“I probably shouldn’t tell you this story, but what the fuck.”
From the beginning, Homicide: Life on the Street was a misunderstood jewel: NBC didn’t know how to market it, and audiences never really warmed to it. But even years after it left the air, showrunner Tom Fontana and his producing partner, Barry Levinson, never gave up on delivering it to the masses. The executive producers have lobbied for years to save the show from unstreamable-TV purgatory, and their efforts have finally borne fruit. Homicide will stream on Peacock starting August 19, with a new remaster and much of its original music intact. “I’m absolutely thrilled,” Fontana says. “I’m going to be very curious to see what people think. Does the show hold up?”
Known for both the breakout role of Andre Braugher and a precursor to The Wire, another Baltimore-set show that began in the pages of David Simon’s reporter’s notebook, Homicide’s distinctive visuals and hard-boiled storytelling made it an Emmy-gilded critical darling. Braugher was flanked by an ensemble that included Richard Belzer, Kyle Secor, Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, and Daniel Baldwin, while guest stars like Robin Williams and Vincent D’Onofrio rotated in and out of its credits. Every week, its fictional detectives stared down ethical dilemmas as they chased murderers and extracted confessions — negotiating a broken system that threatened to break them.
For his part, Fontana won’t actually rewatch it, preferring to spare himself the impulse to go back in and rewrite, re-edit, re-shoot the show all over again. “All I see are the imperfections,” he admits. But he is happy to talk about the work done on Homicide and — more than 30 years after its debut — the yearslong effort to put it up on streaming. Could we get a reboot? Maybe if he can “break the spell” of the original. Maybe.
The re-release news is huge. You and Barry Levinson have been pushing for this for a long, long time.
We have, and oddly enough, we couldn’t really get an answer as to what was the problem. We got various reasons. One that was true was the music rights. When we used a song on the show, the network would only get it for a limited amount of time or a limited amount of airings. Now they buy it in perpetuity throughout the universe. So NBC had to step up and renegotiate — and we had a lot of great songs on the show. At one point, someone, I don’t remember who, said, “Oh, we’ll just replace all the music with library music,” which is mostly crap. Barry and I were like, “No, we’re not doing that.” That didn’t speed things up.
The other reason was they had to be willing to spend the money to remaster the episodes, because when we shot it, we shot it on 16-mm film, which I’m sure looks like crap now. But the remastered versions look fabulous.
Were you and Levinson involved in the remaster?
No, we weren’t involved directly. We just saw the end product, but that was fine. The people doing it were really great at it. I’m one of these people who can’t watch one of my shows once I’ve finished. All I want to do is fix them: Let’s get everybody back. I can rewrite the scene that I wrote. I know how to write it better. We’ll get a more interesting actor for the guest star.
They haven’t released any kind of before and afters or anything like that, but I am curious how the 16-mm, grainy feel of the show looks blown up in HD and 4K.
I’ve seen a little bit. It actually intensifies it in a weird kind of way, but you’ll be the judge. You’ll tell me.
What about music rights? Were there any song choices that, for one reason or another, couldn’t get re-licensed? Was there anything you hated to lose even in this re-release?
No. If there was, they haven’t told us — let me put it that way. I know they had to renegotiate all the songs because they only had a use of them the first time around, but no one said, “We didn’t get such and such.” So I’m taking them at their word, which is probably foolish of me, that they got all the songs that were originally in the show.
I think NBC would have preferred if our detectives had arrested more murderers.
Homicide has taken on a kind of mythic quality in the age of streaming because of its unavailability, its acclaim, and how Braugher’s role on Brooklyn Nine-Nine riffed on it. You had to own the discs to watch it. What mark did it leave on the TV that came after?
There were two things. One is the shooting styles Barry came up with, the handheld camera. The whole show was shot handheld, but also there was never a perfect master shot — the idea was you’d just shoot it one way, shoot it the other direction. Because we didn’t have any car chases or gun battles, the camera movement gave the show an energy and a surprise. If we shot it in a traditional way, it might’ve really been flat. From the beginning, Barry knew he wanted to shoot the show in that way, and the network was kind of like, “What are we doing?” They would get complaints that people were getting dizzy watching the show, throwing up or whatever. But that’s what we kept doing for the whole series.
The other thing we did — before NYPD Blue, but Law & Order was on the air — was let the narrative be decided by the story rather than have a format, like Law & Order. We didn’t want to be tied down: Maybe a murder happens at the beginning of the episode, maybe it happens in the middle of an episode, maybe it doesn’t happen at all. At the end of the episode, you could understand that two stories that had nothing to do with each other were actually parallel stories. Or you say to yourself, Okay, we’re going to do an episode where a guy falls in the subway, and he’s got 45 minutes to live. And that’s the episode, “Subway.”
Several of the show’s stars have passed — Andre Braugher, Richard Belzer, Yaphet Kotto, Jon Polito, Ned Beatty. Do any memories of them surface when you reflect on the show?
