Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 4.4 “A Doll’s Eyes”

Posted on August 31, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, Lisa will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.

This week’s episode made me cry and cry.

Episode 4.4 “A Doll’s Eyes”

(Dir by Kenneth Fink, originally aired on December 1st, 1995)

Here in America, there’s recently been a lot of debate about how much of a problem crime actually is. It’s a bit of an odd debate because much of it is based on telling people to ignore what they’re seeing and experiencing and to instead, just take comfort in abstract statistics and numbers. “Actually,” we’re told, “crime is down from last year,” as if the claim that there’s slightly less of it being reported somehow negates the fact that it exists.

Those who say that crime is not a big deal often forget that crime is not just a matter of statistics and police reports. Crime is something that happens to people. It’s something that scars people. It’s not something that most people can just shrug off. Every crime is different and everyone reacts to being a victim in their own individual way but react, they do. It’s easy to be dismissive of people’s concerns about crime when you’re not the one getting your house broken into or hearing gunshots in the night. It’s easy to say “It was just a mugging,” when you’re not the one getting mugged and losing whatever trust you may have once had in the system. Seth Rogen once tweeted that he didn’t care that his car got broken into because he wasn’t into worrying about possessions. That’s easy to say when you can just buy a new car whenever you feel like it. For someone who can’t and is now stuck with the knowledge that they’re not even safe in their own car, it’s considerably more difficult to be so cavalier. Crime is about more than just statistics and numbers. For those who have been victimized, it’s about loss. It’s about never feeling truly safe or secure again.

This week’s episode of Homicide fellows Pembleton and Bayliss as they investigate a shooting at a mall. A young boy was caught in the crossfire and now, he’s on life support at the hospital. For Pembleton and Bayliss, it starts out as another case. Tracking down the shooters is not difficult. Getting the shooters to confess is not difficult. Pembleton and Bayliss aren’t dealing with master criminals here.

For the boy’s parents (played, in two heart-breaking performances, by Marcia Gay Harden and Gary Basaraba), the shooting of their son is the moment that their lives stopped. They’re the one who eventually have to make the decision to take their son off of life support. Hearing that their son’s organs were donated and are helping other people provides cold comfort. Their only son is dead and, as this episode make clear, they’re not going to be okay. Some would describe their son as just being another statistic, part of the count of how many people died in Baltimore during any given year. For his parents, he’s Patrick, a 10 year-old who loved dinosaurs and science and whose life was ended because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Bayliss runs into the father of a girl who got an organ transplant as the result of the Patrick’s death, the girl’s father muses on how strange it is that one child died so that his girl could live. It’s a powerful moment, one that really captures the humanity at the heart of this show’s best episodes. Patrick’s parents will never recover but his murder has led to other people being saved. Was it worth the cost? The show is smart enough to leave the question for us to ponder.

This episode made me cry. It reminded me a bit of season 2’s Bop Gun, with its mix of the family trying to deal with an unimaginable tragedy while, for Pembleton and Bayliss, it’s another day at work. I would actually say this episode was superior to Bop Gun. Bop Gun tried too hard to wrap things up. A Doll’s Eyes understands that sometimes, this is no way to wrap things up. Life just keeps moving.

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 3.18 “In Search of Crimes Past”

Posted on July 20, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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, Giardello sets a dangerous precedent.

Episode 3.18 “In Search of Crimes Past”

(Dir by Kenneth Fink, originally aired on April 14th, 1995)

A woman (Felicia Shakman) takes Colonel Barnfather hostage, pointing a gun at his head and demanding that Bolander reopen the investigation into a murder that occurred sixteen years ago. Bolander was the primary on the murder and the man that he arrested is scheduled to be executed in just a matter of hours. The woman with the gun is the man’s daughter. Russert wants to bring in the hostage negotiators but Giardello instead orders Bolander to take a look at the files and the evidence and to try to see if he arrested the wrong man.

