I started writing about BUFFY's "The Body" on the 25th anniversary and it spiraled into a personal story about other episodes that mattered to me

Yesterday was the first anniversary of Michelle Trachtenberg's passing and it got me thinking about how it probably was the anniversary of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER episode, "The Body." For those not immediately understanding the connection - Michelle played Dawn Summers, Buffy's sister, on that show, and "The Body" is a touchstone episode of TV centered on the death of Buffy's mother.

As it turns out, a day separates the two anniversaries, but it is the 25th anniversary of that powerful episode. As someone who had their budding TV writer mind blown by it when I saw it in my dorm room back in 2001, I kinda reel at the fact it's been that long and modern TV still lives in the shadow of this show's influence and its contemporaries. In 2001, 1976 would have seemed like ancient history in TV terms. Yet, just looking at the words "The Body," takes me back to experiencing the show all over again.

I did a two-part examination of this episode sixteen years ago (I've been really doing this for that long? Oy) and so I'm not going to rehash or recap much of the episode. If you want to see what I said back in 2010, go here and here.

I wrote those pieces while under the shield of anonymity, so there were a couple personal details I didn't bother going into at that point. For me, there are certain shows and episodes that are indelibly linked with what was going on in my personal and professional lives at the same time. This particular season of BUFFY was airing concurrently with me running my campus TV drama. It was my Fantasy Showrunner period while I was writing and directing episodes with friends that would later air on our campus's closed circuit cable channel.

(This too I have talked about in greater length, here and here.)

We'd been shooting the show for about six weeks. At this point, we didn't even have a completed cut of an episode. But everyone involved was having so much fun that the actors had already be asking me "Do you think you'll do this again next year?" My answer was always, "Let's survive this season first!" But in truth, the wheels had already been turning in my head.

The first season was being written in "Exquisite Corpse" style. I wrote the pilot, introduced the characters, set up a lot of conflicts and stories, and ended it on a cliffhanger. I hand the script to the next writer/director and they go wherever they want, setting up the third writer and then the fourth. As showrunner, I set up a rule that in the first round, you couldn't kill off any characters.

But being the first writer in the second round, I had first shot at killing someone, and so I did. The boyfriend, Josh, to our female lead, Katherine, just wasn't coming across on screen the way we wanted. So, first chance I got, he was dead. For fun I'd suggested that when each of us wrote our cliffhangers, we should write down where we'd take the storylines after that if we were in charge. Then at the end of the season, we'd see how close we were.

It forced me to give a lot of thought to the consequences of killing Josh. And in my wannabe showrunner-trained-by-the-WB brain, it didn't take too long to decide that a REAL writer wouldn't just let Josh's murder be a cheap stunt. It should be a character defining story for Katherine and that the next season she should be sliding further and further into depression. It would lead to some powerful, emotional character work akin to what I found in my favorite shows. I even envisioned the climax of this story being her friends staging an intervention as her depression progressed to full on suicidal.

My film professor had warned me years earlier that every student film was about alcohol and suicide. I failed to heed this.

I remember we shot the murder scene outside in the cold on Saturday, February 10th. That was when I tipped off my lead actress to my thoughts and subsequently told one of my other writers. He seemed utterly perplexed that I would want to tell that story on the show. So I explained to him the three episodes of TV that were huge influences on me.

The first was an episode of THE WONDER YEARS called "The Accident." Kevin and Winnie see each other for the first time a couple months after they broke up. Kevin is concerned that she's hanging out with some older boys and isn't acting like herself. She pushes him away, tells him she just wants to forget everything that happened the last three years (i.e. since her brother died in Vietnam). Kevin isn't sure what's going on with her, but it's not good. In the end, she's in a car accident and gets a broken leg for her trouble, which seems to be a wakeup call. If you remember anything about the episode, it's probably the final scene, where Kevin climbs up to her window as the anachronistic music cue of Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight" plays and Kevin and Winnie say "I love you" to each other.

The second one was "Crosetti," an episode of HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET that deals with the suicide of one of the squad's own, Detective Crosetti. When his body is pulled out of the harbor, Detectives Munch and Bolander immediately assume suicide, but out of sensitivity, Bolander is ordered to investigate it as wrongful death. Half the episode is the squad dealing with how shocking it all seems and the other half is about how Lewis, Crosetti's partner, is in denial that it's suicide and actively tries to mess with witnesses who'd speak to Crosetti's depression.

Most people remember that episode for the final scene where Andre Braugher's Pembleton defies a "no honor guard" order and salutes the funeral procession in dress blues. I remember it for the previous act break. The autopsy report comes in and the tox screen leaves no doubt that Crosetti intentionally overdosed. In an incredible performance from Clark Johnson, we see Lewis's denial collapse like a house of cards. His voice breaks and in sobs that make no effort to put on a brave or masculine front, he cries, "He killed himself!" as Bolander immediately drops any antagonism to Lewis and pulls him in a bear hug.

This history informs my third episode of choice, a later episode of HOMICIDE called "Have a Conscience" that climaxed a long-running story where Detective Mike Kellerman, played by Reed Diamond, had been accused of taking bribes and spent weeks being portrayed in the media as a dirty cop. Even though he's exonerated, it wounded him deeply that his coworkers thought he was crooked and the combination of that with a brutal case and a guy on the street recognizing him as that dirty cop sends him over the edge. His partner, Lewis stops by his houseboat that evening and immediately intuits that something is seriously wrong with Mike. 

