As all 122 episodes of the seminal police drama are compiled in a new box set, Jim Shelley revisits the mean streets of Homicide

The best cop show of recent times – one of the most innovative and influential dramas of all time – was set not in New York, Miami or LA, but in Baltimore. It featured a squad of embattled, super (street) smart, sardonic detectives fighting against the drug dealing and killing blitzing their beloved city. This series stemmed from the pen of the godlike David Simon and was as literate, funny and deep as television could be. But it was not The Wire. It was Homicide: Life On The Street.

Homicide: Life On The Street was even better than The Wire. Yeah – as Chris Rock likes to cry defiantly – I said it! The show ran for seven seasons on NBC from 1993 to 1999, making the new box set a glorious 122 episodes; twice as many as The Wire. It is thus the perfect gear for any Wireheads jonesing for a fix of Simon-flavoured cop drama. The series was based on Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, David Simon's astonishing record of his time "embedded" with the Baltimore police.

It was brought to the screen by the city's film leviathan Barry Levinson (Diner, Tootsie, Rain Man etc), Paul Attanasio (the writer of Donnie Brasco and now executive producer of House), and Tom Fontana (St Elsewhere and later creator of Oz). Simon wrote and edited a few episodes and produced the final two seasons. "I was proud to learn everything they could teach me," he told me.

Simon regards Homicide as "a series of interconnected short stories", comparing it – rather grandiosely – to James Joyce's Dubliners. For me, Homicide is the missing link between Hill Street Blues and The Wire. The links with The Wire and the book are myriad. In one hilarious episode, detectives Munch and Bolander re-enact Simon's anecdote about a suspect confessing after taking a "lie-detection test" – using the station photocopier. "Then David went and did it in The Wire," Fontana protests. "I was like, 'Dude! We already did it.' He said, 'Yeah I know, but I wanted to do it again.'"

The Wire, for Simon, was "more akin to the dynamics of Baltimore as I knew them". But life in Baltimore is horribly real in Homicide.

Clark Johnson

Fontana won an Emmy for the pivotal episode of the first series about the brutal rape and stabbing of 11-year-old Adena Watson – based on the murder of Latonya Wallace, also featured in Simon's book. "We were shooting one day," Clark Johnson (who played detective Meldrick Lewis) tells me. "This lady from the neighbourhood came up to me and said, 'Excuse me. She wasn't lying over here. She was lying over there.'"

So much for NBC's view that the title, A Year On The Killing Streets, needed to be more upbeat.

"A policeman once said to me a young man of 20 had more chance of dying in Baltimore than on the beach at Normandy," Fontana recalls. "We had to be true to that."

Both Simon and Fontana set out to debunk the myths TV had created about police work, starting with the premise that cops get along. Homicide's detectives squabble with their partners like married couples. "You never say 'please' and 'thank you'," complains Tim Bayliss. "PLEASE don't be an idiot. Thank you," seethes Frank Pembleton.

"The greatest lie in dramatic TV," Simon has said, "is the cop who stands over a body and pulls up the sheet and mutters 'damn' … To a real homicide detective, it's just a day's work."

Whereas The Wire was about the cases (the wiretaps used to nail Stringer, Avon, or Marlo), Homicide was about the cops – a group of detectives so involved that death is what they live for. Death becomes the norm. A healthy, happy life at home is beyond them.

"The Wire is more Brecht," agrees Fontana, referring to Simon's description of The Wire as "a political tract masquerading as a cop show". "But we were more Chekhov," – not a distinction you would make discussing The Bill.

The likes of Bayliss (the liberal conscience of the show) and Pembleton (the volatile Jesuit tormented by the need for redemption) are torn apart by their experiences in a manner so torrid that McNulty and co look rather cardboard.

Large parts of each episode are spent with the detectives sitting around talking – about how the world's first fridge was invented in Baltimore; how Montel Williams is from Baltimore ("A guy from Baltimore has got his own talkshow?!"); the claim that "14% of seagulls are lesbians".

Andre Braugher

They talk about sex, death, and love in a way that is positively (or negatively) existential. "The way a woman feels about a man," argues detective Bolander (Ned Beatty), "that's the way he's going to feel about himself, his friends, his job." Eschewing the crucial forensic breakthrough, Homicide's detectives talked their suspects into confession. And the show only ever had one real shoot-out.

"The ratings spiked. Then we went back to making the real show and the ratings went back down!" Fontana laughs.

It's easy to see why Homicide can be seen as more radical than The Wire, not least because it was on NBC rather than the more experimental, independent HBO.

Both shows looked at the way race, the media and local politics in Baltimore affect the police. The leader of the squad in Homicide was the noble, Othello-like figure of Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto). The smartest, sharpest, master of the art of interrogation was Pembleton (Andre Braugher).

'Where's the pretty girl? Where's the hunky guy? We had the least attractive cast on television!'

The show took risks at every turn. "The network would say, 'Where's the pretty girl? Where's the hunky guy?' We had Danny Baldwin! We had the least attractive cast on television!" laughs Fontana.

Clark Johnson, who played Gus Haynes in The Wire, directed the pilots and finales of The Wire and The Shield, and may be the world's greatest authority on TV cop shows, says: "I would put the cast of the first two series up against any cast that's been on TV."

Barry Levinson established the show's groundbreaking visual style (aped by NYPD Blue) from episode one, draining it of colour and shooting entirely on hand-held cameras that swooped in and out of the actors' faces, jabbing at them like a boxer. And, amazingly, the killing of schoolgirl Adena Watson was left unsolved. "That would never happen now. We live in the world of procedural crime dramas now," Fontana laments, referring to CSI – which he openly disdains.

Clark Johnson plays Detective Meldrick Lewis. Photograph: Gail Burton/AP

The network didn't like it, but Fontana says: "Homicide had less censorship problems than St Elsewhere. We did an episode on testicular cancer where the network freaked out because the word 'testicle' had never been said on television before. Ever. They became irritated by Homicide. They hated the camerawork. We were in danger of being cancelled every year."

The second season was four episodes long. "Then they moved us to Friday nights, which was basically Siberia and just forgot about us."

The quality of the scripts attracted star names such as Kathryn Bigelow, Steve Buscemi, John Waters, Kathy Bates and James Earl James. Edie Falco, Elijah Wood and Jake Gyllenhaal made early appearances, as did Chris Rock, as a paedophile suspected of killing Adena.

Murder is relentless in Homicide, the cases more sinister than The Wire, making it more intense, more affecting: an old lady has her tongue cut out and wedged down her throat; a man is trapped under a subway train, dying before Pembleton's eyes.

Fontana takes the fact that The Wire has stolen Homicide's thunder remarkably well. "You mean, the way people talk as if it sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus?" he laughs.

"Look, I love The Wire. David picked up the ball and ran with it. I'm amazed we got to make the show the way we did for as many episodes as we did. So I'm just grateful for that."

So should we all be.

Homicide: A Life On The Street – The Complete Series is out on Mon