Amazon.com video review:
The edgy, intense Homicide: Life on the Street earned its
reputation as the best show on TV from the very beginning. In the pilot
episode, "Gone for Goode," rookie detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor)
walks into the squad room of Baltimore's elite and smack into his first
case,
the murder of 11-year-old girl Adina Watson, a crime that will haunt
Bayliss
throughout the series. Oscar-winning director and series executive
producer Barry Levinson helms this episode himself, establishing the
nervous, energetic camera work, the bickering camaraderie of the homicide
squad, and the meticulous attention to police detail that defined the
series. He won an Emmy for his efforts. The third season episode "Every
Mother's Son" guest stars Sean Nelson (Fresh) as a cold juvenile
killer who couldn't care less that he murdered an innocent boy, while the
mothers of victim and killer unknowingly meet in the station waiting room.
The final episode in the set, "A Doll's Eye" from the fourth season, is
a quiet, introspective look at the parents of a boy left brain-dead by a
stray bullet who are dealing with their grief while under pressure to make a
decision that could save another child through the organ donor program.
Mandy Patinkin make an uncredited cameo as his Chicago Hope doctor.
This set lacks the coherent thread that pulled the episodes together on a weekly
basis, but it displays the series' range like a candy sampler, and the
uniformly
excellent episodes are worth seeing under any circumstance. --Sean
Axmaker
Amazon.com video review:
"The Subway" became the most celebrated episode of the sixth
season of Homicide: Life on the Street. A showcase for Andre
Braugher's Frank Pembleton, the squad's tetchy, intense, brilliant
detective, it takes place almost entirely in the subway and focuses on the
relationship between Pembleton and the dying victim of a gruesome subway
platform accident (guest star Vincent D'Onofrio), who's not expected to
live
out the hour. It garnered lavish praise from TV critics across the U.S.,
earned two Emmy nominations (including one for D'Onofrio), and won the
prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. Little did
documentary director Theodore Bogosian know what was in store when he began
his made-for-public TV special Anatomy of a Homicide, a detailed
look
at the creation of the episode from idea through script and production to
broadcast. You get it all: script conferences, location scouting, special-effects challenges (how do you portray a man convincingly trapped by a tram and
twisted like taffy?), the clip from the HBO series Taxicab
Confessions that inspired the story, and a privileged look at network
politics. It's an inspired pairing for the video debut of the series, a
fine
introduction for new viewers, and the equivalent of a coffee-table video
album for the faithful. --Sean Axmaker