A good chunk of the episode is Mike holding his gun during a breakdown, clearly on the verge of ending it all. Lewis, who probably wouldn't usually be the guy you count on to diffuse that situation, is desperately trying to get through to Mike, to reach him on some level. The emotional stakes couldn't be higher - he lost one partner to suicide. He can't lose another. It's absolutely intense, and I'd never seen ANYTHING like that on TV. Apparently the whole suicide plotline freaked out NBC so it's a minor miracle the episode was even made.

You've probably forgotten how I got here, but all of that was what I was trying to unpack to my skeptical friend who wasn't understanding why I'd send the show down that path. And then a couple weeks later, we were there, watching "The Body" together, both of us determined not to ugly cry in front of the other. The next time the subject came up, I remember eventually he said something like, "No, I get you. For every 'Something Blue,' you're gonna have a 'The Body.'"

Of course, by the time the scripts for season 2 were written and given to the cast, "The Body" was several months old. A very large number of people who worked on my show were BUFFY fans, so more than one person's reaction was, "You're trying to do something like 'The Body,' right?" A couple times I tried to explain, no, I really wanted to do something dark before I even saw that episode, but ultimately it was just easier to say "Yes."

My depression and suicide storyline taught me an extremely important lesson. I knew it was a big tonal departure and ultimately the intervention episode was Episode 5, which meant for four episodes, Katherine's plot was going to be about steadily ratcheting up her depression. Four full episodes where the main character has some heavy stuff to deal with. I wasn't experienced enough to understand how much gravity the main character pulls, even when you try to balance an episode with lighter, wackier humor. Your lead character is like a gravity well, pulling the tone of every other storyline into it.

Basically, in my bid to be dramatic and meaningful, I killed the fun train. I haven't watched it in 24 years, but even at the time, it didn't take me long to realize my error. There were some effective moments, surely... but it was also often too indulgent, too melodramatic and too "Look at me! I'm directing." My dialogue was too on the nose in places and there was too much of it.

In other words, the mistakes everyone makes on their first couple scripts. I'm not kidding when I say I learned more doing this TV show I never got any kind of school credit for than I did from anything else in college. When you're churning out that much output, spotting your weaknesses happens much more quickly and you can start growing past them sooner. The lessons of that season are ones I carry into my work to this very day.

If you've done the math, you might have realized that this second season of our show was being produced while Season Six of BUFFY was airing. That season is built around Buffy suffering intense depression following her resurrection and her friends' discovery they tore her back not from Hell, but Heaven. It's dark but not in the cool, compelling way BUFFY always had been. This season was straight up depressing. Buffy's come back to life and life SUCKS. Season Six piles on the misery and there's a point where it feels like every episode is crafted to add to Buffy's misery.

This was a 22 episode season and to really twist the knife, the emotional low of the season spanned seven or so episodes that took something like four months to play out on screen thanks to long hiatues. Somewhere in the midst of that, I said to myself, "What the hell were these writers thinking? Why would they let this depressing storyline take over the show for so long? No one wants to see our lead just beaten down week-after-week... OH SHIT. I did the same thing!"

There was a bit of a relief in knowing that your idols jumped headfirst into LITERALLY the same mistake you made. And there's also some dark humor in venting and ranting about a creative decision you see as an unforgivable mistake, only to realize you could be talking about yourself. I was so concerned with making something "important" and "meaningful" that I failed to consider how much that storyline ran counter to everything else I enjoyed about the show... and certainly what other people enjoyed in the show.

I don't believe a creator should consider the audience as their first priority. You tell stories you want to tell, something that matters to you, and you hope the right people get it. But sometimes it's possible to lose sight of why you want to tell that story, and you end up making something that you yourself wouldn't even enjoy.

Hard lesson to learn, but I'm glad I learned it early.

An additional grace note to this story is that about two years later, EVERWOOD did a season long arc of Amy Abbott falling into depression after her boyfriend's death... and they fucking nailed it. After like two years of beating myself up for getting it wrong, it was so instructive to see how Greg Berlanti, Rina Mimoun and the rest of the writers crafted a story that took Amy to some dark and unlikable places without it all swallowing the show whole. I spent that whole season going, "This is what I was TRYING to do!"

This was yet another reason why it felt like such a full circle moment when I actually got to write an episode with Rina on SUPERMAN & LOIS. Every now and then, life comes together so neatly that you'd swear someone was writing it.

As for "The Body" itself, it's a powerful episode of TV. I still see it used as a touchstone for when a show does a super-serious episode. At the time, I remember being pissed that the Emmys utterly ignored this in every category. Ignoring Sarah Michelle Gellar's intense performance felt especially criminal. And this is one area where my feelings have evolved in 25 years.

SMG was great in this episode, but you know what? She slayed (ha, ha) every episode. BUFFY was a hard enough tone to hit in the writing, but even when the writing is there, an actor who doesn't know how to play those tonal mixes and shifts can bring everything down. And it's even more clear to me in hindsight that there is far too little respect paid to genre that kicks ass at being genre. 

Fans spent years saying "The Body" was Emmy-worthy and it was a snub to show it no respect. And then one day it hit me - one of the defining features of "The Body" is that it has virtually zero supernatural elements. Joyce Summers dies of an aneurysm - nothing supernatural, nothing the result of a villain trying to hurt Buffy. It's so mundane and human. Spike isn't even in the episode and when a vampire does show up in the final moments, it's mostly there just to remind us that Buffy's day job doesn't stop even on the worst day of her life.

