Homicide: Life on the Street – The Complete Series

Homicide: Life on the Street – The Complete Series

A&E Home Video, $149.95

Before HBO's Baltimore-based The Wire came along and blew everyone's minds (John Waters notwithstanding), the television-consuming public was pretty much dependent on one show to foster its intimacy with Body-More Murdaland. That show – Homicide: Life on the Street – aired on NBC for what now seems an unbelievable seven seasons (enjoying miserable ratings and critical raves throughout) – and was arguably one of the last of the great prime-time network dramas.

It was also a study in what goes into making unpopular television. Comparisons to that other Charm City show (no, not Hot L Baltimore) are inevitable, not least because Homicide was based on The Wire creator David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets – a chronicle of his time spent with the city homicide unit as a Baltimore Sun reporter. Ironically, given that it was largely based on actual cases described in Simon's book, Homicide was both more stylized and less naturalistic, less romanticized and sharply dialogued, and less lovingly shot than the HBO series. Jump cuts, stuttering repeated triplets of the same line, and unconventional points of view are all hallmarks of Homicide, the look of which can largely be credited to feature director and series executive producer Barry Levinson, here doing his first serialized television work. Verité affectations such as bad lighting, dirty-looking sets, and a number of unattractive (or at least unflatteringly shot) actors – not to mention the artless self-expression and not-immediately-compelling sociocultural backgrounds of many of its stories' victims and criminals – were choices both aesthetic and economic (the show was shot on Super 16, allowing quick, handheld camerawork); either way, they impart a Seventies-style grit that stood out among increasingly lush productions of the late Nineties, particularly those on cable.

To the network's chagrin, the show's detectives worked several cases at once, over several episodes, and left many unsolved. No one is a hero in Homicide, and no one is morally unambivalent; everyone is frustratingly – disturbingly – human. Writers went out of their way to challenge themselves (and audiences) with high-concept scenarios: an hour with a character trapped between a subway car and platform; an episode set entirely in an interrogation room ("the box"). And it was as talky and overtly theatrical as anything Aaron Sorkin ever dreamed up.

What turned this unlikely combination of qualities into tour de force TV is anyone's guess, but A&E's recently reissued box set of the series (identical to the 2006 version, which had been out of print) makes as complete a case for that designation as you're likely to get. The importance of its setting – the individual and collective weirdness of one of the most idiosyncratic places in the country, unfolded expertly by Baltimore native Levinson – is particularly apparent when the series is viewed in toto. "Do you say 'Balmer' or 'Baltimore'?" asks a murder suspect in the first season's "Three Men and Adena." "Say 'Baltimore,'" he continues, "and I'll tell you within 10 blocks where you were born." By series' end, we believe we've seen and heard quite a few of those blocks and dialects, along with ridiculously circumscribed slang, churches, hospitals, drug corners, mansions, and crab legs. The "city as character" is a cliché we hear often on the box set's extras, but the fact that the show was shot on location, that most of those involved lived in Baltimore for the duration of every shooting season, and the sheer intensity of local detail lends it an easy authenticity not found on an L.A. soundstage.

There's more, always more, to be made of the indelible characters created by Andre Braugher and Melissa Leo; the slow shark-jumping that commenced, probably, with the introduction of the Luther Mahoney character, whom even Simon labels an improbably Shakespearian villain; masterful performances; feature directors; the weird, swooshing trademark musical interjection that we learn was called the "schwing"; and the number and variety of African-American characters – suitable for a show about a predominantly African-American city, of course, but unprecedented nevertheless – not to mention crises of faith, millennial panic, Colts abandonment issues, and Daniel Baldwin in bikini underwear. Like many of its cases, Homicide remains an open file, one that rewards compulsive viewing and fresh eyes.

Also in crime and suspense

Agatha Christie: Poirot & Marple (A&E Home Video, $134.95); North by Northwest (50th Anniversary Edition) (Warner Home Video, $24.82); Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I (The Big Heat/5 Against the House/The Lineup/Murder by Contract/The Sniper) (Sony Pictures, $59.95)