Homicide Life on the Street - The Complete Season 3
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DVD details
Primary Contributor: BraugherDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 1000 minutes
Published: 2003
DVD Release Date: 2003-10-28
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: A&E Home Video
DVD Reviews of Homicide Life on the Street - The Complete Season 3
DVD Review: It's good but it's no Wire
Summary: 3 Stars
According to many, this is the season when the show came into its own. However, when I watch it, I just think of the source material and how it became The Wire: The Complete Series and I weep for the missed opportunity. This is when the show takes its steps toward becoming Law & Order - The Seventh Year, a better version of Law & Order, but still Law & Order. With all of its earnestness and MURDER IS BAD speechifying.
For the most part, it's pretty good. Andre Braugher is intense. Belzer is funny and cranky. The rest of the squad have their individual stories. The murder cases stay away from the cliches of the master criminal and the Ripped from the Headlines (and spindled and mutilated and spit out). But there's no humor. There's no levity. Everyone becomes deadly serious. And while this is a show about Homicide Detectives, the fact that everyone is SO SERIOUS all the time makes for some tedious viewing.
Of course, if you watch it in small doses, it's still brilliant. But watching it all at once and you get into these horrible loops where the detectives have to stop to talk about racism. Or the horribleness of murder. It's like that Robin Williams episode decided to cast a long dark shadow over the proceedings and everyone has to be as dour as a mortician. The show gets a little better towards the end and shows signs of experimentation (particularly the Bruno Kirby episode where it's all from his perspective) but it's still on its downward slide toward earnest seriousness.
Now this would be a four star review, except I have The Wire for comparison. And when comparing a cop show to The Wire, there is never any comparison.
DVD Review: If there were more stars I would give them to the series! I love Homicide.
Summary: 5 Stars
Homicide was one of the best series on TV. Even though it was on in the 90's it still holds up today. Each character is great. DVD Review: Great Show But No Closed Captions
Summary: 3 Stars
So far, the third season of this show is still my favorite, I think the writers and the actors really started to hit their stride and do the show right. After this season, I feel the show started to slip a little bit, possibly by over-reaching to compete with the more shock-driven Law & Order. As a fan of both shows, I don't feel this was really necessary.
My only complaint is that the DVDs do not feature Closed Captions or English Subtitles for the Hearing Impaired. There are a lot of instances of rushed or mumbled dialog, and it would have been nice to have some help understanding what was being said. Deaf fans of this show are completely out of luck. I'm watching the fifth season now, and it seems like they didn't caption any of the seasons of this show. If you are in any way hard of hearing, this is going to be a real tough show for you to follow. I wouldn't have given my money to this company if I'd known about this earlier. Shame on A&E Home Video for leaving deaf customers out in the cold.
DVD Review: Gritty, realistic, well-written police drama
Summary: 5 Stars
Hands down, this is the primo TV police series of all time - and please believe me when I say I know whereof I speak. Everything about this series - the somewhat run-down, out-of-date precinct house, the squabbles over cases - even the lunch thefts from the community refridgerator - all ring true and fresh. Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) presides over a squadroom of detectives who are prickly, proud, argumentative - but dogged in their pursuits of homicide perpetrators. They squabble ceaselessly amongst themselves, they engage in collaborations outside the scope of the squadroom - both romantic and financial, in the case of joint ownership of a local bar - they complain about the job; they complain about each other; but they club together like a dysfunctional but secretly adoring family. It's clear that all of them harbour enormous respect for Giardello, whom they all refer to as "Gee", and he deals with each of them with sometimes simmering forebearance (and in one case with gleeful deceit, taking Bayliss (Kyle Secor) for just about everything in a marathon game of Hearts during a lull in work).
This was my favourite season in a stellar series. By Year Three, the personalities were set and familiar, and in the opening episode had suffered the first casualty in the lineup when veteran detective Crosetti was found drowned. His ex-partner, Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson), had to come to terms with his death, and you truly feel sorry for Lewis's painful final acceptance.
