It's Raining in Baltimore
Thursday, April 27, 2006 at 8:04pm 3 comments (last by Jamison)
For my birthday last weekend, I stopped in the used record shop near my flat on Market, with just the vaguest of hopes they'd have what I wanted in the used DVD bin.
They did, and while it's not the most extravagant gifts I could have got myself, I found a used copy of Homicide: Life on the Street's third season. And only for $40 too!
The show was never a hit or a ratings success. For the most part it flew under the radar while TV critics raved about it and TV guide kept raving about it. An entirely different set of critics saw it as brutally violent and wanted it cancelled even though as it focused around a the work lives of a Baltimore Police homicide unit, it followed the fallout and repercussions of violence, not the acts themselves.
In fact, the first time the show portrayed a shooting was near the end of the third season and the victims were three of the main characters. It was gut wrenching to watch the first time around and to wait over the next several weeks to find out if they would make it or not.
I'm only on the second disk, and I'm very tempted to skip ahead.
3 Comments
jwb Monday, May 8, 2006 at 11:01pm
If you're a fan of Andre Braugher's performance in Homicide, you might want to watch (or might have watched, at this point) a short series called Thief which just finished a 6-episode run on FX. The show is not as good as Homicide, but Andre Braugher is superb.
PS I enjoy your thoughtful comments found on other SF-related blogs.
Jamison Tuesday, May 9, 2006 at 9:10am
Thief is what got me watching Homicide again, but the last two episodes of Thief are both sitting on my DVR unwatched. As good as Braugher is, Thief left me disappointed.
Maybe it will be better next season.
David Raynes Friday, April 28, 2006 at 2:25pm
Best. Show. Ever.
My first tech job was about a block away from the building they used as their police station set. I ate at the bar that a couple characters in the show owned. I even ran into Richard Belzer/Det. John Munch at the ATM in front of my office once. They also filmed parts of an episode just down the street maybe a couple hundred feet from my parents' house while I was still living there.
Homicide was one of the best parts about living in Baltimore back then, at least in my opinion.