Bop Gun - Homicide: Life on the Street

This review is a series of reviews of the ten best episodes of the 1990s TV drama Homicide: Life on the Streets.

Bop Gun, Story by Tom Fontana, Teleplay by David Mills and David Simon, Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal. Aired 1/6/1994. NBC Home Entertainment. 1994.

"(Endangered species) Shoot them with the bop gun" -- Parliament/Funkadelic.

NBC ordered 9 episodes of the series Homicide: Life on the Street mid-season in 1993. When it showed moderate success in the ratings following its Super Bowl premiere, the network ordered 4 more, which it aired the next year. Considered its second season, these 4 episodes moved away from the de-saturated, grainy look of the year before, but kept the gritty realism that made the show a departure from other police procedurals. "Bop Gun," which was supposed to end the truncated season, instead opened it, mainly because of its guest-starring turn with comedian and actor Robin Williams. NBC executives had a habit of switching episode air dates beginning the previous year when they took the episode "Night of the Dead Living" out of its third episode line-up for fear that its unconventional storytelling (on a hot day, the detectives sit around the squad room, chewing the fat about this or that) would scare off potential viewers. They'd not only continue to interfere with the show’s air dates, but with the cast and stories as well. Still, during the second season, the series continued to maintain its gritty vision with "Bop Gun."

"Bop Gun" was written by the late David Mills, a former journalist for the Washington Post, and David Simon, whose book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets about his year spent in the Baltimore homicide department, became the basis for the series. This pedigree lends to surprising and interesting details about homicide investigations and its effects on all those involved. Dets. Kay Howard and Beau Felton investigate the murder of a young mother who was mugged and killed while touring Baltimore with her family. Unlike most police procedurals, which would focus on the investigation throughout show's running time, the detectives quickly arrest the young man responsible. Most of the episode, however, examines the emotional maelstrom the victims’ husband, Robert Ellison (Robin Williams), and his children (a young Jake Gyllenhaal plays his son Matt) experience. Williams, whose manic acting style has put off viewers, dials it down in this episode. He does a masterful job of portraying a man who is grieving for the sudden and violent death of his wife and his powerlessness to protect her even after death. When Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) jokes with his colleagues about how the red ball case (cases that the higher brass consider important enough to expend the department’s entire manpower and resources to investigate) will give him overtime pay, Ellison angrily demands that Felton be taken off the case. Williams presents Ellison as a man who is desperate to assert himself in any way no matter how fruitless to overcome the impotence he feels in his failure to protect his family. He bristles with a barely restrained anger and hostility that only lends to more frustration since his anger is directed mostly toward himself. You sense a man who wishes he could be as tough and heartless as the men who killed his wife, but knows all too well that even if he had a gun in his possession, as he suggests in another scene with Det. Bayliss when he asks to hold his gun, that he wouldn’t have had the courage to pull the trigger. As he tells Felton during the photograph line-up when he’s unable to pick out the perpetrators:

I bet if someone murdered your wife you’d remember all the faces, wouldn’t you? But I’m just an average guy; all I remember is the gun. I just stood there, staring at it. I just stood there and watched them kill my wife.

He fears that in the end he is a coward and that his own son knows this as well as he does.

The rest of the episode addresses Kay Howard’s (Melissa Leo) refusal to accept that the man who was arrested for the homicide, Vaughn Perkins (Lloyd Goodman), was indeed the perpetrator. Too much about the case---the fact that he didn’t have any major priors on his record and his remorse---doesn’t gel so, after asking for shift commander Lt. Al Giardello’s (Yaphet Kotto) permission, decides to do a shadow investigation to uncover the truth. Howard is less concerned with how, but why. This is a theme that runs throughout the series: the idea that investigating the motivations of the crimes won’t get you any closer to solving murders or will offer any satisfactory answers about why the killing happened in the first place. Much of Tim Bayliss’s stories focused on his obsession with understanding why. Here, Howard, who is the lone female investigator in the homicide unit, is the first one to obsesses over this question. Why would Vaughn, who was raised in a good home by an aunt and uncle and had all the advantages to succeed in life, so willingly squander these opportunities? Yet Vaughn’s life, fraught with the tragedy of losing his father to murder and coping with a mother with a drug habit, is anything but simple. Still, his older brother, who went through the same struggles as Vaughn, successfully avoided the traps Vaughn fell into. Howard’s investigation only leads to more questions and the inevitability of Vaughn’s guilt. When she meets him one last time in hold up, he admits to her about what happened in those seconds before tragedy struck. Hoping he could protect everyone from getting hurt, he instead became disoriented as the situation grew out of hand. Here, the episode presents a dichotomy. Whereas Ellison is powerless to protect his family, Vaughn is likewise powerless over events that quickly spin out of his control.

In the end, both men are caught in a situation where neither has control over their actions and are struggling to deal with the aftermath of what they did or didn't do. Both characters pull together themes that subtly give "Bop Gun" its emotional power---themes about masculinity and fatherhood (Robert and Matt; Vaughn and his deceased father) and how the boundaries of what define each have become blurred in a world where violence has become the only unambiguous definition of what it means to be a man.

