Customer Reviews

Homicide Life on the Street - The Complete Season 4

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The fourth season of Homicide is packed with all the things that make it great television; intelligent writing, complex characters, top-flight acting and unique photography. However, the drama is ratcheted up a notch, removing it somewhat from its book-based, slower-moving roots in the first season. It is also the year of the Dynamic Duo (Pembleton and Bayliss, plus Lewis and Kellerman.) Meldrick Lewis has been without a partner since the suicide of his former partner, Crosetti, in the show's third season. Enter Mike Kellerman (Reed Diamond), a hotshot detective from the Arson Squad who impresses Giardello and is transferred into the unit. Lewis and Kellerman find that they are a good fit and their light and breezy chemistry is a breath of fresh air in an often dark atmosphere. The two bring a spark of fun into work, as evidenced by such episodes as, "Full Moon," "I've Got a Secret," and most notably, "The Hat," in which they allow a seemingly harmless suspect to escape from custody over a dish of rice pudding. But the two have their differences as shown in, "Scene of the Crime," when they clash over the role of a Muslim neighborhood patrol group in the murder of a drug-dealer. Lewis and Kellerman would also have their first encounter with ruthless drug lord, Luther Mahoney in, "The Damage Done." Mahoney would turn out to be a major villain and would start a running plot thread that would last throughout the following two seasons. Meanwhile, the more philosophical, serious pair of Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss would face their own difficulties throughout the year. Bayliss is haunted by the unsolved Adena Watson case from the first season in, "Requiem for Adena," when he finds himself working on another child murder. Pembleton also faces his personal demons in the Law & Order crossover, "For God and Country," when he confronts a domestic terrorist who bombed a black church several years before. Pembleton is burdened by the knowledge that he is about to become a father, but his problems only get worse when he is felled by a stroke in the season finale, "Work Related." Shift Commander Al Giardello is developed more fully in the intense episode, "Thrill of the Kill," as well as, "The Wedding." Unfortunately, while some characters get more camera time, others like Howard and Munch, are seen less. The departure of Stan Bolander and Beau Felton left them without partners. Kay Howard remedies her situation by taking the Sergeant's Exam. Her promotion restricts her to the squad room and she spends less time solving cases, which was always her strong suit. John Munch lands an unexpected partner when Megan Russert is demoted from Captain, but the two don't share the same interplay that afforded Munch so many of his verbal gems with Bolander. Luckily, one of Munch's finest episodes comes along in, "Heartbeat," when he matches wits with a poetic killer who is a fan of Edgar Allan Poe. This would be Russert's final year, as Isabella Hofmann would leave the series at the end of the season. We are also introduced to Brodie, a nerdish free-lance photographer who ends up taping crime scenes for the unit. Other notable episodes include, "A Doll's Eyes," in which two parents struggle through the grieving process after their 10-year-old son is shot at a mall and left on life support. Also, "Stake-out," a character-driven episode that is reminiscent of Homicide's first season, and the two-part, "Sniper," in which Baltimore is terrorized by a killer who plays a mysterious game with the police.

As is the case with the previous seasons, the picture quality and sound are far superior to the reruns from TV. The folks who put together the box sets for The Sopranos could take a lesson from the song listings on each disk in this package, as they are a nice touch for those who enjoy the music in each episode. I was disappointed to find that A&E again excluded the previouslies, and they again did not incorporate chapter breaks in between episodes. They made a chronological slip when placing the episode, "Scene of the Crime," as it is out of story order. The events in, "Work Related," take place directly after, "The Wedding." New viewers may be a bit confused by this error. Some viewers will inevitably complain that only the second half of the Law & Order crossover is present. It would be nice to see the first half of the story, but it is not imperative to fully appreciate the events in the Homicide conclusion. Clark Johnson seems to have a good time with his commentary on, "The Hat," and the bonus documentary was a plus. Despite some technical blunders, the fourth season of Homicide is another solid television masterpiece that belongs in anyone's collection, fan or otherwise.