And it goes without saying that BUFFY's traditional humor is all but absent.

Are you following where I'm going with this? We bought into the idea that in order for BUFFY to be taken seriously by its peers, it had to strip itself of so many of the defining things that made it "BUFFY." It's like saying that if you want a genre show to be honored, the first thing you do is erase everything that makes it genre and just do what a normal drama would.

Fuck. That.

I'm not saying creators shouldn't do that if they want. But when you step back, there is something deeply elitist about the attitude that "oh, now that you're only playing the piano keys that all the normal shows play, we can take you seriously." It's like saying, "BUFFY's so unique and specific... have you tried just being PARTY OF FIVE for an episode?"

There's a lot in "The Body" that's relatable, emotionally powerful even. For some, it might be cathartic to see their heroes experiencing normal grief that they can relate to. I'm not taking shots at any of that.

But is it superior to letting BUFFY just be BUFFY? Maybe the better question is: of all the stories that could be rewarded, is this one head and shoulders above the rest?

I say no. Give me the Musical Episode, the Graduation Episode, the Angelus-kills-Jenny Episode. Give me the ones that embrace genre, not tamps it down so the normies don't get scared off. When you ask me, "What BUFFYs should have gotten Emmys?" I don't know if I'll be so quick to go to "The Body" as an injustice.

Which is not to say that it isn't still deeply powerful and heart-wrenching. And I'm sure I wasn't the only writer to fall on my face trying to do something like it. The good part is once you make those mistakes, if you're smart you won't make them again. 

And sometimes you have the relief of seeing the pros you look up to fall into the same trap, even if they started from much stronger footing than you. 

I'm the featured guest this week on HOMICIDE: LIFE ON REPEAT with Reed Diamond and Kyle Secor!

HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET wasn't quite my first taste of what we later came to call "Prestige TV" but it might have been the first show I loved that passionately. I wasn't there from the start - though the show debuted in January 1993, it wasn't until almost exactly three years later that I became a serious viewer of the series. By that point, I was already a regular viewer of ER and THE X-FILES, both of which were redefining how network TV looked and felt. I also was an occasional, if not regular viewer, of LAW & ORDER.

Nothing makes me feel older than having to explain that this was a time when network TV drama felt truly groundbreaking and cinematic to a degree that it hadn't before. This was pre-SOPRANOS, before HBO launched what generally gets credited as the start of Prestige TV. It's not hard to see why that's where most tellings of TV history start there. HBO's pedigree for writer-driven, cinematic, elevated television is probably unmatched. There's also a certain romance to framing the most remarkable TV as being the product of premium cable - as opposed to broadcast television, where the major networks were free to all the unwashed masses.

You're paying a premium for cable TV, so you need to believe that HBO is giving you a superior kind of product, right? As much truth as there is to that, at least two of those HBO shows - THE WIRE and OZ -  have a direct lineage to HOMICIDE.

The things that made HOMICIDE so innovated on network TV in the 90s have all long since been absorbed by premium cable series, prestige streaming series and even current network television. Handheld camerawork, morally ambiguous heroes, downer endings, and controversial storytelling now practically form the Peak TV Starter Pack. Maybe the only technique that still feels truly unique to HOMICIDE is the editing - specifically the jump cuts and the triple takes. In just about every other way, HOMICIDE feels like a show that could have premiered today.

And to the younger generation, HOMICIDE might as well have just debuted. Though the series got a DVD release, it's barely been syndicated in the last 20 years and it had long been absent from streaming. This year, that was finally redressed, as an HD remastered release came to Peacock. Converted to widescreen and HD, the show doesn't look EXACTLY how it appeared in the 90s, but it holds up well, even though a concession to get the show out there resulted in almost all of the iconic music cues being replaced by material cheaper to license.

As a concession to get the show to a new audience, I'll accept it. This was one of the shows that made me want to be a TV writer. It's the show I found myself emulating often in my early writing. Though it often gets lumped in with other cop procedurals, it's much more character-driven than any other procedural. The emphasis is on the characters more than the cases they work. A case is frequently merely a catalyst to force a character to deal with a personal challenge or to provoke a different side of their personality.

A hallmark of the show was the intense interrogation scenes, with the most powerful of those going to Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton. He'd get inside a suspect's head, break them down psychologically and more often than not, get a confession out of them. It was riveting character drama that just as often would be balanced by quirky humor and idiosyncratic characters like Richard Belzer's Detective Munch. It did things I didn't know could happen on TV - the heroes didn't get their man everytime. Some cases never got closed, the dead going unavenged.

One hour kicks off with the discovery of Detective Crosetti's body, forcing the unit to confront the likelihood he killed himself. Everyone deals with it differently - his partner Lewis insists it couldn't have been suicide and goes as far as trying to interfere in Detective Bolander's investigation into Crosetti's death. Frank and Tim are sent to plan the memorial service, allowing for some dark humor about the cost of cookies. Lt. Giardello is stuck with department politics over how bad it looks to have another suicide. 

All of this leads to a moment I've discussed before - Lewis and Bolander coming to a head over their conflict, only to have the moment interrupted by the autopsy report. The official finding: suicide. Watching Lewis spiral as his denial finally runs out and then fully break down as Bolander pulls him into a bear hug is one of those TV moments that has stayed with me ever since.

