Homicide: Life on the Street: classic or the best show ever created?

I will always remember Max Perlich for his role in Drugstore Cowboy.

And Angel's guide in Buffy Season Two!

One of the fun facts from The Homicide episode guide was that Max Perlich was actually arrested for assualt while he was in H:LOTS.

Yeah, Clark Johnson alluded to that in the commentary. It was a hangun-related incident that involved a parking space!

I hadn't even started to go into the commentary, just re-watching the episodes (I caught them on the first run when I was about 16, so even more things I'm appreciating now that I didn't catch back then).

I got to the episode where Luther Mahoney is first introduced (at the end of Season 4) and it's really interesting to really see Kellerman's character at that point. I think that was one of my favourite character arc in any TV show, so it'll be fun going through that in the next few weeks (just got Season 5 for my birthday).

pembleton rules !!!!

On the audio commentary for The Hat, they were saying how since all the extras in the squad room were basically the same people, they started to dream up storylines amongst themselves, like this guy slept with the receptionist and so forth.

Didn't they have some sort of "Homicide: Second Shift" webTV show? Did anyone see it?

Homicide’s Clark Johnson back on the beat, now as a Canuck cop in CTV movie
By John McKay
TORONTO (CP) — Clark Johnson and cop shows seem to go hand in hand.
Best remembered as Det. Meldrick Lewis in the hit series Homicide: Life on the Street, Johnson has since developed a reputation as a director of the genre, including the big-screen remake of S.W.A.T. and the gritty TV series dramas The Shield and The Wire. He’s also just helmed a prequel to The French Connection for NBC.
Now he’s back to acting, this time in the Canadian movie Tripping the Wire: A Steven Tree Mystery, airing Monday night on CTV. He plays Tree, a Montreal homicide detective — by all accounts a brilliant cop but considered something of a loose cannon who works best alone. Privately he’s pretty messed up, too.
Within the first half-hour of the film, he gets cut by a perp’s knife, has his gun stolen, alienates fellow investigators and, apparently, has been carrying on a 10-year-affair with his remarried ex-wife, a criminal psychiatrist on the force. He’s also popping pills and drinking too much.
“Yeah, I’m done with it after this guy, I’m going to do a little Merchant Ivory kind of period drama,” Johnson says tongue-in-cheek. In truth he says he likes Tree and reports that the writers, longtime friends Peter Smith and Greg Spottiswood, are already working on another Tree script although CTV has made no commitment yet.
“It’s not all my fault,” Johnson says with mock defensiveness about his penchant for gritty cop stories. “I’m drawn to good drama and the compelling dramas tend to be about the wild life that presents itself in the law-enforcement world.”
In Tripping the Wire, Tree is investigating the case of an ex-Canadian Forces soldier who is murdered after blowing the whistle on a military scandal in Bosnia. The man was dishonourably discharged and planning to write an expose book, but both cop and military ranks close around the case, much to Tree’s frustration.
In a sub-plot, Tree is trying to live with a dark secret from his past involving his former partner (Michael Sarrazin), but a psycho low-life criminal (Brendan Fletcher) continues to threaten him with blackmail.
Johnson sees Tree as a sort of darker version of Meldrick.
“I like to think that this is a really good cop but he’s just got too much baggage at this point, too much baggage for a relationship, too much baggage to be totally effective in his job. You know, you’re down in the sewers on a daily basis. It starts wearin’.”
Set in Montreal with some characters who speak with Quebecois accents, the locale, while definitely Canadian, is not really city specific.
Johnson says he would have preferred to dive right into the bicultural realities of Montreal, and he spews a string of well-accented French expletives involving chalices, tabernacles and holy spirits, just to prove he’s into it.
“I really dig the fact that up here there’s that diversity,” he says. “But they sort of made that generic as we tend to do in the movies.”
Born in Philadelphia, Johnson, 47, moved to Toronto as a kid when his father got a teaching job at Ryerson University. He still maintains a home here while his own offspring now attend college in New York. He admits he was the one responsible for all the little in-jokes about Toronto on the Homicide series, where he did some of his first directing.
So as someone whose career straddles the border (he was also featured in CTV’s early-’90s series E.N.G.) Johnson defends Canadian TV drama against its many critics who say the product is not globally viable unless its Canadian-ness is neutralized.
“Good drama’s good drama ... so I don’t think we need to mask it.”
He advises domestic producers not to worry about getting access to the U.S. TV market.
“Do stuff that’s viable here. Every other country that has a film industry doesn’t depend solely on a U.S. market. I mean it’s nice to get that but ...”
Meanwhile, Johnson says he feels blessed these days with his dual career.
He’s currently scouting locations in Canada for his next directorial job, The Sentinel with Michael Douglas. He gives himself a cameo but gets killed by page 8 because he doesn’t like to direct himself.
He also has plans for a film about the Black Panthers.
“I’m kinda sittin’ fat right now.”

Homicide might be my favorite show ever, especially in the early seasons.

So, as a birthday present, Sarah signed us up for NetFlix and put the ENTIRE RUN of Homicide on the order list. What a great girlfriend! We've watched the first six episodes of season one so far.

I envy you.
And Happy Birthday!

I've signed up for the Cdn equivalent, and I'm debating clearing my list of everything except Columbo, Season One.

I am reading the book. It is dope.

It is SO dope. I like the fact that Jay is jewish. Have you seen The Wire yet? Persevere, persevere.

