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Rating:  -
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.
Rating:  -
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 Everything about this series - the somewhat run-down, out-of-date precinct house, the squabbles over cases - even the lunch thefts from the community refridgerator - all ring true and fresh.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.
Rating: -
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!
Rating:  -
Excellent series. Many terrific episodes in this season. I'd've given it five stars, but it hasn't any captions and the extras seem rather paltry. Lots of great characters and nice storylines. Good story arcs with the detective shootings, the bar opening, etc. Two of the stand-out episodes are "Every Mother's Son" and "Gas Man."
Rating: -
In my opinion, season three, the first full season of Homicide, was the best. The ratings had been anemic in seasons one and two, so that it was often called during that time "the best TV show you're not watching". Hoping to improve ratings, NBC insisted on a number of changes, both cosmetic and thematic. Unfortunately, talented but unphotogenic veteran actor Jon Polito was ordered dropped from the cast as the network clamored for more on-screen romance and violence. In order to have episodes the network considered more sensational air during "sweeps" periods, NBC sometimes aired episodes out of order, often to the detriment of story arcs that had developed over several episodes. Probably the most infamous of such gaffes during this season was NBC's decision to broadcast an episode featuring the program's first sex scene ("A Model Citizen") prior to the airing of the much acclaimed episode, "Crosetti"; it was in this latter hour that the death of Detective Steve Crosetti, Jon Polito's character, was revealed and explained. The detective had been in Atlantic City on vacation since the end of the second season's four episodes. For reasons never fully explained or understood, especially considering Crosetti's deep religious beliefs mentioned on the show during the first two seasons, he returns to Baltimore and kills himself rather than return to his job. As a result of this deviation from the producers' intended order, viewers of "A Model Citizen" found out from a comment made by his ex-partner, detective Meldrick Lewis, merely that Crosetti had died but not how or when. Fortunately, the DVD set remedies this and has the episodes in the order they were intended to be aired.
This season also featured a trilogy of episodes ("The City That Bleeds," "Dead End," and "End Game") in which three detectives are seriously wounded as a result of a gunman's ambush, two of them almost fatally; meanwhile, the rest of the unit grapples with this reminder of their own mortality as they hunt for the perpetrator. What makes it even worse - if that is possible - is that the detectives were at a completely wrong address at the time of the shooting due to an administrative typo on the arrest warrant. These "cliffhanger" episodes were intended to cause the network execs to decide to let Homicide finish out its season, in spite of its ratings, and they did the trick.
Isabella Hoffmann is added to the cast this year as the new night shift commander, Megan Russert. Although she was added by the network for all the wrong reasons - to "pretty up" the cast - she is an outstanding actress and a welcome addition throughout her tenure. Russert misses detective work, though, and in the Christmas episode "All Through the House" she joins Meldrick on an investigation into the murder of a material witness when she discovers she knows something about the victim's case. During this same episode Munch and Bolander investigate the death of a man in a Santa Claus suit and Munch spends the evening with a child they believe is the victim's son. Munch is trying to hide from the boy what he believes is his father's fate, but is finally about to tell him what he thinks has happened when Bolander returns with the boy's father, bruised but OK. It turns out that the murder victim had mugged the boy's father and stolen his Santa suit only to be mugged and murdered himself later that night.
In one of the series' best season finales, "Gas Man", Bruno Kirby stars as a recently released ex-con who is out to kill detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) because he had helped lock him up years ago. Kirby plays a loser who, years ago, had falsely claimed to be a qualified repairman so that he could earn a few quick bucks by repairing a gas heater. His faulty repair work causes an explosion and the death of the family whose heater he repaired, and he is angry that he was made a "test case" and tried and convicted of the family's deaths. At the end of the show his plan of revenge has seemed to work out, and he is ready to murder Frank, but ultimately he is all talk and cannot go through with it. The final line of the episode, delivered by Pembleton, is typical of his Shakespearean musings. He is told that he is lucky that the ex-con did not kill him. He responds by saying "Luck had nothing to do with it. God reached down and graced a fool with wisdom." Ultimately, we never know if Frank is talking about himself-for how he handles himself in the situation, or the ex-con for realizing that killing Frank will solve nothing.
These episodes are typical of the high quality drama, often with a sense of irony, you'll experience in this third season of Homicide. So, if you liked seasons one and two, I know you'll love this one too. Highly recommended.
P.S. I am reviewing season three here because I have the room to go into details. However, if you already know you like the entire series, seasons 1-7 are now selling as a package set on Amazon for about $350. This will give you considerable savings over buying the seasons one at a time.
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