Years later I was running a TV drama series for my college campus TV network and I attempted to do a storyline with similar emotional impact. This being 2001, when I shared the script with everyone, they all assumed I was inspired by the equally gut-punching BUFFY episode "The Body." The truth was I'd had the intent for this episode before "The Body" even aired and my direct inspiration was "Crosetti."

Another trope that turned up in a lot of my early work were interrogation scenes. At least three times while in college, I found an excuse to work an interrogation into something I filmed, and it came up in more than one script. The perfect culmination to all of this nearly happened when one of my SUPERMAN & LOIS episodes would have called for what was essentially an interrogation between Lois Lane and an antagonist. Alas, a rebreak of the story ended up denying me the moment that seemingly my entire career was building towards.

As is evident, HOMICIDE made a meaningful impact on me as a creator and an audience member. Over the years, I've paid tribute to it before, broken down the pilot, and reexamined one of the show's most controversial moments - the Luther Mahoney shooting. Thanks to a Twitter conversation, I even connected with and later went out to drinks with Reed Diamond, who played Detective Kellerman. We sorta became whatever you call an internet friendship these days. (Pen-pals? Digital friends?) Which brings me to the real point of this post...

At almost the same time HOMICIDE launched on Peacock, Reed and one of his surviving co-stars, Kyle Secor (Detective Tim Bayliss), launched their rewatch podcast HOMICIDE: LIFE ON REPEAT. Every week, Reed and Kyle recap another HOMICIDE episode, delving into their recollections of making it and sharing their perspectives on the series with three decades of hindsight.

They also usually welcome a guest, typically a writer, director or fellow cast member, but on occasion the guest is someone with no professional connection to the series. If you somehow missed the post title, by now you've probably intuited the reason for this long preamble is because *I* am this week's guest.

I can't tell you what a thrill it was to be "in the Box" with "Kellerman & Bayliss" for a little over an hour. The topic of the show was Season 1, episode 8, "And The Rocket's Dead Glare," but we veer into other topics. I haven't heard the edited episode yet, but I talk about what scenes in David Simon's HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS directly inspired a subplot in this episode, and we even got into a brief discussion of copaganda.

I've done more than a few podcasts and this was easily the most fun I've ever had on a show. Reed and Kyle were great and I just loved the energy I was feeling while we recorded it. Hopefully some of that joy comes across in this week's installment.

The direct YouTube link to this week's episode is here.

You can find it on Apple Podcasts here.

You can find the main site for the podcast here.

All episodes are uploaded - with video - to YouTube here.

And if you're interested in the New York Magazine that discusses the misconduct that many of the Baltimore cops who inspired the show are accused of, you can find it here: David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart.

Breaking down the first episode of HOMICIDE

Previous Pilot Breakdowns
Veronica Mars
Alias
The Office


This continues my pilot breakdown series. Go here for the original Twitter thread.


The series is based on the book HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS, by David Simon. Find it. Read it.

Episode "Gone for Goode" is directed by Barry Levinson, written by Paul Attanasio.

(On DVD commentaries, the writers say Tom Fontana and James Yoshimura deserve "Creator" credit, but Attanasio is the creator of record.)

First scene: Detectives Lewis and Crosetti in an alley in a bad neighborhood, looking for evidence while philosophizing about what it means to "find" things. Sets the tone. This is about the mundane part of police work. It's not car chases, gun standoffs, etc. The last line of scene is "That's the problem with this job. It's got nothign to do with life."

We see the victim's name written on The Board in red. The procedure for each victim. (Names go to black when case is closed.)

First scene of Act One, new arrival Detective Tim Bayliss arrives for his first day. Looks for Lt. Giardello. Is pointed to two guys. Bayliss assumes the white Crosstti Is LT, not the large African American man. Oops.

Bayliss: "This is where I want to be. Thinking cops. No guns."

Next we meet Bolander and Munch. Munch questions a (badly lying) suspect at the hospital. "You're saving your really good lies for some smarter cop, right? I'm just Montell Williams, you want to talk to LARRY KING!" Richard Belzer would play Munch for seven seasons here, and for 15 seasons on L&O: SVU, making him one of TV's longest characters. His sarcastic, testy persona is established from the first scene.

And we're back with Lewis and Crosetti investigating the shooting of a woman. Their talk digresses into Crosetti's obession - the Lincoln assassination and the conspiracy he believes in. Homicide does something that wasn't quote in vogue yet in network TV. It features dialogue that doesn't directly advance the story. A lot of character chit-chat, almost Tarantino-esque.

And now we're with Det. Howard, the only woman in the squad and Det. Felton. We get another interview scene that showcases the mundane nature of the job and the character interplay.

Veteran Detective Bolander busts Munch's balls about his still unsolved case. Munch: "It's been three months, nothing new. It's over." Case is a woman run over. Wasn't even ruled homicide. Munch says it's not even on the board. He shouldn't have to worry. Bolander: [She] was murdered, John. Someone has to speak for her."

That's the show, in one sentence.

Out at lunch, a bunch of the detectives bitch about their co-worker, the as-yet-unseen Pembleton. "Guy thinks he's smarter than everyone else because he listens to Emmylou Harris." Pembleton is being built up for us. Sets the stage, builds anticipation.

Pembleton doesn't have a partner, the squad tells Gee they don't like this. Gee says Felton's paired with him now so Howard can be paired with Bayliss. No one likes this much.

