If The Wire were a book it would be the Great American Novel. The series, now coming to the end of its fourth season, has scope, depth, and breath. Like a Dickens novel, it mixes artistry and social protest, entertainment and essay. But because The Wire is an HBO show it’s not viewed as the great sweeping tale of America that it has turned out to be, and with luck will continue to be in its fifth and presumably final season.

But now, as The Wire comes to a close until sometime in 2007, there are those among us who hunger for more of the same: narrative complexity, multilayed, diverse characters, a general intelligence and respect for the audience’s ability to keep up.

If so there is no better place to turn than Homicide: Life on the Street, the NBC crime drama that ran from January 1993 to May 1999. Produced by Barry Levinson, the show was based on the book of the same title by then Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, who spent a year following the city’s homicide detectives. Though the credits tell us that Homicide was created by critic-turned-screenwriter Paul Attanasio, all accounts indicated that Tom Fontana was the real brains behind the show. Fontana also worked on St. Elsewhere and later HBO’s Oz. Fontana doesn’t have anything to do with The Wire, but after eventually beginning to write episodes of Homicide, Simon adapted first one of his other books, The Corner, into an HBO mini-series and then went on to create the complex multi-leveled universe of The Wire. Interested viewers or fans of the show can now dive into Homicide: Life on the Street, which has been re-released on DVD by A&E, all seven seasons plus the TV movie and numerous extras offered up together for $299, packaged as a homicide department file cabinet (this box hit the street on November 14).

Homicide begins with the arrival of Detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) to the homicide unit let by Lt. Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto, who has the opposite of a widow’s peak, i.e., hair to grows so low on his forehead it looks like a cap). Through his eyes we meet the other members of the division and their frustrations. In the course of seven seasons, various of these people commit suicide, die or are at least shot, retire, have heart attacks, or just stay the course. In the timeline of the seven seasons, Bayliss flubs his first case (the murder of a little girl), his partner flubs another (a female serial killer of Catholic women who is institutionalized instead of indicted), and three cops get shot when serving an arrest warrant. Surprisingly, all three survive, though one of them is later killed off, and this multi-episode sequence provides a great part for Steve Buscemi. The biggest story arc of the series is the one that most mirrors or anticipates The Wire. That’s the long-term pursuit of crime king Luther Mahoney (Erik Todd Dellums) and later his sister, Georgia Rae. These campaigns cover the end of season four through the end of season six, and the characters are based on the same real life criminals who inspired the Barksdale clan and some of their satellites in The Wire. A lot of the actors overlap, too.

Homicide fell into its stride in the third season and got better through the fourth to the sixth. Season one is only nine episodes long, and season two only four, so they are housed together in the set’s first box. The final season is widely viewed as the weakest of all, with by then numerous new cast members such as Michael Michele, and the introduction of Giardello’s estranged son, Mike (Giancarlo Esposito), an FBI agent who ends up working out of the unit. The show was a critics’ darling and continually underperformed in the ratings, despite several attempts to piggyback off of Law and Order. NBC held out as long as it could but eventually cancelled the show.

Part of the reason the critics liked the show had to do with its quirky aspects. Reservoir Dogs had come out the year before Homicide made its debut and you can see a tinge of its influence, intentional or not, in the show’s opening dialogues, in which trivial matters are belabored by the irritable cops, such as the fixation by Crosetti (Jon Polito) on Lincoln’s assassination. Homicide was unique at the time for enlisting the aid of movie stars (Ned Beatty, for example) and comics (Richard Belzer) to shake up the casting. The show used hand held 16mm cameras, utilized jump cuts, and on occasion repeated the same second or so of a shot for emphasis. The opening credit music was scary, more appropriate for a horror show that a cop drama. And the show was one of modern pioneers in the use of dynamic music or unexpected rock songs over montage sequences. The most famous episode of the whole series is episode six of season seven (though it should have been broadcast fourth), “The Subway,” the one with Vincent D’Onofrio as John Lange (one of the show’s many in-jokes: Lange is one of Michael Crichton’s many pseudonyms), a businessman crushed under a subway car, who is going to die as soon as the car is removed, but whose girlfriend the team is trying to locate before he dies (the premise was later used by Shyamalan in Signs). The set also includes the terrific PBS documentary about the making of the episode.

Given all this, why do I remain unconvinced? It is intentional but the show is a little harsh and ungiving, which is alienating, but at the same time all too frequently relies on clichés of the prime time crime show. In addition, the two main characters, Bayliss and his partner Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) are rather unpleasant. Bayliss is an idealist, naive do-gooder who intellectualizes his investigations (and is subtly ridiculed for doing so), and who as the show goes on becomes a Buddhist and a bisexual. His descendent is Dutch on The Shield. Pembleton is a vain, arrogant, egotistical character who views himself as the only good cop on the staff. It’s hard to get behind his various causes and battles. My resistance to theses characters may have something to do with the actors, who get better as the show goes along, but in the first three years give unconvincing line readings and bad yelling scenes.

The show is also occasionally inconsistent. Take the next-to-last episode of season three, the one in which Bayliss’s cousin (David Morse) shoots a Turkish youth trying to get into his house. Bayliss, naturally, takes a special interest in the progress of the case, but meets resistance from his unit members, even though different characters in different stories in the same season looked out for their peers. While interviewing the cousin, Pemberton says, “We’re not here to judge you,” which is simply not true, since in private conversations the cops are constantly judging suspects and criminals. But that is the fatal flaw of most cop shows. Both suspects and victims are usually viewed as somehow lacking or the cause of their own misfortune, while the cops are always privileged, with their problems and private lives highlighted and brooded over. It’s interesting to reflect back on shows such as Arrest and Trial and The FBI which had surprisingly sympathetic accounts of both victims and crooks. But these codicils aside, the show has some creative tales and many good supporting or guest cast turns. Across the 35 discs of the set the sound production is adequate, and the transfers improve as the shows become more recent.

If you have already been collecting the Homicide series as they were originally released, there may be little reason to buy this box for yourself, unless you really need the new extras, or the addition of the concluding Homicide TV movie. There are commentary tracks on the episodes “Gone For Goode,” “Gas Man,” “The Hat,” “The Documentary,” “The Subway,” and “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” along with video interviews with Levinson, Fontana, Simon, and writer James Yoshimura, among others and all related Homicide related shows, such as the “To Catch A Killer: Homicide Detectives” Episode of A&E’s American Justice, the Superbowl XXVII commercials for S1, song Listings, a text feature “The Board,” or the erasure board of solved and unsolved murders, “Inside Homicide” featuring David Somin and Yoshimura, the already mentioned “Anatomy of a Homicide,” plus video of various public events and speeches by show originators. On a final bonus disc are all the Law & Order crossover episodes (“Charm City,” “Baby It’s You,” “Sideshow”) and Homicide: The Movie.

If you got this far in the review you are one of the few to know that on Tuesday, I will be offering another DVD giveaway. Hint: it will be one of the bigger DVDs streeting that day.

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