Crime Wave at NBC--One Hit and One Miss

Here’s a vow: You’ll find no better, rawer, more gripping, more seductively enigmatic hour of television, anytime or anywhere, than tonight’s episode of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” NBC’s 2-month-old ensemble series about police in a seedy area of Baltimore. Its brilliance is an open-and-shut case.

Consisting almost entirely of an elderly murder suspect being grilled through the night by two determined detectives, the episode titled “Three Men and Adena” works you over and wrings you dry.

It airs at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39, preceding the 10 p.m. start of “Crime & Punishment,” another NBC cop series whose debut is as pale and flavorless as “Homicide” is vivid and red hot. A subsequent episode about a school shooting is better, however, and could have been plucked from today’s headlines. More about that shortly.

Cinema has provided many distinctive interrogations through the years, from the cerebral duel of wits between Alec Guinness’ jailed Cardinal and Jack Hawkins’ Marxist inquisitor in “The Prisoner” to the courtroom collapse of Bogie’s Capt. Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny” to John Lone’s decadent Pu Yi facing relentless questioning in “The Last Emperor.”

Television, too, has nourished the genre, rarely more indelibly than in the weekly mind probes aimed at Patrick McGoohan’s resilient No. 6 in “The Prisoner.” And more recently, in the British miniseries “Prime Suspect 2” on PBS, an innocent suspect was driven to suicide by an overzealous cop, and Helen Mirren’s driven Det. Jane Tennison used stroking and soothing talk to delicately ease a confession from a dying murder suspect she loathed. Scintillating stuff.

Now comes tonight’s stunning psychological shootout in “Homicide.” It loosely recounts an actual case detailed in the nonfiction book by David Simon after which executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana have patterned their NBC series.

The setting is the precinct house, where detectives Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) and Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) have arrived with ex-street peddler Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn), who they believe murdered, molested and mutilated 11-year-old Adena Watson, a beautiful child whom Tucker regularly paid to tend his horse. They have only 12 hours to squeeze a confession from this former Araba (a nickname for nomadic produce peddlers who travel through neighborhoods by horse-drawn cart), after which he can charge them with harassment.

In a spartan room known as “the box,” the old man sits in his gray overcoat as he faces his tormentors across a table, warily observing them through thick-lidded eyes, his hair and beard surrounding his face in a circle of white. Alternately playing good cop/bad cop, Pembleton and Bayliss try everything to break Tucker. They lie. They set verbal traps. They cajole, almost coquettishly sidling up to him. They bully him, nose to nose. They relentlessly apply pressure, with Bayliss’ voice rising like a drum roll as Tucker responds in a raspy monotone.

“You see Adena any time Tuesday?” “No.” “You didn’t see Adena Tuesday at all.” “No.” “You didn’t see Adena Tuesday AT ALL!” “No.”

Fontana’s masterful script creates an atmosphere of zig-zagging emotions. At times the talk inside this sealed, claustrophobic universe is sweet and soft. Pembleton, gently to Tucker: “Tell me what happened. I’m not gonna write it down or anything. I’m gonna sit right here. You see no--I have no pen in my hand, nothing up my sleeve. Please don’t look at me as a cop, look at me as Frank, look at me as a friend, ‘cause that’s how I’m lookin’ at you, as a friend, not as somebody that committed a murder, not as a really vicious person, because you’re not.”

Other times, the action is ferocious, as director Martin Campbell’s fluid, hand-held camera delivers an edge and intensity that conflict with the squad room just outside, where the colleagues of Bayliss and Pembleton carry on routinely, mostly oblivious to the titanic struggle occurring on the other side of the door.

Secor and Braugher do their customary excellent work here. The gleaming centerpiece of “Three Men and Adena,” however, is that fine veteran Gunn, somehow convincing you of Tucker’s guilt and innocence in a stirring, mesmerizing, extraordinary performance that has Emmy scrawled all over it. His black character’s rage against the white Bayliss and black Pembleton (“You hate niggers like me, ‘cause you hate bein’ a nigger yourself!”) evokes an entire history of race in the United States in only a few sentences.

Did Tucker kill Adena in a rage? Did he kill her during an alcoholic blackout? Did he kill her at all?

“Three Men and Adena” ends as it begins, with generic scenes from a television set mounted on a wall in a coffee area beside the squad room, implying that despite the wrenching event that has occurred, this has been just another night at the office.

But not just another night of episodic television, thanks again to “Homicide,” a series whose disappointing ratings belie its special qualities and bode poorly for its survival in its present 9 p.m. time slot against murderous competition.

At the very least, this should be a 10 p.m. series. More fundamentally, to allow such work to disappear and become just another tiny, forgotten blip on television’s landscape would be a major crime on the part of NBC.

Much more deserving of bliphood is “Crime & Punishment” from Dick Wolf, who also created the regular occupant of NBC’s 10 p.m. Wednesday slot, the much superior “Law & Order.” After tonight, Wolf’s new series will resume at 10 p.m. Thursdays, temporarily displacing “L.A. Law.”

“Crime & Punishment” gives you Rachel Ticotin and Jon Tenney as partnered LAPD detectives Annette Rey and Ken O’Donnell--they’re cool, they’re efficient--who tonight nail the culprits in a murder/hostage case that somehow manages to be squeaky clean despite featuring a double homicide.

The thin plot is executed crisply, allowing for simple resolution a la formulaic TV. “That was quick,” a colleague observes when Rey and O’Donnell swiftly track down a key figure in the case. Quick--exactly!

“Crime & Punishment” interweaves police work with the private lives of protagonists O’Donnell, who lives with a medical intern, and Rey, a single parent living with her sometimes rebellious 17-year-old daughter. But the device the series most relies on is an unseen interviewer--a sort of supernatural lordly presence--who questions both cops and criminals as each case unfolds.

This process is better served in a more interesting and involving March 11 episode. Much like a 1974 television movie titled “The Gun,” it follows the step-by-step life of a pistol that is legally purchased by a West Los Angeles man but ultimately ends up in the hands of a seemingly benign inner-city boy who uses it to shoot down a 13-year-old bully at school.

“And now your friends owe it to you to get revenge,” the unseen interviewer says to the dead victim.

At least this Gunz N the Hood episode parallels some of the real-life Los Angeles-area bloodshed that makes headlines almost daily, and shows how a single gunshot can resonate tragically. Even so, as the two detectives methodically solve the case, there is no emotional investment here.

And their interrogation sequences--an intermediary in the gun progression cracks immediately--are antiseptic and sweatless, in striking contrast to the intense mind warfare of “Homicide.”

The comparison of the two series speaks for itself.