ACT OUT: on Munch reviewing the case file.

ACT TWO opens with Pembleton (Andre Braugher) being told he's with Felton. He's instantly cocky, points to his clearance rate. Gee says he needs to be a team player.

Frank is used to working bigger cases. He's full of himself. Felton busts his balls, "Am I really going on a routine call with Frank Pembleton... he only handles the big cases, this is just some dead guy."

Frank goes to the motor pool so they can sign out a squad car for the case. He realizes he forgot which car goes with the keys he's been holding. Rather than admit defeat or get another set, he resolves to go car-by-car until his key works.

THAT is Frank. He's tenacious and he can NEVER admit he's wrong.

Felton asks "what does this prove?" Frank says, "Just say it... I don't like being in the basement with that n****r. You resent me." Felton asks why he can't just get another key. "because what if it's the next one?"

Note the tension in every one of these pairings: Frank/Felton is racial tension and resentment of Frank's attitude. Munch/Bolander is old-pro busting the younger guy's balls. Lewis/Crosetti is less overt tension. Their case is basically leading to insurance fraud. I'm not going to recap the ins and outs of that one till later.

Felton, upon learning Tim came from the mayor's security detail, "Wagging tail of a political favor, huh?" He clearly thinks Bayliss is in over his head. "You ever see a dead guy?"

Lewis/Crosetti case: Black Widow, she's buried five husbands, collected insurance on all of them. Problem, when they go to exhume one, the wrong guy is buried there. This sets up the dark humor of them successively digging up graves, trying to find the right body. It's the sort of grimly funny thing that HLOTS was known for. It is also based on a true story, as is much of the first season's episodes.

As Munch interviews the victim's family, we get the sense that he has terrible bedside manner. ACT OUT on that.

ACT OPEN on Bayliss, Pembleton, Howard and Felton in dead man in motel room. Bayliss is trying to show off he knows crime scenes

Frank and Tim left alone. Frank thinks it's murder. Tim doesn't. Frank points out the old guy's car is missing. We find out the older guy has been seen with some younger guys.

A subplot in this ep is about Howard's perfect clearance rate. The suspect she's been looking for disappeared... until he walks right into the squadroom. He folds within seconds in interrogation. Howard's rate is secure. Subverts the trope about how every police interrogation is a chess match. Sometimes the suspects are dumb, with terrible attempts at deception.

Munch goes through suspect mugshots, and he finds something. They're looking for a blonde guy. Funny thing, a suspect picked up two weeks later on another case has black hair.. and blonde eyebrows. They confront the guy, and his answer to everything is "I was drinking." We see Munch turn the victim's name from red to black. We know what that means.

ACT OUT on Bolander meeting the new, attractive medical examiner.

ACT UP on detectives drinking, with Crosetti writing up a complaint against Lewis for calling him a "salami brain." Nice touch, Howard proofreads the memo.

A lot of good Munch lines here, btw. He's the guy interjecting sarcastic jokes whether or not they're appreciated. The other detectives mostly ignore him.

Suspect picked up in Frank and Tim's case and then we get the greatest scene of the pilot, as Frank explains how an interrogation is done.

"A guilty man left in the box alone, falls asleep.. uncooperative, too cooperative, blinks, stares."

He describes what he is about to do as "an act of salesmanship... what I am selling is a long prison term to a client who has no genuine use for the product." I WISH this scene was still on YouTube, because no recap really does it justice. Line by line, this scene is brilliant.

Frank makes the guy read and initial a waiver of his rights. He's making the process mundane, making HIM a part of the process. Guy suggests maybe he wants a lawyer. Frank says if that happens, he has to write it up how it looks - first degree murder.

It's a trap. "This room is like a wall, and at the top of that wall is a small open window. A way out. Son I am that window." Frank gets him to keep talking, putting himself at the scene, waiving his right to an attorney. With that out of the way, Frank catches him in a big lie, and the guy folds like a cheap suit.

Tim confronts Frank, saying he tricked that guy into not getting a lawyer. Frank says "Do you believe he did it?" Frank rips Tim a new one. Tim wonders what an innocent man would do with the same chance. That is always the tension of Box scenes. When Frank pushes it, can he break an innocent man? (Spoiler: he can.)

Now we have Munch, Lewis, and Crosetti in a scene of them that has nothing to do with their cases. They hit on a moneymaking idea, Mail order adult diapers. Scene's a good showcase of how their minds work.

Phone rings at the squad. Howard asks Tim, "you ready?" He answers, which makes him the primary.

Final scene: Tim at the crime scene. A young girl has been murdered. He raises his badge. "Homicide." FADE OUT. End of episode.

So we introduce the ensemble. Tim is used as "new guy" and an audience explainer, both at the start and both as innocent eyes for Frank's envelope pushing behavior in the box. And a lot of little mini-arcs here, showing us how Munch and Bolander relate, how Crosetti and Lewis get on each other's nerves, how Howard and Felton have a pretty easy partnership.

It's not a BIG pilot. It takes a genre of show and refreshes it by amping up the character stuff. None of the cases are teh epic brain teasers you find on most CBS procedurals or L&O. It's all about what the cases mean to the people working them. It's one of my favorite pilots, with one of my favorite scenes, but it feels deceptively low-key when you watch it.

Seek it out. You can't imitate it, but you CAN study how it reveals its characters.

