Trivia / Homicide: Life on the Street

• Acting for Two: In the fourth season episode "The Wedding", Melissa Leo plays both Kaye Howard and her twin sister Carrie (though she's credited as "Margaret May" in that role).
• Actor-Inspired Element: Several examples:
  • The subplot in one episode in which Giardello believes that a potential girlfriend rejected him for colorist reasons was inspired by Yaphet Kotto's own experiences, and desire to bring the social problem to public attention.
  • Frank Pembleton's stroke happened because Andre Braugher threatened to leave the show, saying that Frank had become too invincible a character and boring to perform.
  • The revelation that Tim Bayliss was sexually abused as a child was suggested by Kyle Secor, who felt that it would explain a number of aspects of his personality.
• Actor-Shared Background: Giancarlo Esposito is of Italian and African-American descent like his character.
• Cast the Expert: Gary D'Addario, a retired police commander, inspired the character Al Giardello, and played a recurring role as QRT head Lt. Jasper, in addition to working as a technical advisor.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Originally, NBC wanted Jason Priestley to play John Munch, instead of Richard Belzer. Executive producers Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson stuck to their guns, and Belzer was cast. He'd eventually play a sleazy detective in Homicide: The Movie.
  • Jon Polito originally read for the part of Detective Lewis but requested to be cast in the part of Crosetti. The character was not named Crosetti in the original script but the name was changed to reflect Polito's Italian heritage.
• Creator Backlash: Yaphet Kotto hated how little he was given to do on the show^note He described his time on the show as hanging around Baltimore and occasionally coming on set to say one line. He begged for more to do but the writers kept focusing on the detective characters.. It drove him to write a few episodes so that Giardello would do more than say a few lines around the squad room.
• The Danza: Recurring homicide unit secretary Judy is played by Judy Thornton.
• Directed by Cast Member:
  • Clark Johnson (Meldrick Lewis) directed five episodes.
  • Kyle Secor (Tim Bayliss) directed three episodes.
• Dueling Shows: With NYPD Blue, and Nash Bridges, with which it shared a time slot.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Jon Polito's Steve Crosetti was cut to make way for a younger, attractive female character. The show also had its scheduling messed around with a lot.
  • Generally speaking the show received a lot of creative freedom and leniency from the network, who always renewed the show despite its low ratings. Beatty and Baldwin left over contract disputes, as opposed to being simply replaced. The additions of Callie Thorne as Laura Ballard and Michael Michele as Rene Sheppard were obviously executively mandated however. Jon Seda joining the cast out of nowhere and suddenly rivaling Pembleton and Bayliss for screen time is believed to have come from an order to have a younger, hipper (and whiter, though Seda is a Latino playing a darker-skinned Italian American), lead character.
    • However, the executives' desire to make Homicide a more action oriented show is partly what drove away Ned Beatty at least.
  • The events leading up to the show's cancellation read almost like a parody: the network agreed to renew the show for an eighth season, but only if the producers moved the setting from Baltimore to Miami, changed it from a homicide unit to a P.I. firm, and fired the entire cast except for Munch, Sheppard, and Ballard. The producers wisely declined.
  • The Pembleton stroke story-arc was concluded somewhat earlier than intended due to letters from fans who wanted to see the old Frank back.
  • Possibly the most shameful example, related to the Jon Polito example, is a long-standing rumor that the executives got rid of Melissa Leo's well-received character Kay Howard to make way for more traditionally beautiful actresses Callie Thorne as Laura Ballard and Michael Michele as Rene Sheppard. Needless to say (as well as the characters' personalities being a factor), they weren't nearly as liked as she was.
  • Executives forced Luther Mahoney to be killed off, as they felt he was getting too much spotlight for a criminal on a cop show.
• Fake Nationality: Jon Seda, who is Puerto Rican descent, played Italian-American Det. Falsone.
• Hostility on the Set: According to DVD commentaries of Season 5, Reed Diamond (Kellerman) and Max Perlich (Brodie) had a very poor working relationship and couldn't stand each other.
• Network to the Rescue: The first season's ratings were abysmal (and ratings for the rest of the run weren't much better) and NBC was going to cancel the show but Barry Levinson managed to convince the executives to give the show another chance by promising to get his friend Robin Williams to come in for a guest role. This resulted in the show being renewed for a four-episode second season, the shortest ever season for a network series in US television history.
• No Export for You: Try to find a copy of Homicide: The Movie outside of the U.S.
• Playing Against Type:
  • The murderer in the episode "Full Court Press" is played by Steve Burns. Yes, that one.
