Homicide: Life on the Street

Sitting on my Tivo are the final two regular episodes of Homicide: Life On The Street. When I watch them, I will have seen every epsiode other than the movie, and I don't want to have it end.

It aired when I didn't have much TV time, and even though I heard how great it was, I just didn't have time to watch it. When "Sleuth" started re-running it, I decided to watch a few episodes to see if it was as good as I'd heard. I'd toyed with the idea of getting the DVDs, but they are SO overpriced, I decided against it.

As I watched, I was drawn in, and can say that it is probably my favorite police procedural drama in any medium. The scripts were fresh, the stories were more than simple whodunits, but the thing that made the show go above and beyond being just another cop show were the characters.

EACH character on the show was rich, complex, flawed, but not in a trite way. Det. Frank Pembelton was utterly unlikeable in the early episodes, but as the series went on, and you discovered more about him, the more he was the most complex and rich character on the show and maybe on television. His series-long struggle with his loss of faith wasn't just tacked on, but felt REAL and spoke to me in a way that few TV characters have.

The final season was a HUGE step down from previous seasons, and the show did stumble here and there. Pembleton's recovery from a stroke was right out of a soap opera, the way some characters were written out of the show felt like throw-aways, but a bad episode of Homicide was still better than 99% of what else is on. If the series would have ended with the finale of season 6, I would have been fine with it, and the new characters in season 7 felt completely out of place...cardboard cutouts mixing with people, but I still don't want it to end.

And, as most well done series, there is a character who was our focus through the run. The show starts with Det. Bayliss on his first day in the unit, and it's pretty clear that the emotionally fragile character will be the focus of the final episode as well.

But if I watch the last two episodes, there won't be any more (other than the TV movie which is ONLY available in the Complete Series set).