Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.
This week, it’s another red ball on Homicide!
Episode 3.12 “The City That Bleeds”
(Dir by Tim Hunter, originally aired on January 27th, 1995)
This week’s episode opens with Bolander, Munch, Howard, and Felton having a morning meeting outside of an apartment building. They put on bullet-proof vets because they (and several uniformed officers) are about to arrest Glenn Holton, a sex offender who is believed to have murdered a child. Unfortunately, because of a transcription error on the warrant, the detective go to Apartment 201 instead of 210. As they knock on the door to 201, someone on the stairwell opens fire on them. Bolander, Howard, and Felton are hit. Munch somehow avoids being shot.
It’s red ball time! We’re only 12 episodes into season 3 and this is our third “all hands on deck” red ball of the season. NBC reportedly wanted showrunner Tom Fontana to give them more drama in return for renewing the low-rated Homicide and Fontana delivered.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This was a compelling episode, featuring Pembleton tracking Glenn Holton across the city while Bayliss tried to deal with his guilt over being relieved that he wasn’t shot. After visiting the hospital, Giardello had an emotional breakdown while Lewis was driving him back to the station. Felton’s wife returned from Philadelphia to visit him in the hospital. Gloria Reuben and Tony Lo Bianco guest-starred as detectives who came in to help with the case and, for both of them, this episode felt like an audition to join the cast. Things ended with a cliffhanger. Holton is still at large. Felton is awake but hospitalized. Bolander and Kay are still in critical condition. It was an exciting episode.
And yet, one can understand why Ned Beatty later said, in an interview, that this was one of the episodes that eventually led to him leaving the show. First off, why the detectives would be serving the arrest warrant as opposed to the uniformed cops or, considering Holton’s crimes, even the SWAT team, I’m not sure. Munch makes a comment about how the four of them had served hundreds of arrest warrants in the past but it’s not something that we’ve ever seen them do on the show before. That the nonstop emotional drama was compelling was due to the strength of the cast and not the strength of the script, which was occasionally so overwrought that it felt almost like a parody of a cop show. This episode worked but, after it ended, I found myself thinking about how different it felt from the deliberately-paced and moody episodes the aired during the first and second seasons.
And finally, it’s hard not to get annoyed that, with everything going on, we still had to deal with all of Felton’s stupid domestic nonsense. I’m tried of hearing about Felton’s wife and kids and how he can’t make his marriage work. I’m even more tired of Megan Russert, a character who could be a total badass, being solely defined by her relationship with Felton.
This episode, the first of a three-parter, held my attention while I was watching it and it was only afterwards that I realized I kind of had mixed feelings about it overall. Homicide is changing. We’ll see where it goes.