The unusual style of filming of this series - hand-held cameras, repetitive shots of the same two-second scene, for emphasis on a plot point - was unsettling at times but riveting in its ability to catch your attention. The overall reality of the characters made it impossible for me to have a favourite amongst the cast, as each one shines at unexpected moments, but the most memorable to me are Yaphet Kotto as Giardello and Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton, a mercurial, driven, intense detective known for his ability to get criminals to fess up. Ned Beatty, who plays out-of-shape, constantly-cranky Bolander, an old-school detective nearing retirement, always brings something special to the role. John Munch (Richard Belzer) plays his role with wit and sarcasm, sardonically regarding the world with a very jaundiced and jaded eye. Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson), a perpetual whiner, suffers the fate of no one wanting to partner with him and goes through life looking slightly baffled and injured. Kay Howard (the great Melissa Leo), the squad's only female detective up to this point always ensures that she is more than ready to keep up with the boys, and the point is made in Season Three that she has the best record for closing cases in the whole squad. The loose cannon in the group is Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin - the Baldwins are everywhere), who brings his personal problems with him to work and adds to them by carrying on an affair with a superior officer, Megan Russert (Isabella Hofmann). We learn a lot about the detective's lives outside the squadroom in Season Three - in one particularly memorable episode, a burned-out Kay Howard takes vacation time and drives home to the Chesapeake, landing in the middle of small-town, know-everybody trauma, which just shows that you can't run away from your regular life. Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), the newest member of the squad, always seems a trifle off-balance, never really sure of himself in the scope of the group, and never sure of his standing with his partner, Pembleton - a man who would sooner go without any partner at all.
The character development, plots, acting, and edgy realism in this series is unsurpassed, then and now. The show unfortunately didn't glean a high Nielsen rating (it was stuck in the echoing hole of Friday night, when most people with social lives are not home watching TV)but probably much to my own social detriment, I rarely missed an episode, and the critics showered praise upon it. It certainly portrays police work well - many times I marvelled at the fact that politics seems to be pervasive throughout the police world, as people in the show are denied promotions almost purely on a punitive basis, and others are promoted because it's politically - and demographically - correct.
Never a boring moment here; never a bad job of acting. There are several droll cameos - Tim Russert, briefly, and one intro crossover with Chris Noth of Law And Order delivering John Waters to Baltimore as a captured fugitive - and I have to say that the scriptwriting is possibly the best on TV, at least of its genre.
DVD Review: I love this show!
Summary: 5 Stars
Season 3 was better than I tought it was going to be. I'm just upset that this show isn't on the air anymore because it's so good!
Description of Homicide Life on the Street - The Complete Season 3
If the first two seasons introduced one of the great television crime dramas, Homicide really came into its own during the third. Instead of the mere 13 episodes scattered between 1993 and 1994, NBC ordered up a full 20 for the 1994-1995 season. The entire terrific cast is back, with the exception of Jon Polito, whose absence is explained in the fourth episode ("Crosetti"). There are other changes, like the addition of Megan Russert (Isabella Hofmann) as shift commander. Aside from the fact that the mostly male staff now has a woman to report to (alongside Yaphet Kotto's Lt. Giardello), it turns out that Russert has a "history" with one of the detectives. Homicide always excelled in its exploration of racial and office politics; now sexual politics would become a bigger issue. Religion also comes to the fore as Pembleton (Andre Braugher) is finally forced to confront the loss of his faith while working on a case ("The White Glove Murders") involving several aid workers (episodes 1-3). Meanwhile, his partner, Bayliss (Kyle Secor), is coming to resemble the naive young rookie of the first two seasons less and less by the second... while getting to enjoy a little more romance than the rest of the squad--especially the hapless Meldrick (Clark Johnson). But all is not sturm and drang. Humor still finds a place in each episode and Munch (Richard Belzer) still gets many of the best lines. In the season premiere ("Nearer My God to Thee"), for instance, he tells Bolander (Ned Beatty), "There is no such thing as gratuitous sex. Gratuitous violence, yes... Sex cannot and will not ever be gratuitous." He could be describing Homicide itself, in which nothing is ever gratuitous, especially the sudden loss of human life, which is never--and should never be--treated lightly. --Kathleen C. FennessyGeneral DVDs
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