rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2005-12-08 10:27 am
rachelmanija) wrote2005-12-08 10:27 am
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Homicide: Life on the Streets
I have been watching Homicide: Life on the Streets, the best cop show ever, the entire series from beginning to end via Netflix. I watched about half to a third of each season when it aired, but never the whole thing from beginning to end. Also, I have not seen the movie, so please do not spoil me for that. I am now watching season four.
Homicide is based on a book by a writer who followed the Baltimore Homicide division for a year, and is generally considered to be the most realistic cop show ever. Not the faux gritty realism of NYPD Blue, where ass shots and swearing and glorification of police brutality pass for truth, but real realism: cases aren't always solved, bad guys aren't always caught, lots of time is devoted to the detectives kicking back and waiting around and bantering with each other, and half the time it's perfectly obvious from the get-go who did it, and the issue at stake is how or why or catching the person. It is quite realistic about racial politics and has more black people in the show than any other show I've seen that wasn't specifically directed at a black audience. And it's well-written, incredibly well-acted, often very funny and even more often heartbreaking, and has one of the best character arcs I've ever seen on TV.
In the very first episode, Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor, most recently seen as Jake Kane on Veronica Mars) shows up, a rookie Homicide detective lately of the SWAT team, if I recall correctly, lugging a box of his stuff because no one's given him a desk yet. He's young, he's idealistic, he gets paired with Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher, who had earlier been brilliant as the freed man in Glory) who is the squad's resident genius, especially good at getting confessions from suspects in "The Box," and who probably needs a partner because he's so abrasive that no one else can stand to work with him.
When the phone rings with a homicide report, whoever picks it up becomes the primary detective on that case. The name of the victim is written in red on a board below the detective's name, and if they solve the case it's rewritten in black. Bayliss' first case as the primary is the murder of a little girl, Adena Watson, and that case haunts him for the entire rest of the show-- seven years-- and is pivotal in the series finale, which also involves Bayliss, Adena Watson, and a box of Bayliss' stuff. In an episode in season one, "Three Men and Adena," Bayliss and Pembleton spend the entire episode in the Box trying to wring a confession from the man who Bayliss thinks killed her and Pembleton doesn't. It's one of the best single hours of TV I've ever seen.
If Pembleton is the brains of Homicide, Bayliss is its heart; and I won't say what happens to Bayliss over the course of the show except that he's got the character arc I referred to earlier. If Pembleton's scenes crackle with energy, Bayliss' quietly seethe; and the relationship between the two of them never stops being fascinating and complex and funny and very very sad.
There are other detectives, of course, and it's more of an ensemble show than I've made it sound like. Kay Howard starts out as the only female homicide detective in Baltimore; she's one of the guys, she takes no crap, she has the best record of any of them (even better than Pembleton, though that's mostly a matter of Kay having a lucky tendency to get easier cases), she has incredible hair, and she is one of the few people in the department who I could imagine having a happily ever after. Giardello (Gee), played by Yaphet Kotto, is the enormous black Sicilian lieutenant, who is a very decent human being who's not above looming over and intimidating people. I love Gee.
Meldrick Lewis didn't make much of an impression on me when I first watched the show, but watching it now I'm impressed by how consistently good and subtle his acting is; John Munch is kind of annoying but also funny. Bolander and Crosetti never made much of an impression on me and still don't, and while I liked the relationship between Felton and Howard I was never that into Felton himself.
In season four Mike Kellerman, a pretty strawberry blonde arson detective, joins the team. I didn't much like him when I first saw the show, but he's grown on me on second viewing. Also, he has a really great extended storyline that runs through seasons five and six.
Later I will ask for recommendations on what episodes I need to watch in the generally disastrous season seven in order to catch Bayliss' storyline, and avoid the many dreadful episodes featuring new characters I hate. Because as I said, the series finale makes up for the awfulness of the final season, and is a mustn't-miss. Also, I want to see the movie, though I will probably cry all the way through it.
