When is the first episode of Homicide: Life on the street broadcast on the American television network NBC on January 31, 1993, this crime series was unlike any other of its time.
The series was based on the book by David Simon Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets which followed his time with the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit.
Simon later went on to create The Wire, which is still regarded as one of the best television series of all time, but having started his career as a reporter, he rose to fame with this vividly written account of his time following a detective shift in 1988 as they investigated murders.
As in his book, the series depicted the everyday reality and often black humor of a group of people whose work regularly brought them close to death.
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"The Wire" is rightfully considered the pinnacle of the television format, but its blend of compassionate storytelling and social criticism was already evident in "Homicide," which celebrated its 30th birthday earlier this year.
Although Simon's creative involvement in that series was reduced, his reporting from the streets served as a major inspiration.
In addition to the Baltimore location, the two series shared some of the cast and crew, and even recycled some scenes from Simon's book - specifically the scene when the cops convince a compliant suspect that the photocopier is a polygraph.
The scene was repeated in both series.
The series was originally shot on Super Sixteen with hand-held cameras, creating a raw but striking visual style, interspersed with distinctive sharp cuts.
Even the grainy black-and-white credits separated the series from the rest.
Most of the police procedural series of the time had a more make-up look.
When Barry Levinson, film director Restaurant (1982) and Good morning, Vietnam (1987) turned to the screenwriter and producer Tom Fontana, with extensive experience in television and theater - to help him adapt the book, he told him that he did not want a police series with car chases and gunfights.
"It sounded like such a crazy idea, such a big challenge, that I gladly accepted," says Fontana.
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"Homicide" tried to be authentic.
It was filmed on location in Baltimore, and its downtown, harbor, row houses and corners will become an integral part of the series.
Detectives from Simon's book were on hand to offer advice.
"We learned a lot from those guys," says Melissa Leo, who played Detective Kay Howard and later won an Oscar for her role in Boxer by David O'Russell.
Early on, Simon took the cast to various drug hangouts around town, recalls Kyle Secor, who played rookie detective Tim Bayliss.
Even the filing cabinets in the department office were filled with old police reports.
The police service was going through the digitization process, so the set designer managed to reach them.
Cops rarely drew their weapons in this series.
Mostly they just complained about paperwork and air conditioners.
They worried about the success rate and the number of unsolved cases listed under their name in red on the board that played a prominent role in each episode.
The dialogue involved philosophizing about life and death, with digressions about the assassination of Lincoln and which animal has the most sperm.
The characters in the show boasted that they "speak for the dead," but they were all complex and imperfect.
"It's a group of people who, every day of their lives, deal with dead bodies. You just have to acknowledge the impact it has on them emotionally, spiritually, mentally," says Fontana.
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The main cast
The diverse cast included seasoned character actors such as Japheth Koto, known for films such as The eighth passenger i Live and let others die, and Ned Beatty, the star Television networks i Releases - along with comedian Richard Belzer as the caustic John Munch (a character he later played in several seasons of the second NBC cop series "Law & Order").
Clark Johnson, who played the likable Meldrick Lewis, directed the opening episodes of both "Badges" and "The Wire," setting the tone for the cop series of the next decade.
Overall, the ensemble was also strikingly diverse for the time.
A more retrograde element was the fact that the central cast of detectives was originally intended to be all-male, until Fontana and Levinson realized that was wrong, Lio explains.
She got the role of Kay Howard, the only police officer in "Homicide".
Although many of the characters had direct parallels in Simon's book, this was not the case with Howard.
Female detectives were a rarity back then.
There was simply no precedent for it, adds Lio.
The character was originally supposed to be named Kay Harvey, as a reference to Rick Garvey, one of the real-life detectives who, just like Howard, had a perfect percentage of cases solved, but they decided not to, because they felt that Garvey wouldn't bother "to go back to the office when he finds out he's being played by a woman," laughs Lio.
Lio firmly decided to avoid clichés in the interpretation of the character.
Howard was hardworking, ambitious and extremely professional, more capable than her male counterpart.