  • Legendary comedian Robin Williams gives a serious (and Emmy-nominated!) performance in "Bop Gun" as a grieving father whose wife was killed during a mugging.
  • Chris Rock guest-starred as a pedophile and murderer in "Requiem for Adena".
  • Lily Tomlin played an Affably Evil fugitive and murderer in "The Hat".
  • Neil Patrick Harris as a sleazy drug dealer in "Valentine's Day".
• Promoted to Opening Titles:
  • Max Perlich as Brodie in Season Five, after being recurring in Season Four.
  • Jon Seda (Falsone) and Peter Gerety (Gharty) were added in Season Six after both appearing in the final two-part story of Season Five.
  • Toni Lewis (Stivers) was finally added in Season Seven after a single episode in Season Four and a frequent recurring role in Seasons Five and Six.
  • Željko Ivanek (Danvers) was a recurring role throughout the entire show and was finally promoted for the reunion movie.
• Recast as a Regular: Walt MacPherson played a uniformed officer in the first season who finds a piece of evidence. He appears later, starting in the third season, in a recurring role as homicide detective Roger Gaffney. Gaffney rises from detective to lieutenant to captain.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Pembleton's wife Mary was played by Andre Braugher's wife Ami.
  • Toni Lewis (Det. Terri Stivers) is married to Chris Tergesen, the show's music supervisor. In addition, Tergesen's brother, Lee Tergesen, had a recurring role as Officer Chris Thormann.
• Romance on the Set: Reed Diamond and Michelle Forbes briefly dated while on the show together.
• Screwed by the Network: Not as bad as some examples. Basically, NBC's decision to air the show at 10:00pm on a Friday opposite Nash Bridges assured that the show would never find its audience, a fact lamented by the many critics that kept it alive. Because the show was highly critically acclaimed, NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield (himself known for green lighting and supporting a number of good 1990's shows such as Seinfeld and Friends), stood by the show and constantly renewed it. Unfortunately, however, Littlefield was also a man with a major inferiority complex, and come season 6, feeling that the show was not getting any of the high ratings that equaled the programming successes of his predecessor, Brandon Tartikoff (who, as most viewers of the 1980's recall, practically saved NBC from oblivion by green lighting such major juggernauts as Family Ties, Cheers, The Golden Girls, and the biggest one of all, The Cosby Show) he decided that he was giving the show runners too much freedom, so he stepped in with a few changes, adding characters like Falsone, Ballard, Sheppard and downsizing the screen time of some of the favorites to give the spotlight to these characters. Now, ordinarily, the more sensible solution would have been to just simply find the show a better time slot (like the Wednesdays or Thursdays that the show premiered in). However, as mentioned above, Littlefield was very fussy about not having his ego get bruised, and to him, simply admitting that he made a mistake regarding the show's time slot was a major sign of weakness which would make him look like nothing more than a Poor Man's Substitute for Tartikoff. Eventually, executive meddling is what killed the show, as seen in the above entry.
• Technology Marches On: In one episode, Felton brags about his portable TV, which lets him watch ball games and dirty movies (on videotape) while stuck waiting to testify in court. In the decades since, smartphones and streaming have made such activities mundane.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The producers wanted to include ER as a third series in the Crossover between Homicide and Law & Order , but ultimately ER didn't make it in. Depending on who you ask, either the producers of ER outright declined, or they were up for the crossover, but the collective group couldn't figure out how to work them in.^note It would have required the relevant characters to relocate to a third city, Chicago, which is some distance from both New York and Baltimore.
  • There were plans to have a subplot in Season 2 about Crosetti moving into the suburbs, but it was never filmed.
  • Jason Priestley and Jim Beaver auditioned for the role of John Munch. NBC argued heavily for casting Priestley, but Richard Belzer was ultimately cast. Priestley later appeared as a detective in the Finale Movie.
  • During an interview, Erik Dellums claimed Tom Fontana and David Simon planned to add Luther Mahoney to the main cast. However, NBC vetoed this and ordered them to kill the character off to stop him from taking focus from the detectives.
• Written by Cast Member: Yaphet Kotto (Al Giardello) wrote three episodes.
• You Look Familiar:
  • The actor who played Gaffney, Walt MacPherson, had previously appeared in the first season as a beat cop who finds an earring at a crime scene and offers it to Bayliss as possible evidence. He later shows up in another episode at a horse stable where a jockey was found dead, chatting with Munch, and is identified by the name "Frank". Unlike Gaffney, Frank seems to get along well enough with Munch during their conversation.
  • Chuck Jeffreys played four different characters over the course of the show's run.

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