Homicide is based on a book by a writer who followed the Baltimore Homicide division for a year, and is generally considered to be the most realistic cop show ever. Not the faux gritty realism of NYPD Blue, where ass shots and swearing and glorification of police brutality pass for truth, but real realism: cases aren't always solved, bad guys aren't always caught, lots of time is devoted to the detectives kicking back and waiting around and bantering with each other, and half the time it's perfectly obvious from the get-go who did it, and the issue at stake is how or why or catching the person. It is quite realistic about racial politics and has more black people in the show than any other show I've seen that wasn't specifically directed at a black audience. And it's well-written, incredibly well-acted, often very funny and even more often heartbreaking, and has one of the best character arcs I've ever seen on TV.
In the very first episode, Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor, most recently seen as Jake Kane on Veronica Mars) shows up, a rookie Homicide detective lately of the SWAT team, if I recall correctly, lugging a box of his stuff because no one's given him a desk yet. He's young, he's idealistic, he gets paired with Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher, who had earlier been brilliant as the freed man in Glory) who is the squad's resident genius, especially good at getting confessions from suspects in "The Box," and who probably needs a partner because he's so abrasive that no one else can stand to work with him.
When the phone rings with a homicide report, whoever picks it up becomes the primary detective on that case. The name of the victim is written in red on a board below the detective's name, and if they solve the case it's rewritten in black. Bayliss' first case as the primary is the murder of a little girl, Adena Watson, and that case haunts him for the entire rest of the show-- seven years-- and is pivotal in the series finale, which also involves Bayliss, Adena Watson, and a box of Bayliss' stuff. In an episode in season one, "Three Men and Adena," Bayliss and Pembleton spend the entire episode in the Box trying to wring a confession from the man who Bayliss thinks killed her and Pembleton doesn't. It's one of the best single hours of TV I've ever seen.
If Pembleton is the brains of Homicide, Bayliss is its heart; and I won't say what happens to Bayliss over the course of the show except that he's got the character arc I referred to earlier. If Pembleton's scenes crackle with energy, Bayliss' quietly seethe; and the relationship between the two of them never stops being fascinating and complex and funny and very very sad.
There are other detectives, of course, and it's more of an ensemble show than I've made it sound like. Kay Howard starts out as the only female homicide detective in Baltimore; she's one of the guys, she takes no crap, she has the best record of any of them (even better than Pembleton, though that's mostly a matter of Kay having a lucky tendency to get easier cases), she has incredible hair, and she is one of the few people in the department who I could imagine having a happily ever after. Giardello (Gee), played by Yaphet Kotto, is the enormous black Sicilian lieutenant, who is a very decent human being who's not above looming over and intimidating people. I love Gee.
Meldrick Lewis didn't make much of an impression on me when I first watched the show, but watching it now I'm impressed by how consistently good and subtle his acting is; John Munch is kind of annoying but also funny. Bolander and Crosetti never made much of an impression on me and still don't, and while I liked the relationship between Felton and Howard I was never that into Felton himself.
In season four Mike Kellerman, a pretty strawberry blonde arson detective, joins the team. I didn't much like him when I first saw the show, but he's grown on me on second viewing. Also, he has a really great extended storyline that runs through seasons five and six.
Later I will ask for recommendations on what episodes I need to watch in the generally disastrous season seven in order to catch Bayliss' storyline, and avoid the many dreadful episodes featuring new characters I hate. Because as I said, the series finale makes up for the awfulness of the final season, and is a mustn't-miss. Also, I want to see the movie, though I will probably cry all the way through it.
More non-fantasy/sf/anime TV recommendations: HBO
Sex and the City is a very funny series about four rich single white women in New York City; it ran for six seasons, and got better and deeper as it went along. It's very much a snapshot of a particular social class at a particular point in time.
Six Feet Under had a brilliant first and second season, then went in weird directions. It's about a family of morticians and is very funny and well-acted.