There were no rules for what kind of clothes a detective wears, she says, "so we invented them".
Howard often wore a shirt and tie, he adds, "which is something I think suits a woman - and which is finally starting to be seen."
Although it was a series with an equal ensemble, Andre Brauer, who played Detective Frank Pembleton, a Jesuit-educated New York erudite with a complicated relationship with God, quickly established himself as the leading character.
He had an electrifying aura in front of the cameras, radiating charisma and energy.
"I have never seen such an actor on television.
"His rhythm was unique to him," says Fontana.
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Sekor's character Bayliss was thrown into the fire on the very first case, the murder of Adena Watson, an 11-year-old girl based on the real-life murder of LaTonya Wallace, one of the most unpleasant cases in Simon's book.
The detective in charge of LaTonya Wallace's murder was present when many of those scenes were shot.
"It had a big impact on his life, his relationships, and his approach to work.
"Baylis had a very high standard of good and evil," says Secor, adding that this was reflected in his character of Baylis.
Bayliss' relationship with the magnificent Pembleton developed over the course of the series.
"Andre was the best partner in the world.
"We experienced ourselves as an old married couple," says Sekor.
Often shooting in two mornings deepened their relationship, and the on-screen chemistry between the two is palpable, especially when they're in the Box, the interrogation room where some of the show's most memorable scenes were filmed.
And indeed, worried about exceeding the budget of the first season, Fontana decided to write the episode "Three Men and Adena" set almost entirely in the Box.
Bayliss and Pembleton have just 12 hours to extract a confession from the prime suspect in the murder of Adena Watson, an elderly fruit seller, an "Arab" according to the Baltimore dictionary, played by the legendary Moses Gunn.
Fontana read transcripts from the Wallace case as he prepared, and the episode is as claustrophobic and tense as it gets on television, as the balance of power constantly shifts between the three.
Neither in the series nor in life is there a satisfactory resolution.
The case is still not solved.
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Fontana credits the strength of this episode to director Martin Campbell, who went on to direct big-budget Hollywood films such as Mask of Zoro (1998) and Casino Royale (2006)
"What he did was so subtle, but so brilliant. He never shot from the same angle twice, so you never get bored of being in the same room for an hour."
The episode earned Fontana an Emmy for "Outstanding Screenplay in a Drama Series".
After the first season aired, the future of the series remained uncertain for some time.
"There was tremendous resistance to renewing the series until I won the Emmy and then all of a sudden they said, 'We love it.' We've always adored her,'" Fontana recalls.
NBC renewed the series, but only for four episodes, instead of nine as in the first season.
"The number should be increasing, not decreasing.
"But they said take four or leave it. They also started insisting that we have guest stars," he adds.
Levinson invited Robin Williams, with whom he had already worked, to play the grieving husband of a murdered tourist in the opening episode of the second season of "Bop Gun".
Williams was cast as a depressed, gloomy man trying to deal with sudden grief, shocked by the casual way the cops talk about overtime while his wife lies in the morgue - a role atypical for him.
"It felt like the right way to meet the network's demand for guest stars while still staying true to the craziness of our show," says Fontana.
The episode "Bop Gun" was written by David Simon and his friend David Mills.
She highlighted the mismatch between resources allocated to priority cases - the so-called "red ball" - and murders in poorer, black neighborhoods, like the young killer's father.
It was the first television script Simon ever wrote, and after that, he says, he turned down more lucrative offers to write for other series to stay with "Homicide" and learn how television works, eventually becoming a script editor. and producer in the last two seasons.
The episode was also directed by Steven Gyllenhaal and features his son, a very young Jake Gyllenhaal, as Robin Williams' son.
The legendary guest roles of Elijah Wood, Peter Gallagher, Marsha Gay Harden, Steve Buscemi will become a feature of the series.
Her fearless ethos
In writing the script for this series, they did not shy away from moral complexity.
"We wrote about human beings who were brought to the Box by moments of crisis. What exactly brought them there and what happens to them afterwards were the stories that attracted us," says Fontana.
