How To Watch Television

1. Homicide: Realism

13 1 Homicide Realism Bambi L. Haggins Abstract: One of the most critically acclaimed but low-rated dramas in network television history, Homicide: Life on the Streets approached the cop show genre by trying to remain true to actual police work and life in Baltimore. Bambi Haggins explores this commitment to realism by investigating the narrative and stylistic techniques employed by the show to create its feeling of authenticity. Homicide: Life on the Streets (NBC, 1993–1999), one of the most compelling and innovative cop dramas ever aired on U.S. network television, occupies a significant , if often overlooked, position in the history of television drama. Homicide is the “missing link” between the quality dramas of the 1980s, such as Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–1987), and groundbreaking cable series unencumbered by network limitations, like The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008). While Homicide continues the “quality” tradition from its NBC dramatic forbearers—the multiple storylines, overlapping dialogue, and cast of flawed protagonists in Hill Street Blues, and the cinematic visual style and the city as character in Miami Vice (NBC, 1984– 1989)—it manages to convey a sense of immediacy and intimacy that can be as disquieting as it is engaging. Based on David Simon’s nonfiction book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which chronicled his year “embedded” with Baltimore ’s “Murder Police,” Homicide does little to assuage the audience’s anxieties; rather, it brings a messy and unsettling slice of American urban life to network television. As a twentieth-century cop show, it offers an inspirational model for twenty-first-century television drama. We might consider Homicide’s commitment to realism in terms comparable to those of the “RealFeel” index, a meteorological measure that takes into account humidity, precipitation, elevation, and similar factors to describe what the temperature actually feels like. Thus, by examining the look, the sound, and, most significantly, the sense of Homicide, and by attending to facets of “emotional 14 Bambi L. Haggins realism” and “plausibility, typicality, and factuality” of the series, we can describe its “RealFeel” effect. Though “RealFeel” synthesizes a variety of specific qualities, this essay focuses on signifiers of realism that build upon each other, resonate for the viewer, and make the televisual world of Homicide, its people, and its stories feel real: socio-culturally charged, unpredictable narratives with crisp and edgy dialogue; a sense of verisimilitude in terms of both the historical moment and the place; a cast of complex characters in a culturally diverse milieu; and the sampling of generic conventions combining dark comedy, gritty police drama, and contemporary urban morality tale within each episode. These elements are not unique to this series—not when Homicide owes a debt to Hill Street Blues, and The Wire owes a debt to Homicide. While all three combine the highly evocative, and sometimes unsettling, visual style and the narrative complexity we have come to expect of quality television drama, each series builds upon the other, refining its sense of the real. The multiple storylines and flawed protagonists of Hill Street Blues give way to Homicide’s extended story arcs (across episodes and seasons), nuanced depictions of conflicted characters, and an incisive view of Baltimore in the 1990s. The Wire mobilizes—and expands upon—all of the aforementioned elements of “RealFeel” in its made-for-HBO drama. Both the televisual milieu of Hill Street Blues, an inner city precinct in an unnamed urban space, and the multiple factions in The Wire, including Baltimore ’s police, government, unions, and schools, which are tainted to various degrees by corruption, resonate differently for audiences than the televisual milieu of Homicide. The Wire adheres closely to the multifaceted nature of the body of creator David Simon’s journalistic work (which includes the corner, the precinct, and the press room), and, thanks to freedoms offered by the premium cable HBO network presents an unfiltered vision of Baltimore. Homicide, while undoubtedly ambitious, is more modest in its aspirations. Like the book upon which it is based, the focus is narrow: one work shift in one squad in one precinct, which makes the depiction of a small slice of Charm City more plausible and, arguably, more intimate. Some might argue that the more controversial NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993–2005) covered similar narrative terrain and that its much-publicized instances of nudity and swearing pushed the boundaries of network television.1 However, by utilizing the generic conflation of procedural and melodrama, NYPD Blue offers a more palatable—if provocative—televisual meal for...