Homicide: Life on the Street Premiered Nineteen years Ago Today

Nineteen years ago today, Homicide: Life on the Street premiered on NBC after the Superbowl. Executive produced by Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson, Homicide aired nine episodes that season and another four the following year. Shot in grainy, desaturated footage on hand-held cameras, the NBC drama quietly revolutionized television by offering a more realistic approach to police procedurals. This show wasn’t as concerned about the cases or about showing cops as all-heroic figures chasing after the bad guys, but as prickly, sometimes unlikable human beings who cared as much about their overtime pay as putting down cases. Based on the nonfiction work Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon (who would go on to produce HBO’s The Wire and Treme), Homicide: Life on the Street survived for seven years despite low ratings and little Emmy recognition.

To be honest, I slept on this series during much of its run (though I did catch the last five minutes of that premiere episode). I didn’t get into it until I started catching late-night reruns on Court TV and became a fan. While the quality of the show waxed and waned during the later seasons, mostly due to network executive interference, it continued to be a pretty high mark in broadcast television.

I came up with a list of the ten best episodes from the show, which I will post intermittently over the next few months. These episodes I think are pretty good examples of how Homicide excelled at delivering great drama.

"Three Men & Adena," written by Tom Fontana, Directed by Martin Campbell. Air date: 3/3/93. NBC Home Entertainment. 1993.

The Adena Watson case, the sexual assault and murder of an eleven year old girl, would become the white whale for not only rookie detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), who was the primary on the case, but for the show as well. During its seven seasons, the writers would refer back to this case. Unlike other police procedurals, Adena Watson’s murder was never closed. This was the real genius of Homicide: it realistically addressed the fact that some cases are never solved, that some people really do get away with murder. During the first nine-episode season, the Adena Watson murder often crowded out other, equally compelling cases. It certainly became apparent to the writers that this case, along with the lead actors playing Bayliss and Det. Frank Pembleton (the always impeccable Andre Braugher) could deliver scintillating drama on the screen. Case in point: Three Men & Adena. Airing five weeks into the original run (it’s the sixth episode on the DVD set), Three Men & Adena is as exactly as its title implies: three men Dets. Bayliss and Pembleton and their prime suspect, Risley Tucker aka The Arabber (Moses Gunn’s final performance here, also equally compelling) are holed up in the box (the detectives’ clever name for the interrogation room). That’s it, the entire episode. And yet so much drama and action occurs in this enclosed anteroom. Both Bayliss and Pembleton try to force a confession out of the Arabber. Since they have no other evidence that will hold up in court to charge him with, they have exactly twelve hours to wring one out of him (the Arabber had been interviewed many times before and the law stipulated a limitation to the number of interviews detectives can subject a suspect without charging him with a crime, so both Pembleton and Bayliss were literally on the line with this one). The Arabber however proves to be a formidable opponent and, at one point even turns the tables on both detectives and starts reading their numbers.

The episode is a tour-de-force of television drama. Braugher, Secor, and Gunn are like jazz saxophonists here, playing in perfect harmony and yet capable of delivering great, improvisational solos. But what I love most about this episode is the ebbs and flows to the drama, the way the action and dramatic beats are paced to keep the episode from becoming melodramatic. Each dramatic flourish is carefully calibrated so that by the end of the episode you really feel as if twelve hours have passed and much ground has been covered and yet so very little has changed. Well, that’s not entirely true. While the detectives fail to get the confession they need to close this case, they have been changed by the experience, though not always for the better. The mercurial Pembleton, who never wanted a partner, realizes that for better or worse, Bayliss is his, and despite differences in style, attitude, and outlooks on being murder police, will become his rabbi. Eager and wet-behind-the-ears Bayliss has been wrung through his own crucible, one which will haunt him throughout the course of the series. Bayliss starts off certain that the Arabber did it, but by the end of the episode he is riddled with doubt, not only about The Arabber’s guilt but about his own skills as a detective. Since Bayliss is both the eyes and ears of the audience into this world, his doubts become our own. All the baggage we bring into police procedurals, all the cliches and expectations, are suddenly upended. Was the Arabber guilty? Was he innocent? Homicide never answers these questions. And here the show’s genius reveals itself again: Homicide was never interested in presenting clear lines between good and evil, right and wrong. The world it was creating was much grayer, less certain, but always compelling.

The episode has a lot in common with Twelve Angry Men, which got its start as a network drama in the 1950s before it was produced as a major film starring Henry Fonda. The drama relies on dialogue to move the action forward. And the dialogue here crackles with tension. While the show wasn’t lavished with many Emmy recognitions the way other lesser shows have during this period, it didn’t always go home empty-handed. Producer Tom Fontana, who wrote the episode, was awarded with Best Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Simon and the late David Mills also won an Emmy for writing the second-season episode Bop Gun, which will be reviewed later; and Braugher took home a Best Actor award as well).