Although not as politically engaged as "The Wire," "Homicide" dealt with corruption, incompetence, and systemic failures in the police force, as well as the societal impact of drug addiction and poverty in Baltimore.
One episode showed police teaming up after a shooting that potentially involved another officer.
Discouraged from investigating his own colleagues, an angry Pembleton emotionally destroys a black suspect in the Box, extracting a confession from him, to give the bosses the result they wanted.
The free, improvisational style of filming excited the actors, allowing them to try new things.
"We were given a tremendous amount of freedom to play with and breathe life into the stories that David found in his own book," says Secor, as Lio gleefully talks about "every day she spent in that office with that camera and that group of men."
"It taught me a lot of things," he adds.
Fontana made sure to talk to the actors about how they saw the development of their own characters.
Lio talks about Fontana's genius in this regard, specifically regarding "the inventiveness that we actors were allowed to bring to all of it."
Sekor describes how Fontana encouraged him to make discoveries about his own character: "Tom gave me a lot of freedom in terms of the direction the character was going."
In later seasons, Bayliss reveals that he was sexually abused as a child.
He too begins to explore his own sexuality and, at the end of the series, openly declares himself as bisexual, a rarity for the protagonist of a primetime television series, then as now.
"The network got a little nervous about it," Secor says.
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Not everything that was recorded ended up in the final version.
"What happened to that explicit kiss with Peter Gallagher?" he laughs, referring to the episode in which his character receives a date request from a gay restaurant owner played by Peter Gallagher.
But he also received numerous letters from people who recognized themselves in what his character was going through, especially in the scenes when he confronted and later took care of the uncle who abused him.
"That love-hate relationship made a big impression on people."
The writers gave Brauer scenes where he could really let loose.
"We said: this is going to touch him. He won't be able to play that scene," says Fontana.
"And, of course, he would always succeed in the end, which only made us step up our efforts to present him with a new challenge."
Pembleton eventually hit the ground with all his might when he suffered a stroke at the end of season four.
Brauer's portrayal of a highly articulate man now struggling for words is typically layered and poignant.
"That was another interesting twist thrown into our relationship.
"Andre's character was always overbearing, and now he suddenly needed help," says Secor.
The television network wasn't so sure about Kay Howard's character.
She is promoted to sergeant, but soon becomes a less prominent character in the series.
"I know Tom went to NBC every year to fight to keep Howard in the unit," Lio says, but her character didn't return after season five.
The way they went about it is clearly still a sore spot for her.
"They didn't know what to do with me. I'm so grateful to Tom Fontana for fighting to keep Kay on the show."
The series developed in different ways.
"Throughout the seasons, we kept playing with her, trying things out and changing her look," says Fontana.
In the later seasons, there were also serial killers and snipers, and even gunfights.
Although at first glance it began to look more like a more conventional procedural series, with a more conventionally handsome cast, "Homicide" continued to bring us outstanding episodes.
In the sixth season episode, "Subway," written by James Yoshimura, Vincent D'Onofrio played a man pushed under a subway train, conscious and lucid but fatally injured, with less than an hour to live, he talks to Pembleton, while Pembleton tries to figure out who is responsible.
"It's practically a theater piece with two characters," says Fontana.
Brauer left at the end of the sixth season, finally winning an Emmy in 1998.
The series was never the same without him, and the seventh season was the last, although Brauer and all the other members of the original cast, even those who died, returned in the 2000 film that tied up all the unfinished threads and allowed for more one last heartbreaking scene with Bayliss and Pembleton.
When the series stopped airing in 1999, the way series were recorded and watched was already beginning to change.
Fontana's next series, the thrilling experimental prison drama Oz, premiered in 1997, launching a wave of HBO original series.
"The Sopranos" began airing in 1999, and Simon's mini-series "The Corner" followed in 2000, before "The Wire" premiered in 2002.
In the discussion of the history of prime TV series, "Homicide" doesn't always get the place it deserves, but it played a key role in that transition, paving the way for what came after.
"We had a feeling that this was the end of something and the beginning of something else," says Lio.
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