up to the viewer whether or not she’d been at fault, and whether women are a liability because they can’t physically intimidate a lot of people.
It would be overstatement to say gender was the season’s theme, but gender was definitely on the block for examination. Since season one, the female contingent in the squad had grown substantially. Behind the scenes this was due to pressure from the networks who wanted to get more women into a male-dominated show, but in s7 the producers took this enforced change and interrogated it. If there are women on the job, what does that mean for everyday life? Sheppard’s experience was one way this was explored. The otherwise pointless Ballard-Falsone romance makes sense in this light too, because if you have mixed genders on the squad then you will get romantic entanglement and all that entails. (In a weird sense, the addition of Gee’s son to the squadroom even fits in to this theme, because family politics and gender politics cross over in some ways.)
The real centrepiece of the season, of course, was the saga of Tim Bayliss, the fresh-faced newbie in season one episode one now jaded and facing the conclusion of his own existential journey. What happens to Bayliss makes sense of the loss of his old partner Frank Pembleton; without Pembleton’s anchor, he spins outwards, reinventing himself over and over and finally breaking apart into nothingness. Kyle Secor sells this beautifully, unfailingly generous with the camera and courageous in what he gives up to the performance. He’s not the star of the series, there isn’t one, but his experience is what you take away from the ending (and its coda in the Homicide: Life Everlasting TV movie).
So with all this going for it, I can easily forgive s7 its weaknesses, its too-neat revelations and occasional forays into TV-typical murder mysteries. The heart stayed strong through this season. Don’t skip it – watch Homicide right to the end. It has many rewards. I’m delighted I finally got to see it.

I blogged about this before. It’ll be gone soon, but while it remains: Big Bird singing at Jim Henson’s memorial service.