After seven seasons of critical acclaim but endless ratings struggle, the Baltimore-based television drama "Homicide: Life on the Street" is dead.
NBC confirmed the cancellation late yesterday with a statement saying: " 'Homicide: Life on the Street' has been a favorite among critics and millions of viewers for the past seven years. While it won't be returning next season ... we tip our hats and express our gratitude to Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana and the rest of the extremely talented cast and crew who have brought top-notch, award-winning drama to NBC."
The statement was signed by Garth Ancier, who became NBC's president of entertainment Monday.
The loss will be especially felt in Baltimore, where the series is estimated to have injected $18 million to $21 million into the local economy each of the past several years.
"We expected to be canceled after nine episodes, after 13 episodes, after 33 episodes," said David Simon, producer for the series and author of the nonfiction book "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," on which the Peabody Award-winning police drama was based.
"Ultimately, we ran for 122 episodes, which is longer than the vast majority of network series. It was a blast and I'm proud to be associated with it," he said.
Baltimore's Emmy- and Oscar- winning director Barry Levinson optioned former Sun reporter Simon's book for $10,000 in 1991 and brought it to television in 1993.
"In the end, everything is only about numbers," said Levinson, referring to ratings and profit margins.
"But it's not often that you have a show that, ultimately, really makes its mark in television history, and I think we did that," he added. "We affected storytelling and camera style, and also pointed a camera at another place rather than the traditional New York-Los Angeles world."
In addition to the innovative camera style and storytelling, what made "Homicide" special and what it will surely be most remembered for are its enlightened and matter-of-fact depiction of a multiracial workplace and its unbending moral vision in an era of spin-doctoring, relativism and Washington lies that rose to the level of impeachment.
" 'Homicide' was one of the great breakthrough dramas in television history," said Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University and author of "Television's Second Golden Age," an examination of prime-time drama in the 1980s and '90s.
"It logged many hours and years of really fine American dramatic storytelling. It was a masterpiece of a show, and it's sad to see such a great program end," he added.
"The hardest thing about going off the air is that there are so many great people in Baltimore who it will affect. I feel like the manager of a Chevy plant today who has just been told by headquarters they're going to close the plant," said Tom Fontana, the show's Emmy-winning writer and co-executive producer.
"But I want to stress to the people of Baltimore that Barry and I are committed to finding another series and returning to Baltimore to make it," Fontana said.
In his statement, NBC's Ancier said: "We have great confidence in the production team [Fontana and Levinson] and are working toward a pilot commitment" for the 2000-2001 season.
In a development yesterday that might help soften the blow to the local film industry, Simon confirmed that he is conducting negotiations with HBO to film a six-hour limited series based on his second book, "The Corner," that he hopes will be made in Baltimore.
Yesterday's cancellation was not unexpected. The possibility had been discussed in The Sun since December, as the series struggled to find itself dramatically and slipped in the ratings with the departure of Andre Braugher, who played emotion-charged Detective Frank Pembleton.
But the possibility of cancellation has stalked "Homicide" virtually since the night it debuted -- at 10: 25 p.m. Jan. 31, 1993 -- in the coveted spot following the Super Bowl.
The episode, "Gone for Goode," which earned director Levinson an Emmy, was seen by 18.8 million viewers, which would be the most ever to see a single episode. But NBC executives considered it a sub-par performance.
Nor was the series as widely celebrated by critics as it is today. Levinson and Fontana employed cutting-edge technical devices, in part to keep production costs down, but also to create a gritty and arresting new look. These involved shooting on Super-16 mm instead of the more traditional 35 mm film, the use of hand-held cameras moving freely among the actors, and, most of all, the use of jump cuts in which a scene is repeated several times in fast succession.
Levinson had French film director Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" in mind, especially with the jump cuts. But some critics complained that they found the style "jarring" or that the camera movement made them "seasick."
"I imagine anyone who has been drinking a lot at a Super Bowl party might have trouble following the show," Levinson said.
The first season consisted of only nine episodes, the last eight of which ran Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on NBC. Again, the ratings were less than Warren Littlefield, then president of NBC Entertainment, had envisioned. But by the fifth episode, "Three Men and Adena," the breakthrough brilliance of "Homicide" was apparent and the raves rolled in.
The episode took place entirely in a precinct room known as "The Box," the place where suspects are interrogated. It involved only three characters -- Braugher's Frank Pembleton, Kyle Secor's Tim Bayliss and guest star Moses Gunn, as Risley Tucker, the a-raber suspected of killing 11-year-old Adena Watson, the child whose death haunted the first season of "Homicide."
Stark and minimalist, the episode was musical theater as much as television, a celebration and explosion of language -- an angry, urban opera with the voices of Bayliss and Pembleton coming together and then falling back as Tucker sings a final aria of rage and contempt.
"Three Men and Adena" won an Emmy for Fontana for best writing in a dramatic series. More important, it established "The Box" as the main stage for Pembleton and the moral center of the "Homicide" universe.