Other Pilot Breakdowns:
Everwood
Life
Revenge

Happy birthday The Wonder Years and Homicide: Life on the Street

Less than a year ago I ran my blog series, 16 Great TV Shows, which focused on the shows that most shaped my own writing and my own love of television. Today, two of those shows are having notable birthdays. Even though I've recently written tributes to both, it seems wrong not to mark the anniversaries for The Wonder Years and Homicide: Life on the Street.

How is it possible The Wonder Years is 30? The series - created by Neal Marlens and Carol Black - first aired on January 31, 1988, with its setting in 1968. From there, the series remained set twenty years prior to the time in which it aired. So had the series never been cancelled, the episode airing this week would be set in 1998 and probably would have the Monica Lewinsky scandal as its backdrop. I can tell you one thing I was doing this week in 1998: watching reruns of The Wonder Years on Nick-At-Nite. It's a bit staggering to be confronted with that realization that much time has passed.

My earlier tribute covered so much ground that I don't know what to say except marvel that somehow the young woman who was the first crush for many guys my age, Danica McKellar, gets more stunning by the year!

In all seriousness, I remember one of my earliest realizations about The Wonder Years being that despite the period setting, my world and Kevin Arnold's world weren't so different. The school environment was largely the same, the kinds of relationships you had with friends, family and crushes were all mostly along similar dynamics, whether you came of age in the 70s or the 90s.

And that's when I realized that a coming-of-age show set in the 90s would stick out as far more of a period piece than The Wonder Years did to a kid growing up when it was on air. There are two things that changed being a teenager forever. In 1999, the horror of the Columbine High School shooting completely altered the way teens felt about how safe their school was. Security measures were implemented and for a while, it felt like we'd never look at alienated students the same again.

The second advent was the concurrent development of smart phones and social media. It completely altered the landscape, particularly for teens, where both facilitated new means of bullying and emotionally abusing people. If you watched American Vandal or 13 Reasons Why, you get a good sense of how all of that is different now. It makes me wonder if The Wonder Years still feels relevant to the current generation.

For as much as I've seen people talk about the sixties as a similar time, the show resonated with me because of how easily I could see myself in Kevin's shoes. Maybe today it plays as an idealized depiction of a simpler time. Or maybe it's as foreign to modern teens as Little House on the Prairie was to me. The show is the teenage experience I hope everyone gets to live through in some fashion, heartbreak and all. I'll admit, it's a little weird to watch The Wonder Years and long for the time in which the show was produced.

And then we have Homicide: Life on the Street, celebrating 25 years this year. Like The Wonder Years, it premiered after the Super Bowl, though it struggled for much longer to find an audience. I wrote a pretty exhaustive retrospective piece five years ago for the 20th anniversary, in addition to my tribute piece last year, so you'd be justified in thinking I had little left to say.

Homicide is the true beginning of the Peak TV era. It's everything that came together to make The Wire, but done on a network TV platform. For me, 25 years of Homicide means two and a half decades of prestige TV that strives to transcend its medium. The show remains distinctive in a way most shows akin to the CBS procedural genre do not. When you turned on Homicide, you never would mistake it for a different show on the air at the time and even now, I can't picture many people confusing it for any other procedural, past or present.

I don't know if there's every been a greater broadcast TV actor than Andre Braugher. While that statement might be hyperbole, it's even more accurate to say that the perfect marriage of actor and character in Braugher's Frank Pembleton is even rarer. Frank gave the show many of its most intense moments, but he also had so many moments of emotion and heart with his partner Tim.

Richard Belzer's Munch had an even longer legacy, going on to 13 seasons as a regular on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and appearing on 10 series as that character. For a show that struggled in the ratings during most of its run, it cast a long shadow on TV.

There's one Homicide story I keep thinking of as we find ourselves in the conversation about the importance of representation in film and TV. Showrunner Tom Fontana spoke of filming a scene where Lt. Giardello, Pembleton, Lewis and Captain Barnfather are all in a heated discussion about how to handle a particularly delicate case. Once they called cut, Braugher went over to Fontana and said, "Did you do that on purpose?" Fontana, taken aback, said he didn't know what Braugher meant.

Braugher said that he'd never been in a scene with four black actors that wasn't about race. This was just a scene where all the characters happened to be black - their skin color wasn't a story point, or even a thematic issue. There was no "other-ing." I found it fascinating that Braugher picked up on that at once AND that it was notable enough that he assumed it must have been done on purpose to make the very point the actor highlighted.

It seems equally telling that that issue was completely invisible to Fontana. He wasn't trying to make any point - this was simply the result of him having a diverse enough cast where this could happen without it being an event. This also resulted from him writing his characters as being true to their natures and not defining their identities solely by their skin color.

More than twenty years since that scene and it still feels like it would be an anomaly on contemporary television. Hopefully the next two decades will bring bigger strides forward.

Happy birthday Homicide and The Wonder Years! You've certainly aged better than shows that were three decades old when YOU were first on the air.

16 Great TV Shows, Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld
Part 5: The John Larroquette Show
Part 6: ER
Part 7: Newsradio
Part 8: The X-Files
Part 9: Law & Order

Homicide: Life on the Street is the yin to Law & Order's yang. L&O is purely procedural, while Homicide thrives when the characters are front and center, their worldviews challenged or reinforced by the latest case in front of them. While L&O often turns its focus to institutional and societal morality, Homicide is more likely to explore individual morality. Though L&O's handheld style helps give the show its energy, Homicide eschews all rules of filmmaking staging and editing: jump-cuts, triple-takes, axis-crossing and everything a first year film student is told not to do is fair game so long as the emotional truth of the moment isn't compromised.

