A Groundbreaking TV Show Can Finally Be Streamed. There’s Just One Problem.
As absences from the Alexandrian library of streaming television go, there were few gaps more glaring than the blank shelf where Homicide: Life on the Street was meant to reside. Although it was perennially low in the ratings, the hard-edged NBC drama was like nothing else on the air when it debuted in 1993, with live-wire performances, cinéma vérité–style camerawork, and plots drawn straight from the beat reporting of then–Baltimore Sun correspondent David Simon. But as contemporaries like ER and The X-Files made their way into the reality of postphysical media, Homicide remained a notable omission, receding in the rearview like a DVD player left out on the curb.
The news that Homicide would finally make its online debut on Peacock this month was greeted with hosannas, amplified by the announcement that the entire series would be given a digital refresh, upgraded from dull, drab analog to HD and 4K. But in all the dutiful rephrasings of NBCUniversal’s press release sprinkled across media outlets, none thought to ask a simple question: What exactly would this refurbished version look like? And, more specifically, what shape would it be in?
Widescreen TV was still a novelty when Homicide went off the air in 1999 and little more than a pipe dream when it debuted, but it has since become a norm so overwhelming that no vintage series can resist its pull. Seinfeld, Friends, The Simpsons: One after another reentered the culture in newly rectangular form, with little notice beyond the purposefully vague promise of remastering. Filling a modern TV with an image crafted in the analog era typically involves taking a bit off the top and bottom and showing more on the sides, which is possible because shows shot on film routinely captured more than was ever designed to be used. But because those extra pieces on the side were never meant to be seen, they often expose crew members and equipment lurking just outside the intended frame. It’s not difficult to remove them with modern technology, but that takes time and money that studios aren’t always willing to spend. In the remastered version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “The Body” that’s currently streaming on Hulu, you can clearly see a microphone poking into the upper right-hand corner as Buffy walks in and discovers her mother lying dead on the living-room couch, a moment of heartrending shock disrupted by an unwanted reminder that you are simply watching actors on a set. Lopping off the top and bottom creates the opposite problem, stranding visual information we’re supposed to have outside the boundaries of what we can see. In Seinfeld’s “The Pothole,” for example, you can see George Costanza gesturing furiously at a New York street but not the pothole that has provoked his rage.
These are extreme examples, and also rare ones. In the analog days, back before TV was considered a serious art form, shows had to be calibrated for a wide variety of suboptimal viewing circumstances, reading as clearly on a 5-inch screen tucked into the corner of a brightly lit kitchen as on a high-end set, and because tube TVs distorted around their curved edges, they were covered in housings that obscured their corners—all of which meant that you couldn’t afford to be too precious in how you composed a shot. (Back then, if an entire episode was too dark to see, it was considered the fault of the people who made it, not blamed on viewers with improperly calibrated screens.) So while converting an episode of Friends to widescreen might result in some weirdly cramped or off-balance compositions, it’s not as if you’re starting with Citizen Kane—if you can see the actors’ faces and their bodies, you’re more or less getting the point.
Homicide was more visually distinctive than the average TV show, especially in 1993. In an era when moving from feature films to television was all but unheard of, the pilot was directed by Oscar winner Barry Levinson, establishing a kinetic, anxious style that had more in common with the burgeoning indie-film movement than with a standard network procedural. Rather than falling back on TV veterans—who, in any case, might have been reluctant to set up shop in Baltimore for weeks on end—the first season’s directing roster was likewise filled out by people from the world of feature films, both independent and mainstream.
The latter group included Martin Campbell, coming off a string of schlocky but solid Hollywood potboilers that would within a couple of years put him in the director’s chair for the James Bond movie GoldenEye. Campbell directed two episodes in Homicide’s nine-episode first season, one of which, “Three Men and Adena,” is now an established classic, sharing space with the sixth season’s “Subway” on lists of the greatest episodes ever made. Tom Fontana won an Emmy for his script, which finds homicide detectives Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) and Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) attempting to sweat a confession out of suspect Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn), who they believe is responsible for the murder and mutilation of an 11-year-old girl.