I’m not really sure I buy Giardello’s response. Giardello claims he has no choice but actually, it seems to me that Giardello is setting a dangerous precedent. In Baltimore, if you think a relative has been wrongly convicted, you can apparently just take someone hostage and demand the case be reopened. I’m not sure those are the rules that anyone wants to set.

Now, of course, it turns out that Bolander did arrest the wrong guy. It perhaps would have been more interesting if Bolander had look at the files and said, “Yeah, I got the right guy,” but then this episode wouldn’t be able to make a statement against the death penalty. Bolander realizes that he made a mistake and also that the actual murderer is a man who committed suicide that very evening.

While that’s going on, Pembleton and Bayliss investigate the death of an elderly woman who appears to have slipped and drowned in her bathtub. Her husband (Barnard Hughes) seems to be heartbroken. Of course, the husband actually killed her. He has fallen in love with another woman and he killed his wife so that he could be with her. I preferred this storyline to the Bolander one, just because it featured a lot of Pembleton/Bayliss scenes and a good performance from Barnard Hughes.

Finally, Munch hired a new bartender. He didn’t bother to tell his partners beforehand but how could Lewis and Bayliss possibly complain about Munch hiring Jerry Stiller to tend bar? (Technically, Stiller was playing an Irishman named McGonical.) This was a minor but likeable storyline, mostly because of Jerry Stiller’s likably bizarre performance.

So, this was yet another good but not great episode. The Bolander storyline was a bit too melodramatic for its own good. It’s not the sort of thing that would have happened during the show’s first two seasons, back when the whole point was to be realistic. But that Bayliss/Pembleton storyline featured the show’s two most compelling characters doing what they did did best. This episode was not perfect but it held my attention nonetheless.

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 3.10 “Every Mother’s Son”

Posted on May 4, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, life and death both continue in Baltimore.

Episode 3.10 “Every Mother’s Son”

(Dir by Kenneth Fink, originally aired on January 6th, 1995)

Let’s get the least important part of this week’s episode out of the way first. Felton is still looking for his wife and kids. He abandons Kay while she’s in the middle of a homicide investigation. When Kay calls him out on it, Felton brings up the fact that she went on vacation for a weekend. The difference is that Felton isn’t taking vacation days. Instead, he’s just leaving in the middle of work and expecting Kay to handle all of his cases.

BEAU FELTON — WORST HOMICIDE DETECTIVE EVER!

Meanwhile, Lewis and Munch discover that their bar is a historical landmark because George Washington once stopped there to use the restroom. The bar stuff, while not really related to the episode’s main drama, didn’t feel as unnecessary as the stuff with Felton’s family. A lot of that is because Lewis, Munch, and Bayliss are a lot more sympathetic than Felton. This week’s scenes with Howie Mandel as an interior decorator felt a bit off for an episode of Homicide but they still amused me. That said, at some point, these three really are going to have to get it together and open the place.

As for the main storyline, it featured Pembleton and Bayliss investigating the shooting of a 13 year-old in a bowling alley. It’s a familiar story, one that this show has used before. The fact that we’ve seen it before is not a reflection on the show. It’s reflection of the reality of life on the streets. The murderer was another kid, one who was now facing life in prison if he ended up getting charged as an adult. The murderer showed little remorse, telling Pembleton that he would rather be in jail than the on the streets. What made this episode stand out was a scene between two mothers — one the mother of the victim and the other the mother of the shooter — meeting by chance in a police station and striking up a conversation despite not knowing who the other was. Gay Thomas Wilson and Rhonda Stubbins White both gave excellent and poignant performances of two women who, by the end of the show, would have both ended up losing their oldest son.

This was a simple but effective episode, a moody look at the ironies of death and violence in Baltimore. George Washington once stopped by the Waterfront Bar but that doesn’t mean anything to the people who are dying and suffering in the city. In the end, Pembleton could only look on in silene as the shooter announced that he was happy to be in jail. “You’re probably going to die in a cell just like this,” Pembleton says.

“Better here than on the streets,” is the reply.

And nothing more is left to be said.