Episode List:
*Fire 1
*Fire 2
*Autofocus
*A Doll's Eyes (Guest Star Marcia Gay Harden)
*Heartbeat
*Hate Crimes
*Thrill of the Kill
*Sniper 1 (Cameo by Jay Leno)
*Sniper 2
*Full Moon
*For God and Country (Law & Order crossover)
*The Hat (Guest Star Lily Tomlin)
*I've Got a Secret
*Justice 1
*Justice 2
*Stake-out
*Map of the Heart
*Requiem for Adena (Guest Star Chris Rock)
*The Damage Done
*The Wedding
*Scene of the Crime
*Work Related

"Homicide" season 4 preserved the show's unique trend of realistic murder mysteries mixed in with a decidedly non-soap-opera look at the lives of its detectives. This year featured the show's first true crossover with "Law & Order", and also featured three other two-part episodes, as well as some surprising guest turns.

Beau Felton and Stan Bolander are gone. That's the bad news. However, Mike Kellerman (Reed Diamond), a hot-shot arson detective, joined the squad in the season-opening two-parter ("FIre) and soon we're introduced to Brodie (Max Pehrlich), the oddball videographer hired by Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) and Russert to document the unit. Bayliss ("Requiem for Adena") and Pembleton ("Work Related") remained the show's signature detectives. Bad news was in store for Russert's (Isabella Hoffmann) rapid career advancement, shortly after Howard (Melissa Leo) got promoted to sergeant.

"Homicide" was also noteworthy for its guest stars. Names you'll recognize this season include Chris Rock, Lily Tomlin (nominated for an Emmy), Stephanie Romanov ("Angel"), Illeana Douglas, J.K. Simmons ("Law & Order"), Dean Winters ("Oz"; reprising a role from the previous season), and surprising glimpses of Mandy Patinkin and Jay Leno. Also appearing are Melissa Leo (doing double-duty playing Howard's sister) and Peter Gerety, as a uniform who'd go on to join the regular cast during the show's final seasons.

This season's episodes are:

* Fire (1 & 2)
* Autofocus
* Thrill of the Kill
* Hate Crimes
* A Doll's Eyes
* Heartbeat
* Sniper (1 & 2)
* The Hat
* I've Got a Secret
* For God and Country
* Justice (1 & 2)
* Stakeout
* Requiem for Adena
* Full Moon
* Scene of the Crime
* Map of the Heart
* The Damage Done
* The Wedding
* Work Related

While Homicide would continue for three more seasons, season 4 was the last true great season of this marvelous show. This is thanks to NBC's tampering. This season includes the best episode of any television drama (a bold statement, but watch it and see), "A Doll's Eyes" a heartbreaking tale of a little boy shot in a mall, and the trauma his parents suffer. Other episodes of interest: Thrill of the Kill, Full Moon, and Stakeout. Homicide season 4: Buy it!

The quality here is almost indescribable. So many great episodes, so much fine acting from the entire cast to match the top-notch writing and production. Fortunately, much of the quality is sustained through Season 5, so I'm waiting for the DVD release of it and Season 6 (which was still better than 99.99% of the other stuff on US TV at the time).

What can I say? I'm watching Season 4 of HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREETS and am amazed how the show keeps its high quality of characters and storylines consistent with the previous 3 seasons. Even with the absense of Bolander and Felton (they were suspended by Captain Barnfather) the other cast members carry the show just as well, and with the introduction of Detective Kellerman, is a further positive addition to the cast. I've heard rumors that this may be the last good season of HOMICIDE and the show begins to slide downhill with the start of Season 5. I believe this may be the case, but Season 4 is a MUST BUY for any and all HOMICIDE fans out there!!! Without this show, others like NYPD BLUE, LAW & ORDER, and CSI would never have been produced!

