This is the Job:“Homicide”

“I gotta do this, this is my job. This is the deal, this is the law, this is my day. I have no doubts or suspicions about it. Heart has nothing to do with it anymore – it’s all in the caffeine.” -Detective Frank Pembleton

Homicide: Life on the Streets faced plenty of challenges in its brief first two seasons: Creative struggles in a medium that was often seen as antithetical to creative story-telling, the thin line between fact and fiction, and ultimately the even thinner one between critical acclaim and success in the ratings game. By the start of the third season the show’s future seemed surer, but by no means certain; especially since they’d arrived at a serious watershed moment.

Throughout the first and second season, the writers and producers of the show extensively mined their source text, David Simon’s non-fiction tome Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Out of that text came the foundations for the show’s core group of characters and many of the cases they worked in the thirteen episodes of the first two seasons. By the beginning of the third season, pickings were getting slimmer where incidents from Simon’s year with the Baltimore homicide unit were concerned, and with an order for at least thirteen episodes needing to be filled, the show’s creators needed to find new angles.

Andre Baugher as Det. Frank Pembleton

One of the main reasons Homicide has become such a milestone work of TV drama, and one which has admirably stood the test of time, lies in the fact that the show’s creators seemed to address every problem with a wild creative gamble. Rather than slowly break away from the patterns they’d relied on in the previous seasons, they dove off the deep end, straight into a monumental three episode arc rife with psychological drama in which Andre Braugher emerges as the show’s leading player. Underlying that sweeping narrative were growing tangles of threads exploring the lives of the show’s characters from more intimate angles, weaving a web of complications, personal tragedies, and the occasionally burst of comic relief stoogery.

About halfway through A Year on the Killing Streets, the murders being investigated become almost incidental beside Simon’s depiction of the men who investigated them; with the opening gesture’s of its third season, Life on the Streets reaches that same moment of transformation. By that point, however, the shows character’s were a lifetime away from their inspirations. From an identical point of origin, the television show had become a distinct text, entirely autonomous from it’s source – if you will, the Earth 2 version of Baltimore’s murder police (factor in The Wire, and The Corner and Baltimore is headed straight for a Crisis on Multiple Earths).

By delving deep into the fictional lives of the characters, the writers were able to make a clean break from Simon’s text and begin constructing a pure fiction which remained true to the spirit of the book, and to the reality which informed it. But even when emerging character details were not deeply personal, they still had a noticeable impact on the text as a whole. John Munch, for example, was well established by this point as a curmudgeon and perennial naysayer, qualifications which made him the perfect mouthpiece for meta-textual commentary on television and American myth like the eerily prescient tangent which opened the the third season, in which he predicts many of the artistic advances and commercial threats which the medium would face in the coming years.

But while new ground was broken for the entire ensemble of characters in the third season, undeniably it was Detective Frank Pembleton who got the most attention. It’s a testament to the kind of far reaching and wild collaboration which the pursuit of great television enables. Throughout the first two seasons, it was Andre Baugher’s fierce portrayal which made Pembleton such a stand out character. The writers, likely encouraged by the producers, then turned out meatier and more nuanced parts for Braugher. By the close of the third season, while Homicide remained an ensemble story, Braugher’s Detective Pembleton had become the key representative figure of that ensemble. The drudgery of police work, the grim confrontations with the worst of humanity, the brutal effect homicide investigation can have on a man’s life – it all comes to a focus Braugher’s portrayal of man slowly, almost imperceptibly, coming apart at the seams.

What makes this development particularly fascinating is that Pembleton is easily the character whose private life is the most hidden from view. While we see the rest of the cast through trials which constantly blur the lines of their lives into oblivion. From the emotionally catastrophic near fatal shooting of three central characters to the uneasy partnership of three others looking to open their own bar, by the close of the third season there is practically no divider between home and work, citizen and cop, for any of the characters. Pembleton, however, keeps that line tightly defended, a fact which might explain the character’s well disguised difficulties coping – and which is the cornerstone of the third season’s unconventional and unexpected finale.

Despite having their order bumped to 20 episodes for the third season, and NBC’s president personally lauding the show as the best on television, Homicide approached the end of its third season uncertain as to whether or not there would be a fourth. The show’s creators met that uncertainty with their tried and true solution – an unexpected change, a gamble, an experiment. It’s what kept the show perpetually on the edge, both of cancellation and innovation, and insured its legacy as a milestone work in the medium.

Thinking it might be the series finale, director Barry Levinson returned to the show for the first time since the pilot, bringing with him renown character actors Richard Edson and Bruno Kirby (the latter would return to direct an episode in the following season). Kirby plays a wayward and less than heard-hearted criminal with a vendetta against Pembleton. Edson plays his easily bullied sidekick, an amusing reflection of Pembleton’s partner Tim Bayliss, played by Kyle Secor. Throughout the episode, Kirby and Edson’s almost comical pairing stalk Pembleton – penetrating the line he draws between his two lives and ensuring it’s eventual collapse. Peculiar though the episode is, the pay off is undeniable, and the episode’s long term effects weave there way into future seasons like ravaging vines.

Kirby and Edson in Levinson's "Good Morning Vietnam"

It’s the sort of loose but farseeing planning which liberated the medium of comics throughout the bronze and modern-ages, mixed with the dynamic expressive elements and collaborative nature of film, all in a medium which had, for decades, been recognized but unexplored, accepted but never nurtured. The first two seasons of Homicide my have broken ground on a vision, but it was the third season, in its fearless complexity, which paved the way for real and far reaching change in the medium of television.