For years, Homicide: Life on the Street was one of the most notable shows known for their unavailability on streaming. If you wanted to experience the late Andre Braugher’s breakout role, the adaptation that kick-started David Simon’s TV career, and a story Vulture’s Margaret Lyons once called “arguably the best cop show of all time,” you had to buy the DVDs, sometimes for more than $100. That all changes in less than a month: On August 19, Peacock will debut all seven seasons of Homicide, as well as Homicide: The Movie, its sequel and series finale, on streaming in a new HD and 4K remaster.
Created by Paul Attanasio (based on a book by Simon) and led by showrunner and executive producer Tom Fontana and executive producer Barry Levinson, Homicide was never a ratings hit in its lifetime, but its influence on police procedurals and on television at large is massive. Shot on 16-mm. film, it often felt gritty and mean, and the police officers it followed could be nasty and crude as often as they were funny and noble. Episodes like the interrogation master class “Three Men and Adena” (memorably spoofed in Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s “The Box”) and “Bop Gun,” which guest-starred Robin Williams as a grieving widower and father, cemented its legacy as an uncompromising watch and earned it die-hard fans in the process. The series crossed over with numerous shows, and Detective John Munch, the character played by the late Richard Belzer, evolved into one of the leads of Law & Order: SVU. Likewise, Simon has credited the start of his TV career — which later included shows like The Wire and Treme — to the groundwork laid by Homicide.
This will be the first time the series has been made available in HD, and we’re curious to see how it actually looks and plays on Peacock. We haven’t yet seen before-and-after comparisons yet, so the jury’s out on whether the remaster will faithfully reproduce the series’ iconic grit. (Some remasters take their cleanups too far.) NBC also confirmed that much of the original music remains in the remastered show and that clearing those music rights for streaming, as Simon noted last year on Twitter, was a key factor in the holdup — as is often the case when a decades-old show goes out of print. Last year, the New York Times reported that for years Levinson had been working to get a straight answer on when Homicide would be available to stream. His persistence finally paid off.
This story has been updated.
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