The episode takes place almost entirely in “the Box,” the windowless interrogation room that becomes synonymous with Homicide over the course of its run, in large part because of the way it allowed Braugher’s ferocious performance to take over every inch of the screen. In “Three Men and Adena,” the camera presses in tight on the faces of the suspect and his questioners, so close you can see every drop of perspiration, each stipple of five-o’clock shadow. Pembleton and Bayliss know that this is their last chance to question Tucker, who’s been hauled in so many times the department is on the verge of a harassment suit, and they go after him with every tool in their arsenal, ratcheting up the tension, then letting it slacken, only to come at him again from a new and unexpected angle. They rage; they plead; they outwit and empathize, anything that might get him to crack. And Tucker, an itinerant produce vendor with no representation or resources, pushes right back, until neither the detectives nor the audience is sure if they’ve got the right man. (The episode was based on a real murder investigation recounted in Simon’s book—which, like, the case on the show, remained unsolved.)
The version of “Three Men and Adena” streaming on Peacock dissipates that tightly framed tension by adding extra space at the edges of the screen. In the episode as it originally aired, Bayliss shoves a photo of the victim in Tucker’s face, and it’s as if he’s being physically pressed against the edge of the frame, with no way to escape, no choice but to confront the likeness of the girl he may have killed. In the new version, there’s more room to breathe, and you can see a pack of cigarettes laying on the table on the right side of the screen—not a major distraction, but a superfluous element in a moment meant to intensely focus on only two things.
It’s not just the framing either. When Bayliss and Pembleton’s boss looks in on their interrogation, he does it through a two-way mirror with the same dimensions as an analog television. The show wasn’t just shot for those TVs. It was built and staged and lit for them. Because the original image is nearly as tall as it is wide, Campbell underlines the way the power dynamics shift during the interrogation by moving his camera along the vertical axis, pressing down on the actors from above when they put the heat on, meeting them at eye level when they’re letting off steam. A director shooting in widescreen wouldn’t have just framed things differently. They’d have done everything differently, acting according to a set of parameters that in this version no longer apply.
That said, the remastered version looks, well, kind of great. Even “fabulous,” as Fontana put it in an interview with Vulture. On my DVDs, the original colors are flat verging on monochromatic, a washed-out yellowish gray, but in Peacock’s HD, the tile walls of the Box are an earthy ocher, and you can see each crease in Moses Gunn’s brow. If I’d never seen the show and had to pick between the two, I’d choose the new version in a heartbeat. I’m mesmerized by the sweat shining on Braugher’s luminous skin, savoring the freshly visible handwriting on a crumpled paper bag full of incriminating evidence. And yet I can’t quite banish the thought: Maybe Homicide was never meant to look this good.
Or maybe it’s not “good.” Maybe it’s just new. Why stop at restoring a piece of vintage media to its original form when you can take it so much further now? If a 50-year-old album sounds thin and uncommanding next to the infinitely malleable sounds of contemporary music, why not add a discreet touch of digital compression to level the playing field? (In TV, remastering is code for “cropping to widescreen”; in music, it’s code for “making it louder.”) Sure, James Cameron could have used the long-awaited digital release of The Abyss and True Lies to give viewers the experience of watching a fresh 35 mm print on opening weekend. But he has been living in the digital realm so long that he can’t abide the limitations of analog filmmaking anymore. The new versions smooth out every trace of natural film grain, using A.I. to artificially sharpen the images until the actors look like plastic. Rather than polishing 30-year-old movies to look as if they were made yesterday, it makes them appear as if they were shot on Pandora.
Even if you’re 4K-pilled enough to prefer the way True Lies looks now, no amount of digital tinkering can smooth over the movie’s grotesque sexism and racism, which, unlike the beauty of film grain, is better left in the past. Homicide has aged better than some shows of its era, but a script, by a white writer, in which a suspect lobs the N-word at a Black cop multiple times would certainly attract more comment now than it did then; and as much as I love Buffy, I cringe when the show treats Xander’s discomfort with a gay classmate as an amiable foible rather than a character flaw. (That goes double for my beloved NewsRadio, in which every other Joe Rogan scene seems to be built around some sort of gay-panic gag.) Perhaps it’s better when every frame reminds you that you’re watching something from another time and neither the image nor the attitudes will necessarily conform to current sensibilities. We’ve folded the idea that every piece of past media should be readily accessible into the idea that it should be easy to watch—easy on the eyes and easy on the brain. But if we can’t cope with black bars on the sides of the screen, how are we going to handle stories that don’t move at the pace of a TikTok feed, books with words we don’t know, songs that don’t drop their hook in the first 30 seconds? Appreciating art from different times is a practice, one it’s easy to lose touch with if you don’t do it enough. Rather than insisting that the old feel new, we could stand to reflect more frequently on how soon what feels new right now will be a part of the distant past.
