In Anticipation of a Paley Center Homicide Reunion

Image via NBC

I wasn’t old enough to be paying attention when Homicide: Life on the Street’s episode “The Subway” aired in 1997, but my parents maintain that it was the most extraordinary thing they’d ever seen on television. Now, sitting bleary-eyed watching the episode over my coffee, I didn’t know what I was getting into, and I absolutely agree with my parents. I imagine what it must have been like watching it when it aired: You tune-in to a crime show that has made it to its fifth season despite poor ratings, to characters with whom you might not be familiar, since you can’t always catch the show when it’s on, and you watch this incredible drama unfold at 10 pm some Friday night in your living room. It wasn’t the only time Homicide pulled off something so affecting, but it’s certainly a good example. This May, twenty years after the episode aired, the Homicide cast and creators will reunite at the Paley Center in New York.

The premise of “The Subway” is quite constrained. The Baltimore Police Department homicide unit is called in when John Lange (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) is pushed into an oncoming subway and pinned between the train and the platform. He’s still alive, but the pressure of the pinning is literally holding him together, and the moment EMTs move him, he will die. While Detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) tries to discern between cruel murder and accident among a frantic mass of disturbed witnesses, Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) sits with Lange to await his fate. Lange’s breathless, angry shouting as his blood pressure gradually drops is sickening. This wait is as emotionally draining as any one-act tragedy.

It was funny to me that when I enthused to my mother about this show I’d found, she could remember vividly that she had loved it as well, and that we shared a crush on Andre Braugher’s Pembleton. Other detectives, like the newer Bayliss, respond to suspects with anger or hatred, but Pembleton is always cool. His voice can drop to a deep, even tone that is tense and terrifying, and the satisfaction that flashes across his face when he finds the truth is brilliant. The effect is mythological. It spans across generational tastes.

The reflection of these events in the eyes of Pembleton shows us the brilliance of Homicide’s anthology-style storytelling. These pivotal moments of loss in guest characters’ lives are part of the daily grind for homicide detectives. Their sensitivity is numbed to the cruel and the grotesque, but it is heightened in other ways. Pembleton insists on holding the subways, and keeping Lange pinned (and alive), until his girlfriend, who is above ground jogging nearby, is found and brought to him to say goodbye.

David Simon wrote the nonfiction book on which Homicide was based, and also wrote and produced for the show in later seasons. Simon began his career as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, but he moved on to nonfiction long-form journalism and then to narrative television. The transition is full of potential: the arc of a TV series allows for continuity, for a writer’s control of tension and denouement, and for an audience’s and writer’s profound intimacy with characters.

From the first episode of Simon’s later show The Wire, Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) shows a similar yearning for continuity and control. He decides he wants to take himself out of the usual homicide routine to focus on one particular case: the Barksdale drug ring. Higher-ups aren’t happy about it, but they can’t stop him. This is one of the magical privileges a detective is allowed in fiction — while usually homicide cops are beholden to the rhythms and needs of the police department as an institution, just once a detective asks for more, and a judge, though reluctant, gives in.

On Homicide, the will of detectives is less influential, and in that sense, the fictional arc is closer to reality. The detectives have to be invested in the human aspects of it to understand how crimes work, but they also have to accept where their work ends. However they might want to identify a larger narrative, to feel as if they’re preventing murder rather than just trying to keep up with it, they can’t. The gravely injured Lange shouts at Pembleton, who is standing, safe, a few feet away, “You got nothing, so I’m what? A lesson in bad luck?” Pembleton just looks at him, brow furrowed. What can he do? Essentially the man is already dead.

Image via NBC

Part of the extraordinary thrill of “The Subway” is that it can be almost entirely contained in a single long scene. The story plays out almost entirely in a few actors’ faces and dialogue, in carefully wrought camera angles and sound editing that produce the horrible grief and beauty of the situation. One might call this a “bottle episode,” but the label doesn’t quite fit. Bottle episodes are used to save money, since they require minimal sets and few extraneous actors. “The Subway” is by no means low budget: the production team had to create the effect of the man pinned under the subway in a real subway station, and the plot explicitly depends on the presence of crowds of extras. In fact, as shown in a PBS documentary on the making of the episode, “The Subway” was a major undertaking, and a constant personal battle for writer James Yoshimura, with push back from casting, network censors, and even the Maryland Transit Administration.

This episode can’t be called a one-off production feat, either. It’s part of the show’s long game of emotional depth, thanks to the larger vision of writer Tom Fontana and executive producer Barry Levinson. Homicide’s most difficult cases grip the homicide detectives as they grip us, and when the episodes end, they leave us in shock. The effect replicates what the homicide detectives sometimes talk about: a kind of whiplash, the inability to accept that something so inconclusive and difficult can be finished.

In her memoir This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, novelist Ann Patchett notes wistfully that “only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.” Take on top of that the continued loss as Yoshimura’s dream story must survive network constraints, logistical production challenges, and varying and sometimes conflicting artistic visions from crew, and the achievement of the episode looks all the more heroic. As shown in the documentary, the network wanted a satisfactory romantic goodbye for Lange, but Yoshimura stood his ground on that, saying that it was essential for Pembleton to fill the role of someone’s end-of-life companion. Simon, who coproduced the episode and was present on set as a consultant, reflected in the documentary on Yoshimura’s language use. Simon argued that any real frustrated detective’s speech has to contain at least a few curse words — though any curse word is more than the network would like. Not to mention the difficulty of producing such a stunt at all, let alone doing it in a working subway station, when MTA officials stand close, miffed (perhaps rightly) by the poor PR implications of Yoshimura’s choice of setting for his “accident.”

When “The Subway” ends, EMTs take Lange above ground on a gurney. The killer, now an afterthought, is taken away in a police car, and detectives, firefighters, and transit officials all disperse. Pembleton, controlled as always, looks shaken. The busy, anonymous outdoors feel alien after nearly an hour below ground.

Writer Tom Fontana said in an interview for the Archive of American Television, “If my stuff is dark, it’s because I worry that so much of television is a lie… I think I have a responsibility to say, ‘You know, things don’t always turn out the way they do on television.’” David Simon observed on his transition from journalism to television, “Art frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world.” From the creators’ vision, you get a gem like “The Subway,” an infuriating hour, heartbreaking and horrific and hard to let go. I can’t think of a more perfect medium for the story of a team of detectives than Homicide: an episodic drama on unsteady footing, which might be canceled at any time, but in which any single episode is extraordinarily captivating.

Image via NBC

Click here for info on the Paley Center’s Homicide: Life on the Street reunion in New York City on May 24, 2018.

Paley Matters is a publication of The Paley Center for Media.