David Simon, the creator of HBO's "The Wire" and one of the brains behind "Homicide: Life on the Street", was asked recently why the "The Wire" has never had high ratings in the USA, despite getting mad love from the critics. His response was blunt. He put the show's poor ratings down to the fact that "The Wire" has a predominantly black cast, the unglamorous Baltimore setting and the fact that The Wire "requires thought and commitment to watch and absorb complex plotlines and subtleties. Television in America is by and large a vegetative medium."

I believe "Homicide: Life on the Street" was similarly affected. With all due respect to its citizens, the Fells Point district of Baltimore where this series is shot is not a particularly pretty part of the city and, with a sizable black population, it's inevitable that the vast majority of people the Baltimore murder police are likely to come across are going to be African American. I find it sad but can totally understand why that might not be what most people want to tune in on an evening to see - or indeed, later pay money to see on DVD. When you look at "CSI: Miami" for instance, (reportedly the most popular TV series in the world at the moment), you can immediately see the vast disparity between the two. Everything about that show is about glamour: the city settings, the big houses and big fast cars and everyone totally buff and beautiful. It's escapism at its best in that it bears little or no resemblance to reality. But in this age of superficiality and celebrity mania, I'm guessing this is what most folks are up for.

But I believe such folks are missing out. If "Homicide" is anything, it's realistic. This season was the first to have a full 22 episodes. The storylines are tense, gripping and real. The hand-held camerawork gives it the feel of a documentary. Even though the producers dropped Daniel Baldwin and Ned Beatty, brought in Reed Diamond and had Isabelle Hoffman's character demoted back to detective to, presumably, up the 'babe' factor of the cast, this is still by and large a collection of very ordinary looking but incredibly talented actors. I think that's one of the main reasons why it works for me. It's a completely rewarding experience and, after watching an entire season, I can very easily start again from the first episode and still get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

I don't wish to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet but we have fires, snipers, a wife who kills her husband (and the woman he was cheating on her with), drug wars, a "thrill killer" working his way up the I-95, a homophobic hate crime gone wrong, a child killed by a paedophile and any manner of murder mayhem. There are star appearances from people like Lily Tomlin, Chris Rock, Jay Leno, Marcia Gay Harden and Gary Basaraba. And in a slick crossover with Season 6 of "Law & Order", we get an appearance from members of the cast, including Jerry Orbach, Benjamin Bratt, S. Epatha Merkerson, Sam Waterston and Jill Hennesy. The brilliant Max Perlich also guest stars as the squads new video man, Brodie.

Andre Braugher's wife Abi Brabson (who plays detective Pembleton's wife Mary in the show) gives birth to their baby towards the end of the season and to give Braugher time to spend with his newborn child, the producers cleverly decide to give him a stroke. It works in another way: Pembleton is easily the most accomplished detective on the squad, (a fact he makes sure everyone around him is acutely aware of), and it will be interesting in the coming season/s to see him have to work his way back up to any practical level of competency.

DVD extras include commentary on "The Hat", the episode starring Lily Tomlin, scene selection, interactive menus, song listings (a tool I've found very useful indeed) and a short documentary, "Homicide: Life in Season 4" narrated by Isabella Hoffman and featuring interviews with Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana, Henry Bromwell, David Simon and James Yoshimura.

The only thing I would've really liked that wasn't included was subtitles. Some of the terminologies go right over my head and it sometimes helps to see them in writing.

Still, I've bought Seasons 1 - 4 so far and am looking to getting Season 5 soon. I can barely wait.

I can't imagine anyone watching the first three seasons of this show and needing a review to urge them onward, but in case you do I'll be brief. This is a show that has stopped worrying about whether or not they're going to get cancelled next week. The ratings haven't been exceptional, but they have been exceptionally consistent, and the producers have put the pedal down to see what this puppy can do. Man, is it fun to watch. This is a network TV production at its finest and most creative. Homicide showed studio and network executives that there was money to made off edgy shows. Without visionary producers Fontana and Levinson, we might never have had The Shield, Rescue Me and a dozen other high-quality, small audience cable dramas. So put it in your cart already and savor a piece of TV history.