I remember a few Friday nights during the show's third season where I was in the room as my mother watched Homicide and I had an immediate visceral reaction: I hated it. (This would not be the first time my mother was attuned to a groundbreaking series before I was. She also came to Buffy at least a full half-season before I did.)

As I said yesterday, it took the crossover episode to make me give the show a second look. I think my tastes must have matured enough in the intervening year that everything about the show clicked with me. Andre Braugher rightly had grabbed the lion's share of media attention as the intense Frank Pembleton, but the hidden strength of the show was how well-defined and compelling all the characters were. Clark Johnson's Meldrick Lewis is the perfect example of an actor disappearing so casually into a role that everything he does is invisible. You don't notice Lewis so much because he doesn't do anything to stand out as inauthentic. (Hunt down some footage of Johnson out of character and marvel at how completely unlike Meldrick he is.) You could run down the cast list and say much the same for everyone.

Having said that, I always had great affection for Richard Belzer's John Munch, the sardonic quipper of the group. Soon after I began watching, NBC ran older episodes from season one, including a show where he and Ned Beatty's Bolander use a rigged copy machine to interrogate a suspect after telling him it's a (life-threatening lie detector.) I think that was the moment where it really clicked for me - "Hey, this show is incredibly FUNNY!" I even remember likening it to the relatively-recent PULP FICTION in how it found humor in places not seen in those kind of stories before.

The other Tarantino-like facet I credited the series for turned out to be false. Lifetime soon was running syndicated reruns, putting the episodes in order of their original airing. This meant that a show declaring that Detective Crosetti had died ran before the show where he was actually found dead. The reason for this was that NBC bumped the latter episode due to scheduling issues, the shows as produced had Crosetti's death happening first, as was the producers' intent. I've written about this episode before, and called it one of Homicide's most powerful hours.

In fact, that's one of the clearest influences on my writing. In college, I was showrunner for a half-hour drama series and in planning for the second season, I knew I wanted to do a powerful story that would shake up a lot of characters and hit them in their emotional core. By the time the script made its way to shooting, seven months later, Buffy had aired the emotionally raw "The Body" and everyone assumed I was trying to be Joss Whedon. (I was, just not here.) There were a lot of small things that - to my mind - I stole liberally from HOMICIDE on that show, but for the most part, the characters and setting are so different that the influence is less obvious.

A notable exception is an interrogation scene I featured in one episode. Though all the detectives were regularly shown breaking down a suspect in "The Box," few were more compelling to watch than Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton. The pilot uses him to introduce the psychological nature of a police interrogation, demonstrating how suspects are broken down and then very gradually trapped by their own statements. It's a sequence borrowed largely from David Simon's book that spawned it, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

And then there's this riveting sequence where Frank gets a confession out of an innocent man.



It was always a thrill watching Pembleton work "The Box," and one of the show's best hours focuses entirely on an interrogation run by him and his partner Tim Bayliss. "Three Men and Adena" finds the two detectives with 24 hours to get a murder confession out of their prime suspect or see him walk away for ever. The decompression allows writer Tom Fontana to show the different approaches between the two detectives. Early on, Bayliss seems to think the path to success is by hitting the suspect with all the evidence he has and browbeating him into admitting it. Pembleton seems to keep stepping on Bayliss's questions, giving the suspect relief from questions he'd find it very hard to explain. Gradually it dawns on us what Frank is doing. He's not undercutting Tim, he's trying to get the suspect to open up just enough that Frank can get inside his head and trap him.

An interrogation scene is not about information - it's as much about the person asking the questions as the person called on to answer. I remember that realizing it completely changed my view of how to write those scenes. And over the years, I've written a LOT of interrogations.

Homicide always knew how to use scenes like this to reflect the relationships of the various patnerships too. L&O's various detective teams were relatively harmonious, but Homicide's tended to go through more ups and downs that a marriage in a relationship drama. If the writers had Lewis and Kellerman working a particular case, there was a REASON they chose those detectives for that case. It never felt like you could swap detective teams and come out with the same story.

H: LOTS is another show I could probably do a whole week's worth of posts on if I put my mind to it. It was the rare show at the time that made me hungry to read other (intelligent) reactions to the material. This coincided with my joining Usenet newsgroups and there were only a couple TV fandoms I wasted my time reading about in there. alt.tv.homicide was always the most literate and interesting discussion board, and never failed to make me look below the surface of the writing. It made me aware of the kind of depth I'd have to strive for to compete on a professional level.

Other Homicide Posts:
Friday Free-For-All: Richard Belzer as Detective John Munch
Happy birthday, Homicide!
"It was a clean shoot" - HOMICIDE's most debated episode turns 20 today

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

"It was a clean shoot" - HOMICIDE's most debated episode turns 20 today

"It was a clean shoot."

I must have seen those words several hundred times during my time reading the Usenet group devoted to Homicide: Life on the Street. Within that community, it referred to a plot point so notorious that no further context was needed - the climax of season 5's "Deception." (Teleplay by Debbie Sarjeant; Story by Tom Fontana & Julie Martin & James Yoshimura.)

Today, that episode turns 20.