The feel of Baltimore
Other aspects of the series that came to be trademark were also established in that exceptional first season, such as the distinctly Baltimore look and feel. Episode eight, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," ends with an exquisite scene that captures the loneliness permeating the lives of men and women who investigate death for a living. The episode ends late at night in a tavern with Ned Beatty as recently divorced Detective Stan Bolander alone at the bar talking about his blues and singing to himself along with the jukebox. His only company is a bored bartender who looks on impassively and aimlessly washes glasses. The bartender is played by John Waters.
But as great as the first nine episodes were, NBC declined to go beyond its initial order of 13 episodes or to put "Homicide" on its fall schedule. "Homicide" would return in 1994, but only as a midseason replacement. "Homicide" escaped the ax, but it hardly seemed cause for celebration.
NBC becomes a partner
Behind the scenes, however, perhaps the most important development in the history of the series took place between those truncated first and second seasons: NBC became co-producing partners with Fontana and Levinson. NBC now had a much more compelling reason to want to see "Homicide" succeed: As a partner, it had a greater share of the profits, especially those from syndication and home video sales should "Homicide" have an extended run.
When "Homicide" returned for its second season on Jan. 4, 1994, it had a new time period, Thursday nights at 10, bumping longtime NBC stalwart "L.A. Law" from the spot.
Again, "Homicide" dazzled, opening with an episode titled "Bop Gun," starring Robin Williams and written by Simon and David Mills, a former University of Maryland classmate of Simon's who had been working as a reporter for the Washington Post. Williams played a tourist from Iowa whose wife is shot to death. "Bop Gun" was the second-most-watched episode in series history with just under 18 million viewers.
Despite that success, the second season ended only three weeks later on Jan. 27 with an episode featuring Julianna Margulies as Bolander's new girlfriend, a student at the Peabody Conservatory who brings Bolander, an amateur cellist, onstage in an empty concert hall for a musical duet. The scene is lovely, sensual, romantic and exactly the kind of extraordinary moment "Homicide" was becoming known for. But again "Homicide" was put in limbo, with no more episodes on the shelf and no order from NBC.
"Where is limbo?" said Jon Polito, who played Detective Steve Crosetti. "It's in Baltimore."
In February, NBC gave the series what Fontana called a "qualified renewal." What that meant is that, after tough negotiations which included Levinson and Fontana refusing to relocate to California or to "lighten up" the show, NBC ordered 13 episodes for the fall of 1995 with the promise that it would buy nine more -- for a full and normal season order of 22 -- if ratings were acceptable.
For the first time, "Homicide" would be on the fall schedule with the possibility of a full season's run, but it would lose its 10 p.m. Thursday spot to a new doctor drama titled "ER." "Homicide" would shift to 10 p.m. Fridays, the spot it has occupied since.
Progressive on race
While "Homicide" never won the ratings race in its time period, the series' critical reputation continued to grow until this season without Braugher, who left last May after the series' 100th episode and a year of work that finally earned him the Emmy for best actor in a dramatic series. Fontana and Braugher insisted that the series was fine without Pembleton, but it wasn't.
In a time when most network sitcoms are either all-white or all-black and dramas that feature African-American characters limit them in terms of personal lives and romantic relationships, "Homicide" offered a wide range of black characters. Furthermore, it presented them as interesting, complicated and multidimensional.
"In terms of race, 'Homicide' is the most progressive program on network television," said Sasha Torres, director of the film and media studies program at the Johns Hopkins University and author of "Living Color: Race and Television in the United States."
"The characters are incredibly compelling and complicated. It offered this whole spectrum of African-American characters and often let them argue among themselves. One of the things that's really remarkable about this show is that the African-American characters actually get to have politics and disagree with each other," Torres said.
Detective Pembleton
No one was more complicated and argumentative than the Jesuit-trained, angry-at-God, obsessive-in-work, suspicious-of-whites, brilliant and judgmental Detective Frank Pembleton.
Pembleton was also the center of morality in "Homicide" -- articulating a moral vision so fierce and inviolate that it infused the entire series with an air of spirituality. Pembleton was an avenging angel, "speaking for the dead" and extracting acknowledgments of sin from murderers unlucky enough to find themselves alone with Pembleton in his suffocating confessional box.
In the end, perhaps, nothing suggests the uniqueness and the greatness of "Homicide" as much as the way a TV insider has to reach beyond the medium to describe the show.
Bruce Paltrow, former producer of the hospital drama "St. Elsewhere," said after directing an episode of the series that " 'Homicide' is to television what abstract expressionism is to art."
Syracuse University's Thompson said, "While it is always sad to see a great series like 'Homicide' get canceled and know there will be no more new episodes, we should remember that when Melville wrote the last chapter of Moby Dick, folks didn't go, 'Oh no, what are we losing with the end of Moby Dick?' Or when Shakespeare finished 'Hamlet,' people didn't do that.
"And I think we have to keep in mind that we are not, in fact, losing 'Homicide.' All of those great episodes stuck to the tape. NBC's not going to erase them tonight. The episodes are still around. You can see them on Court TV, and I am sure we'll be watching them for a century or more in all sorts of other venues."
Pub Date: 5/14/99