The standard of American television these days is excellent. Not good, not fair, not OK but truly outstanding. CSI, The Shield, the sadly departed Sopranos, Lost and Heroes - all fantastic.

Homicide Life on the Street, I think set the standard for American drama. I feel that the most recent American television owes a small debt to Homicide, which began in the 1990s.

Even though Homicide at the time was not delivering the viewer numbers the network wished and wanted, it still had a following that thrived on the quality of the show and notably the characters. (Unfortunately, the tv network in Britain that aired the show commonly played around with the time and dates of airing and it never really had the following in Blighty that it really deserved).

Homicide had it all - Barry Levinson and his love of Baltimore, good scripts (the interaction between the characters is almost like early Tarantino), excellent cast, great guest directors, but most of all Yaphet Kotto as Giardello who endeavours to keep the red names on the whiteboard, his colesterol and the bosses uptstairs all in check.

From the 90s until now, as the quality of American drama has excelled, without Homicide, X-Files and the early seasons of ER, would we have the likes of 24, The Shield, Lost, CSI?

Americans be proud. Homicide is American police drama at its best. In England, police television drama has been a baron wastleland since Helen Mirren graced Prime Suspect. All we have now is The Bill (which I think is a straightfaced joke at the expense of our London Police Constabulary) and Heartbeat (a policeman cycling on his bike through the countryside in 1960s England) - I sincerely wish I was joking about these shows (as I have a sense of national pride), but unfortunately I am serious. Believe me, when it comes to television at least, Americans have the best of everything...

Season 4 of "Homicide" is truly great television, but it is missing two things that season three had - detectives Beau Felton and Stan Bolander. Unlike Detective Crosetti's character, whose death is the subject of an entire episode that was arguably the best of the entire series, Beau and Stan are merely mentioned to have caused an embarrassing episode at a convention and given 22 week suspensions because of this. In fact, the last chance the series would have had to write the characters out of the show properly would have been the last episode of season three. However, it is obvious from that episode - "The Gas Man" - that the show's creators thought that the series would not be renewed for a fourth season and just decided to write a very good off-beat episode for that finale. Thus, this omission can be somewhat forgiven.

Given that now three detectives are missing from the original cast, the season opener is a two-parter that introduces the audience to Mike Kellerman. Bayliss and Pembleton are called out to investigate an arson-related homicide when a dead body is found in a burned warehouse and wind up working with detective Kellerman of arson. We soon learn beneath the boyish, fun-loving exterior is a cagey and complex detective. We will also see that Reed Diamond, the actor who plays Kellerman, has real depth and emotion to him as well. We soon learn that Kellerman is good at his job when he beats the homicide detectives to both the medical examiner and Missing Persons. When he manages to trick a confession out of the murderer at the conclusion of the two parter, he is offered a job in homicide and is partnered with Lewis. The complexity of Kellerman's character is meant to be part of the "new Homicide" with more storyline given to the personal lives of the characters from this point forward in the series.

Another character, Brodie, is added to the cast in "Autofocus". In this episode, the detectives get help from news cameraman J.H. Brodie, who has the killer of an elderly woman on tape entirely by accident and then spends a good deal of the episode trying to convince the detectives that he has something worth watching. Naturally, he has a price--he wants an exclusive on the arrest of the killers. Eventually he does get this but it is not enough to save his job. The higher-ups at his TV station are far more focused on getting an exclusive than they are on solving a crime. When Brodie gives this up he is promptly fired. It's pretty clear that Brodie was meant to be a version of David Simon, the man who spent a year on the killing streets and wrote the original book. But where Simon stayed outside of the story in his book, Brodie keeps stepping into it on the series. It is impossible to pretend (like the detectives do) that he isn't there but we're never sure what to make of him.