So, should I bother renting seasons 4 and 5, or should I leave it at that? I have the fear of No Beatty and the Stroke Coffin.

Not as good but still great. Have you seen The Wire?

If not, get that instead.

See them all except possibly the last season, which is fatally Braugherless.

My wife couldn't stand the post-stroke Braugher.

Avoid any season with Jon Seda.

But Meldrick has good stuff right up to the end--and the last scene of the last episode is KLASSICK (if you've seen the first scene of the first episode).

Also, just announced this week, Tom Fontana is writing a Batman comic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Eh, Fontana has been pretty hit or miss, esp. with Oz.

I could tolerate Falsone, it's Stuart Gharty I couldn't stand.

I find though that the Falsone character in the Felton case is too different once he became a regular, whereas Gharty's character is pretty consistent prior to joining the squad (and after when he becomes lieutenant in the movie).

I loved Beatty, but I felt Polito's loss far more. He was great.

Did you see the DVD Season Three "featurette" where the writers were talking about how Polito was sort of being wishy-washy about whether or not he was coming back to the show, and they finally got fed up and they were like, "Fuck you, then. You're dead."
That was pretty funny.

I did see that.

We need some kind of Bunk/Meldrick team-up show.

I skipped to the bottom of this thread to let you know that I am watching them all in order, am currently at the end of Season Five, and can't read this thread until I have watched them all. That is all.

It's worth watching through Season 6 and as Huk pointed out seasons 6 and 7 have some worthwhile Meldrick stuff but little else.

the final seasons are really not as bad as everyone says. they are comparatively worse than the rest of the show, but they're worth watching. Subway is in season 6 I think and it's still easily one of the best three episodes of the series

i am only two discs into season one and think it's classic/best show ever created. better than the wire by far. i'll have to check the book out.

Hey, we finished watching it. Took almost exactly three months. Now I get to go back and read this thread.

So, um, scanning the beginning of this thread, it sounds like there's a seventh season? Which apparently NetFlix doesn't carry? Because I don't know anything about an "internet killer" or anything.

Weird. Anyways:

* I agree that Falsone and Ballard kinda suck, but Kellerman becomes quite possibly the most irritating character in TV history by season six. I kept hoping he would get killed off. I like Gharty though, he's great!
* Andre Braugher rules so hard.
* I have figured out where the show goes wrong near the end: Originally, the show was basically about the relationships between the partners: Bayliss and Pembleton, Munch and Bolander, Felton and Howard, then Lewis and Kellerman. They completely abandon this near the end, focusing more on these crazy unlikely crimes (whereas the crimes at the beginning were pretty uninteresting for the most part). In season six, the partnerships are a lot more ambiguous, with everyone pretty much just working with whoever's around.
* You know what's fun? Talking like Kaye Howard and ending every sentence with "eh?" We're gonna go to the store, eh? You better watch what you're doing, eh?
* My favorite episode that hasn't been mentioned yet is the one where Lewis and Kellerman are investigating the murder out at the hotel at the city limits, where all the degenerates and illegal immigrants are staying. That one's great.

I think I might just hang out in this thread all day. Where's adam? Huk-L?

i suppose i should start watching this now

Apparently Max Perlich appeared on an episode of Nash Bridges - AKA Homicide ratings enemy no. 1! Sellout! Also he was in Ferris Bueller's Day Off as "Anderson." Anyone have any idea who this is?

If you're gonna hang here, you're gonna have to explain to me why Gharty was great.

you should jess! but watch the wire first. (congrats, btw. you totally deserve that gig)

I don't have enough time to watch season 4-7 before I leave the country! (Back in the UK, we don't do DVDs.) Should I skip straight to the finale movie, or will this cause internal haemmoraghing?

Well, the movie kind of brings everything to a close, and, um, you probably don't want to watch the movie until you've seen Season 7, since, there's big time Bayliss spoilers in there (he grows a beard).

I liked Gharty because:
* Allowed writers to address religion again (as they did with Pembleton), which I always find fascinating.
* The tenderness and protectiveness of Gharty for Ballard contributed some of the only partner dynamics in the late seasons.
* Although the character is Bolander-redux in many ways, I think Peter Gerety is a good actor and is worth watching.

He ended up in the Wire right, as one of the useless veterans that gets assigned to the detail?

I can see the tenderness and protectiveness, except he's a bit of a bullshitter. I mean, his attitude and justification for not answering a call as a patrolman just made me hate him from the get-go. He proceeded to act like big man on campus (especially around Munch), but he has no honour or credibility as a policeman.

I like how in the movie, as the new shift commander, he tries to stand up to Pembleton and Bayliss, but they just calmly blow him off as the joke he really is.

Well, yeah, he's not exactly a likeable character, but I think he's a good character. He's kind of like Felton in that he's just an average cop: not really that smart, doesn't really solve crimes through ingenuity but more just through persistence or luck. You can't just have 8 Pembletons.

That's why I love Lewis. He's a "shuffler."

have you read the book nick? i read the book before rewatching homicide again (which i'm still in the midst of), and it was so fascinating to watch in light of how much of it actually happened to david simon. the first three seasons especially.

Lewis is probably my second-fave character after predictable choice of Frank Pembleton for #1.

I have not read the book, I'll try and find it.

He was the Judge in the Wire, right? He had one of the Wire's pivotal "I'll help you now, but I'll accidentally fuck everything up later" roles (see also the lawyer, the FBI guy, the shift commander, etc.)