Just the Facts: ‘Homicide’ Is Tops

The best thing about Sunday’s Super Bowl is that it gives NBC’s new “Homicide: Life on the Street” a killer lead-in.

An oddity of television is that the commercial success of one program is often determined largely by the success of the program that precedes it, the reality being that even the remote control device has not totally liberated viewers from the tyranny of network promos and their own brain-dead lethargy. After all, it takes effort to switch channels.

Thus, should the TV audience for Sunday’s Dallas-Buffalo game even approach that of last year’s Super Bowl--which the A. C. Nielsen Co. says was overwhelmingly the most-watched program of 1992--then Oscar-winning movie director Barry Levinson’s “Homicide” will get a well-deserved mammoth sampling when it premieres at 7 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39. (Its regular time slot will be Wednesdays at 9 p.m.)

There’s a little bit of irony in Levinson now potentially benefiting from the passivity of viewers. He has thought a lot about television, weighing its impact, expressing in public statements and in his movie “Avalon” his belief that the medium has robbed us of an important facet of life by virtually eliminating communication among family members. In other words, why listen to each other when they can listen to television? It’s a dark scenario.

A brighter one is that many Americans will now be talking to each other about “Homicide.”

What they will see is a cops-and-crime hour reeking of atmosphere, wit and intelligence, an invigorating, essentially nonviolent series about homicide detectives that could be the “Hill Street Blues” of the ‘90s.

The TV industry’s current Conventional Wisdom is that hourlong drama series are passe. If it doesn’t shoot itself in the foot, however, “Homicide” has the potential to take a seat beside “Dragnet,” “Naked City,” “Police Story” and “Hill Street Blues” at the elite Algonquin Round Table of TV cop series. Although not self-consciously derivative, it borrows from each of these classics.

It was the oft-lampooned “Dragnet”--whose life in either first runs, reruns or remakes--has spanned more than four decades, that not only deglamorized police work but also originated the running, conversational cop patter that, in another form, amusingly threads “Homicide.” Jack Webb’s stony Joe Friday was forever having his ear bent by his talky partners, Frank Smith (Ben Alexander) and later Joe Gannon (Harry Morgan). When it came to what they had for dinner the previous night or other tedious items of domesticity, they were quick to blab all to the courteously suffering Friday, who seemed to have no private life of his own.

If “Dragnet” sanitized Los Angeles detective sleuthing, it was the New York-grounded “Naked City” (1958-1963) that first applied the urban grit now so visible on “Homicide,” a slice of realism (there were 8 million stories in the naked city, remember) that infinite other cop series have unsuccessfully tried to copy. And it was the Joseph Wambaugh-created anthology “Police Story” (1973-77) that so sensitively probed the personal lives and darker psyches of police work that “Homicide” seems poised to do.

However, it’s another contemporary NBC series, the memorable “Hill Street Blues” (1981-87), that “Homicide” is most like, mingling sardonic humor and the rot of crime in a realistic police setting on the mean streets of Baltimore, where murders are not necessarily solved at the end of each hour and cases are secondary to relationships among characters.

The focus of the first two episodes--both of which are strikingly good--is much less the end-result of the police work than it is what the detectives are thinking about the work, and each other. That leaves a lot of latitude.

Yet unlike “Hill Street Blues,” whose squad-room reality was softened by a couple of cop caricatures, even in its lighter moments “Homicide” never goes over the top.

Across the board, the detective characters created by executive producers Levinson (who directs the premiere) and Tom Fontana are beauts, from leering, wisecracking cynic John Munch (Richard Belzer) to arrogant master cop Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher). Ned Beatty, Clark Johnson, Jon Polito, Daniel Baldwin, Melissa Leo and Kyle Secor play their fellow detectives, Yaphet Kotto is their lieutenant and Australian actress Wendy Hughes is a medical examiner. All perform ably.

A stand-up comic by trade, the perfectly cast Belzer is point cop for delivering punch lines in Paul Attanasio’s sterling opening script. When Munch’s sweaty partner (Beatty) sees Munch’s negative reaction when he pulls out a cigar, he points out, defensively, that the stogie is still in its cover. “So,” Munch deadpans, “you’re practicing safe smoking, is that it?”

There are two masterful sequences here that exhibit the panoramic range of “Homicide.” One, in which the wrong body is exhumed and the right one lost in the cemetery, has you bending over in laughter. The other, in which Braugher’s Pembleton horrifies his young partner by unethically tricking a murder suspect into confessing, literally stiffens your spine.

It is, indeed, the stinging, standing ovation-worthy work by Braugher, so indelible as the intellectual black soldier in “Glory,” that gives “Homicide” much of its edge, along with the use of hand-held cameras and some artfully ragged editing whose “Cops”-style herky-jerkiness has the effect of accentuating the rough environment in which these detectives operate.

Levinson has a great ear for working-class dialogue, especially when laboring in his hometown of Baltimore. As in “Diner” and, to an even greater extent, “Tin Men,” he choreographs his characters in humorous conversational interludes, pulling in tight on the faces of these tough-guy detectives and eavesdropping as they spend their off-duty hours shooting the breeze around a table in a shabby crab house.

Rather than being mannered, it’s something that makes the series unique. Homicide, observes one cop, is “the one thing this country’s still good at.”

So hey, let’s be careful out there.