Another major change that occurs in `Autofocus' is Howard is being promoted to Sergeant. Unfortunately, in the book, it was made very clear that a sergeant's role was mostly office work, although they are allowed to go out on cases. This is the reason that the sergeants were written out of the series when the show premiered. And since there is already one office bound leader (Giardello) there would seem to be less for Howard to do. Howard gets squeezed between these two extremes and as a result would have almost no presence on the show for the next two years- not being called out on cases, or allowed to supervise. It's a great pity, because as this episode illustrates there was a lot that could have been done exploring Howard's character as she dealt with the challenges of her new job - how she deals with it and how others deal working with a former friend. Instead, Howard was all but eliminated, a sad fate for Melissa Leo who was such a vital part of the show for its first three years on the air.

"Sniper" is an excellent two parter in which someone is randomly picking off citizens of Baltimore and using the game of hangman to clue in the police. Throughout this "red ball" case, the detectives are worn down to the nub working around the clock. This case sounds formulaic now, but remember that this was seven years before the DC sniper case. In the beginning of that actual case some people speculated that the snipers were imitating this episode of Homicide. Ultimately, Russert makes the decision to send Bayliss in to talk to the sniper rather than sending in the SWAT team, once the sniper is identified through the brand of chalk he is using, and this leads to the sniper killing himself. The solving of the case is somewhat formulaic, but the fallout of the case leads to Russert's demotion to regular detective, setting up some good moments in the rest of the season where Isabella Hoffman is finally given something to do.

"Stakeout" is a series classic that is somewhat like season one's "Night of the Dead Living" where we see that detective work can often be very dull. In the space of twenty four hours we find the identity of a serial killer from one of the thickest criminals on the show. Arrested for narcotic possession and stolen property, he confesses that he was involved with ten murders. He thinks that because he didn't actually kill any of the victims he is less liable which proves as Bayliss puts it "Crime makes you stupid" The killer is en route from a trip back to Baltimore, so the Homicide unit sets up a stakeout in the house next door. So two detectives go there. And they wait. Three hours later the shift changes. And they wait. Every three hours, they change partners until twenty-four hours later when the killer is arrested in his driveway without incident. During the course of that time, they identify several of the dead bodies, arrest an accomplice who agrees to testify against the killer and build-up an air-tight case. So the investigation is actually the least interesting part of the show. What makes `Stakeout' one of the highlights of the season is the emotional baggage that some of the detectives are carrying and that they unload while they try to pass the time. Part of this is expressed very well in the characters of George and Cathy Buxton, the people who own the house the detectives are using for surveillance. During the stakeout, the Buxtons argue, the husband storms out, the two make up, and their marriage returns to what passes for normal.

The season finale, "Work Related", has a very unexpected ending as Pembleton almost dies while interrogating a suspect in the box in what for the first half of the episode seems like a very ordinary hour of TV. He is almost felled by a silent killer that he doesn't even know is on his trail. His fate is left up in the air waiting for the next year's season opener.

In conclusion, I think that this fourth season of "Homicide" is still a five-star season, but it is just not up to the six star genius of the first three seasons. There are many brilliant individual episodes I haven't mentioned, and the acting and writing are still top-notch, but the "NYPD-Blueing" of the series is beginning to creep in at this point ever so faintly. Gone are the less physically attractive members of the original cast who probably didn't have personal lives that would attract younger viewers, and more and more personal elements of the detectives' lives are being incorporated into the storyline. However, the series is still must-see TV until the departure of Andre Braugher - the heart of the cast - at the end of season six and the redecoration of the squad room with soft pastels at the beginning of season seven that leaves it looking like a travel agency.

The most memorable of a long line of police dramas - this series is good to watch now as when it was on TV.
Many of the characters(Munch - for one)went on to the Law & Order series permanently, but making guest appearances as the detectives from Baltimore.
It is a series well worth adding to your collection if you like good police procedural shows, with enough quirky characters to make it a bit different from the run of the mill.