When we were shooting the first episode, Andre and Kyle Secor were doing an interrogation of a young gay hustler suspected of murdering the guy he was servicing. Andre and Kyle were so good because they were opposites. Kyle’s character was all about Miranda rights and doing it fairly, and Andre’s character was all about, If the guy’s guilty, I’m going to do what I need to do to get him to confess. Barry and I watched a take, turned to each other, and said, “We can really explore those two.” That’s what inspired me to write “Three Men and Adena,” the sixth episode of the first season. The dynamic between the two of them with a third party seemed like it’s something you could do a whole hour about, which we did. And Andre’s gifts as an actor, his power and his brilliance, coupled with Kyle’s talents and dexterity, is one of my biggest ongoing memories of the show.
Belzer was a dear, dear friend. I visited him a few months before he died in France. I just loved him. The insanity of Richard Belzer was a joy to be a part of. Once you shot the scene the way it was written — you’d let him riff because you were always going to get something wonderful and funny that you could potentially cut into the scene. A number of the other actors weren’t that good at it, so sometimes you had to say, “Okay, that’s enough.” But Belz, he was fantastic.
Are there episodes you’d recommend newcomers pay close attention to? Do you have favorites beyond those you’ve mentioned?
The subway episode — I didn’t write it, Jim Yoshimura wrote it — is an extraordinary piece. And another one he wrote called “A Doll’s Eyes,” about parents with their young son at a mall; there’s a shooting, and the kid is hit by a random bullet, and he’s on life support. The homicide detectives investigate, and the parents are like, “He’s not dead.” The parents had to accept the reality and decide to pull the plug, but the detectives had to decide their job wasn’t necessarily to investigate. It was also about helping these people understand what death will mean to them.
Streaming might be kinder to Homicide’s vibe. On broadcast it had a wonky schedule: The second season only had four episodes, then episodes aired out of order.
The show was not doing well in the first season. We had premiered after the Super Bowl, which at the time seemed like a great thing. But in retrospect, what’s worse than having a show that is about ideas and people talking immediately after everybody’s drunk from watching the Super Bowl? The show was not popular, and they were going to cancel it. Barry and I flew out to Los Angeles to have a meeting with Warren Littlefield and Ronald Meyer, who were the two head guys at NBC at the time. And it was a very difficult conversation. We agreed that they would pick up the show for six episodes if we got a star to appear in one of them. Since Barry Levinson is an Oscar-winning director, that was something we thought we could accomplish, and we did. We got Robin Williams to do “Bop Gun,” in one of his really first dramatic roles. That spirited them on to renew the show for season three.
And then in season three, we didn’t bring back an actor, Jon Polito. We decided that his character Steve Crosetti would commit suicide and that it would have this effect on the other homicide detectives. The episode that was about his suicide just happened to fall on sweeps week. And NBC decided it was too grim to air during sweeps week. So they aired the episode that followed it, but throughout that episode, people were talking about Crosetti being dead. If you were watching, you’d go, Crosetti died? I didn’t know Crosetti died. The next week, Crosetti died. NBC would do that sometimes. Once you finish the show, you don’t really have any control over it. It’s really up to the network. They paid for it.
Do you recall significant moments when the network interfered in the show?
I think NBC would have preferred if our detectives had arrested more murderers — especially Adena Watson. We were always like, “Well, that doesn’t always happen.” The reason that I decided we would never close that case is they never closed that case in real life, of the real young girl who died. I thought it would be a disservice to her and to the family to come up with some fictional solution to the murder. NBC wished we solved it. There were numerous times that they would’ve rather the story ended differently, but I have to give them credit. They never said, “We’re not going to let you shoot that episode.” It was always a healthy, creative argument, not just with the creative executives but also with broadcast standards.
One time we had a story about a young man who was found hanging in his bedroom. The detectives were trying to determine whether it was murder or suicide, and what it turned out to be was autoerotic asphyxia. Roz Weinman, who was the head of broadcast standards when we were doing Homicide, called me and said, “Look, I’m not going to tell you you can’t do this. I’m just going to tell you that, statistically, you will be inviting young men to do this, and I would ask you not to.” I respected that, and we didn’t do it. Roz and I had that kind of relationship. She was supportive of the risks that we were taking and a fan of the show, so she was very careful about giving us notes. That was the only time I could think of where I actually said I would do what they were asking, but I’m sure there were others.
Have you ever been approached to reboot Homicide or otherwise revive it?
I probably shouldn’t tell you this story, but what the fuck. Five or six years ago, I got a call from an executive at NBC Universal, the studio. “I’m calling to see if you’d be interested in rebooting Homicide,” she said. I talked to Barry, and we were like, “Yeah, okay, maybe. It depends.” And she said, “Okay, we’re going to go talk to the network and will get back to you.” A week or so later she called me and said, “The network wants to know why now? Why reboot Homicide now?” And I said, “Well, you fucking called me. I didn’t call you. And second of all, as far as I can tell, there are still murders going on in the world!” That’s where that ended, because I didn’t have a “why now” that I guess pleased them.
But I will say this: I’ve been talking to Barry and Gail Mutrux, who was one of our producers, and Paul Attanasio and Jim Yoshimura. If there’s a spark that comes off the Peacock streaming, maybe we’ll take another look at it. My biggest fear is being haunted by the original, and because so many of the actors are gone. We would have to start with a whole new cast and probably in another city just to break the spell, if you will. I don’t know.
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