Summer TV Club: Homicide – “Gone for Goode”

Welcome to the start of our Summer TV Club! What better way to kick it off at the close of a holiday weekend with a gritty crime show about murder! Before delving into the first episode of Homicide, I think it makes a little bit of sense to explain why I’m watching it in the first place. Part of the allure of Homicide is the creative team behind it. The show was adapted by a book by David Simon, a Baltimore reporter, who would go on to win acclaim for The Corner, The Wire, and now, Treme. The show’s creator, Paul Attanasio, would get an Oscar nod for his script for Quiz Show, before he’d settle back into television with a little show on Fox called House. And then there was a Barry Levinson-directed pilot. On top of all of this, there was a top notch cast that featured Kyle Secor, Andre Braugher, Daniel Baldwin, Clark Johnson, Jon Polito, Yaphet Kotto, Ned Beatty, and Richard Belzer, who introduced the world to Detective John Munch, a character he still plays today on Law and Order: SVU.

So the pedigree of the show really speaks for itself. Yet, as seems to be David Simon’s curse, the show was critically acclaimed but struggled in the ratings, even from the start. Premiering after Super Bowl XXVII on January 31, 1993, Homicide immediately became a bubble show. Yet two Emmy’s for the pilot and the success of ABC’s cop drama NYPD Blue led to the show getting picked up for a minuscule four episode second season, following an equally small nine episode first. The show struggled in the ratings for the rest of its seven year run, and after a TV movie in 2000, the show wrapped its run. Homicide has been heralded not just for its quality, but also for it’s portrayal of African American men, and even spawned one of the first internet tie-ins, with Homicide: Second Shift, a mini-spinoff exclusively on the web.

All of this weighed heavy on my mind as I put in the first episode, “Gone for Goode.” Immediately, Homicide establishes just what it is. It starts with Lewis (Johnson) and Crosetti (Polito) at the scene of a recent shooting, but instead of getting details or scouring for clues, they’re having a conversation. Right off the bat, Homicide plays out like a dark workplace drama, with the crime in the background. Shortly after this scene, and following the opening credits, the general form of Homicide becomes clear: rather than feature the whole department working on a single case, the sets of partners are all working their own cases, all with the goal of turning cases on the big board from red (unsolved) to black (solved).

In “Gone for Goode,” the three cases investigated are not interwoven with the personal lives of the cops, but rather their work relationships and their relationship with work. Before Felton (Baldwin) and Howard (Leo) take a call about a body in a basement, he hesitates to take the call, thinking it will be an unsolved case, when in fact, it goes incredibly smoothly. Lewis and Crosetti’s case involves a woman who murders her husbands after taking out life insurance policies, encountering styrofoam coffins and lost bodies along the way. Felton gets into it with Pembleton (Braugher) when the latter has a set of unmarked car keys, and won’t go get a new key, instead trying every one in the garage. Muntz yells at a suspect that he’s “not Montell Williams.” I was pleasantly surprised not only by the humor, but by how it wasn’t in the form of a witty quip the way it is in most current crime dramas.

Yet on the other side of the humor is the gritty cop drama. There are some cop show troupes present, such as the fact that Pembleton refuses to work with a partner, but for the most part, Homicide doesn’t treat the scene of the crime or the details with any more reverence than they need. In fact, the humor works to the advantage of the show, making the brutal crimes more realistic. In fact, David Simon was once quoted as saying, “The greatest lie, I think, in dramatic TV is the cop who stands over a body and pulls up the sheet and mutters, ‘Damn’ and looks down sadly. To a real homicide detective, it’s just a day’s work.” And that’s a good point, which help separates Homicide, and later The Wire, from the standard cop procedural. There is importance placed on the severity and gravity of the crimes, as seen in Bolander’s (Beatty) remark to Muntz that someone needs to stand up for Jenny Goode, a druggie that was the victim of a hit and run, and yet, it’s hard to argue with the fact that if you see that sort of thing everyday, you’ll become immune to the tragedy of it, and thus look for the lighter side of a job that dwells in tragedy.

The most powerful scene in “Gone for Goode” comes when rookie cop Bayliss (Secor) sits in on an interrogation with Pembleton. The two had been investigating the death of an older man in a hotel, and had caught a younger man, (Spin City‘s Alexander Chaplin) who had been in his company and had stolen his car. Pembleton is a one man “good cop, bad cop” routine, lulling the suspect into waiving his right to an attorney before getting him to confess. Braugher puts on a spectacular performance in the scene, and his subsequent argument with Bayliss over whether or not the kid should have had the right to attorney or not is as powerful as any scene you’ll see on television today. To a certain degree, this isn’t really the most original cop argument, but it does an excellent job of setting up the convictions of both Pembleton and Bayliss, the latter of whom at episode’s end takes his first call, where he’s called to the scene of the murder of Adena Watson, an 11-year-old-girl. The case is Bayliss’ first, and from what I understand, becomes the biggest lingering mystery over the course of the show’s run.

I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of “Gone for Goode.” As someone who’s never been a big fan of cop procedurals, I was impressed at how the show relies on its characters more than it does the idea of cops solving cases, even in its first episode. There is a naturalism that has rarely been seen in network television, even in today’s new golden age, that is incredibly appealing, and engages the viewer as much as the story itself. I guess it goes without saying I’m really looking forward to seeing how this show plays out.

Michael’s Score: 98
TUiW Grade: A+

For more on our summer TV club, including the schedule and where to watch some of the shows, go here.