[Chat] Homicide: Life on the Streets on DVD

[Emil Volcheck]

Folks,

in today's mail, I got my DVDs for Homicide: Life on the Street
(Seasons 1 and 2).  This is great news for H:LotS fans!
I ordered mine from DeepDiscountDVD.com (their price: $37.21).

The Sun ran a story today on the new release.

--Emil

---

http://www.sunspot.net/entertainment/tv/bal-to.homicide27may27,0,3757688.story?coll=bal%2Dtv%2Dutility

'Homicide' is back on street again - in DVD

Boxed set restores warm memories of 'our' TV series

By Chris Kaltenbach
Sun Staff

May 27, 2003

It's time to start our love affair with Homicide: Life on the Street
all over again.

A DVD boxed set of Homicide's first two seasons, being released by A&E
Home Video today, offers the chance to get reacquainted with
Pembleton, Munch, Bolander, Howard and all the exhilaratingly flawed
characters that made the show so intoxicating. Not to mention the
myriad Baltimore locations that made it so ... ours.

Airing on NBC from 1993-2000, the show didn't so much change the face
of television as redirect it. It utilized a visual vocabulary that
relied on hand-held cameras and location shooting for verisimilitude;
story lines that concentrated on the everyday nature of police work,
not the flash; and characters who lived in a world that could be as
mundane as it was exciting, frequently more so.

And it was all shot right here in Charm City, at a recycled rec pier
in Fells Point, the ancient Baltimore Cemetery at the east end of
North Avenue, Camden Yards, Patterson Park, the city morgue - over the
course of seven years, there weren't many areas around these parts
that the filmmakers didn't visit at least once.

The four-DVD set includes all nine episodes from season one (the show
debuted on Jan. 31, 1993, right after the Super Bowl) and four from
season two, including the landmark "Bop Gun," starring Robin Williams
as a tourist whose wife is gunned down outside Camden Yards by a kid
who, it turns out, was actually trying to prevent any violence.

Like any good DVD, the Homicide set ($69.95 for the two seasons)
includes a few bonuses for the hard-core fan. There are the
commercials that aired during the Super Bowl that preceded the series
debut, cast and crew biographies, an episode of A&E's American Justice
that looks at real homicide detectives, even a list of the songs used
in each episode - an often-overlooked factor in its success, as few
series have used a soundtrack to greater effect.

Accompanying the premiere episode, "Gone for Goode," is a commentary
track featuring executive producers Barry Levinson (who directed the
episode) and Tom Fontana ruminating on why it was so important that
the series be shot in Baltimore and how established directors who came
to work on the series often had trouble keeping up with all the rules
of episodic TV the series was breaking.

The commentary starts off wobbly, as Levinson and Fontana, who sound
as though they're seeing Homicide for the first time in years,
reconnect with the show. But sticking with it reaps benefits, as the
filmmakers expound on what they were trying to do, how different they
were trying to keep their approach from established norms (Fontana
doesn't sound like much of a fan of Murder, She Wrote) and the
strengths of the cast - pay attention to the buildup to the
introduction of Andre Braugher's Frank Pembleton, who doesn't even
show up until after the first commercial.

Watching these 13 episodes, arranged not in the order in which they
aired, but the order in which the series' producers would have
preferred ("Bop Gun," for instance, appears as episode 13, instead of
10), proves a double delight. Not only is it proof of how insightful
and entertaining TV drama can be, it's also a reminder of an
intoxicating time when Baltimore got to be Hollywood East for a while.

It was great fun, hon.

Copyright 2003, The Baltimore Sun