The Sopranos is about a family of mobsters in New Jersey. Extremely dark and, in the first few seasons, full of black humor and operatic intensity. Tony Soprano's mother Livia is an instant archetype, a manipulative witch who, in her best moment, responds to her teenage grandson's confession of loneliness and existensial fear by snarling, "We all die in our own arms!" Very dark, graphically violent, and the last few seasons have been unwatchably depressing, but I recommend the first two or three.
Re: More non-fantasy/sf/anime TV recommendations: HBO
Of course, this now brings our Netflix queue to 150 and counting, so it's gonna be a while...
Re: More non-fantasy/sf/anime TV recommendations: HBO
ROME, which George R. R. Martin has been raving about on his website, is terrific, one of the best dramas set in the classical world I've ever seen. No, it's not as literate as I, CLAUDIUS, but it brings the city itself to life in way that BBC production never could (or to be fair, tried to do). Plus, as Neil Gaiman once observed, I, CLAUDIUS the mini-series often made the mistake of forgetting how truly alien to us the Romans were and how seriously they took their religion (something that the Graves' novel didn't forget to do). ROME does well on both counts. At first I thought that Ciaran Hinds (the Captain in the film adaptation of Austen's PERSUASION) was a bit uncharismatic as Caesar (who was a charmer in real life), but by the end of the season I found him magnificent. Max Perkis, the kid from MASTER AND COMMANDER, is the best Octavian I've ever seen (and convincing as a genius). Polly Walker is fun as his scheming bitch-mother Attia. But Kevin McKidd (from TRAINSPOTTING and DOG SOLDIERS) and Ray Stevens are the heart and soul of the show as Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, two very different Centurions who are my current favorite tough-guy buddy team. Especially Stevens, who pulls of the difficult trick of making you like a man who beats the husband of the Greek slave he loves (and has freed) to death in a rage when he finds out she's married.
One of the interesting things about the series is that, while its characters are often likeable and sometimes noble, their virtues are those of their time. Octavian seems concerned with the good of the common people, but he's dismissive of slaves (although not prone to beat them like his mother is) and keeps reminding the lowborn characters of their place -- although he seems to genuinely admire Vorenus and comes to truly like Pullo, he won't quite let them treat him like an equal. The morally upright Vorenus thinks nothing of owning slaves (or bringing home a German phallus as a trophy) and his and other characters' devotion to a Republican ideal does NOT mean they have any concept of modern democracy. And while Vorenus is a decent man who genuinely loves his wife Niobe (played by the luminous Indira Varma from KAMA SUTRA, who's up there with Maggie Cheung and Aisharawa Rai as a screen beauty), the show makes you believe he might just kill her if he ever finds out she had a child by her sister's husband when he was off fighting in Gaul (she thought he was dead, as a bureaucratic snafu had ended his pay, but after discovering this wasn't true she compounded her "guilt" by making him believe the child is really his grandson).
There may or may not be a 2nd season, but ROME should be out on DVD soon.
And then there's DEADWOOD, which just rules
Indeed, the writing is what really impresses me about the show. Don't believe those people who try to tell you it's nothing but a lot of cursing. Yes, the characters say "fuck" a lot, but only some of them (how much they curse is very much determined by their status in this society), and they generally say it in a convincing period way. What I love about the dialogue is how it mixes the profane and scatalogical with archaic usage and complex phrasings and rhythms derived from Shakespeare and the King James Bible. No, it's not completley accurate. Many people in the Old West were known for their "blasphemous" and "obscene" language, and we know that real historical figures like Mark Twain and Sir Richard Francis Burton and the author of MY SECRET LIFE used words like "shit" and "piss" and "goddam" and "fart" and even "cunt" and "fuck." What they probably didn't do was use the words "cocksucker" and "motherfucker," epithets of which the more profane speakers on DEADWOOD are particularly fond (although the concepts certainly weren't unknown), but even these anachronism work in the flow of the complex language and I can't imagine the dialogue being as effective withou them. It's as densely written as Pinter or Stoppard.