I've thought of that episode and its fallout a lot over the last few years, as we've seen more and more police-involved shootings gain prominence in the news. I can't help but reflect on how much those Usenet debates taught me about police procedure long before the larger zeitgeist was arguing when it should be legal for a cop to shoot someone.

The Homicide episode was the resolution to a subplot that had run through several episodes over the course of the prior year. Detectives Lewis (Clark Johnson) and Kellerman (Reed Diamond) had long been trying to get the goods on local drug kingpin Luther Mahoney (the fantastic Erik Todd Dellums), who'd managed to slither out of every attempt they made to nail him. In this episode, they finally crack the case when circumstances lead them to intercepting one of Mahoney's incoming heroin shipments. One swap of fake drugs for the real ones later, and Luthor's dealers face a lot of angry customers. Luther himself knows he had to have been betrayed by either his own lieutenant or his suppliers.

So he agrees to a meeting in a public place. Things go bad, Luthor kills two people and escapes to his penthouse. Lewis and Kellerman are separated and by the time Kellerman gets to Luther's penthouse, Luther has gotten ahold of Lewis's gun and is aiming it right at him.

Kellerman issues three warnings to drop the gun. Luthor turns to Kellerman, gun arm extended 45 degrees at his side and with a mocking laugh, says, "Go ahead Detective. Read me my rights." Kellerman, advancing on Luther, says "You have the right to remain silent" and then shoots him in the chest.

Debate: is this a clean shoot?

In the strictly legal sense, yes. So long as Luther has the gun, he can be considered an active threat. Kellerman has warned him twice to drop it. Law enforcement professionals who frequented the group confirmed that this factor pretty much makes Kellerman's actions defensible. (Despite the questionable act of beginning a Miranda reading before shooting the suspect.)

Here's where Homicide muddied the waters a bit. Before Kellerman arrives, Lewis is the first one to catch Luther. And when Lewis pulls a gun on him, Luther immediately puts his hands up and says "I'm unarmed. I'm surrendering."

Lewis responds by holstering his gun and giving Luther a beatdown for all the murders over the past year that he's escaped justice for. During this struggle, Luther gets Lewis's gun and that's the point where Kellerman enters.

Someone's in the wrong here, but it isn't Kellerman. As you might expect, though, the cops sanitize their statements to keep Lewis in the clear. It's an interesting bit of ethics coming from the characters we're expected to see as "the good guys."


Does what Lewis did change any of the facts about what Kellerman did? In terms of if Kellerman was right to do what he did, I say no.

And yet, this shooting would have repercussions through the following season. A new arrival to the squad, Falsone (Jon Seda, playing a character I so disliked it took a solid decade not to react with disgust to his appearance in any other series), kept picking at this scab, convinced that Kellerman was the dirty one. It didn't help that Kellerman wasn't in a good place. Prior to the Mahoney shooting, he'd been accused of corruption when he was in fact the only member of his old squad not taking payouts AND he'd come close to committing suicide over his distraught reaction to another of Luther's victims.

And Lewis ends their partnership, basically cutting Kellerman out of his life as much as he can. Kellerman takes none of this well, drinking heavily and is clearly compromised on the job. By the end of the season, when what's left of the Mahoney organization has more or less declared war on the squad, Kellerman finds himself being interrogated over the shooting by Falsone... and the squad's biggest gun and best interrogator in the box: Detective Pembleton (Andre Braugher.)

When the big interrogation goes down, Lewis doesn't directly implicate Kellerman, but more or less lets Pembleton know that going after Kellerman wouldn't necessarily be on the wrong track. Thus, Kellerman finds himself defending this shooting again a year after the fact, with Pembleton and Falsone seizing on Kellerman's reenactment of the scene where he shows Luther had the gun down. Kellerman continues to insist that the suspect had a gun, but the others act as if "but the gun was down" trumps that.

This ends Mike's career. His lieutenant says he'll toss the confession if Kellerman resigns. thereby sparing the unit from further scrutiny.

In the real world, it doesn't. And it's interesting to me that Homicide chose to tell the story in this way. There are three options:

1) straight up ignorance of police procedures - unlikely

2) disregard of real procedures in the name of dramatic license - possible, maybe even probable.

3) we're meant to look below the surface to understand WHY everyone as they do.

As 3 is the most interesting to debate, that's the line of thought we're gonna follow here.

At the end of this arc, arguably the most significant example of police conduct goes unpunished, and really not even acknowledged. Lewis beat up a surrendering suspect and put himself in a position where that suspect took his weapon. And to the bitter end, Lewis never acknowledges that or even gives the dramatically satisfying speech of telling Kellerman, "I'm sorry I put you in that position, Mikey." Hell, he never even acts grateful for what was done, instead, more or less gaslighting Kellerman into taking all the blame.

I used to hate how this ending sold out Kellerman. He was one of my favorites, and Reed Diamond was vastly underrated in that role. To this day, when he shows up on my TV, I'm excited to see him. Andre Braugher's departure that season sucked up most of the press, but Kellerman's exit also left a massive hole in the squad. I would moan about the "bad writing" of this ending and let myself get sucked into the "clean shoot" debate. It was years before I realized I wasn't giving the writers credit for the hidden depth of the story. Deep subtext wasn't often present in network drama, and certainly not when the characters assert something about the story that is actually directly antithetical to the meaning of that story.

And so we return to Mike Kellerman, the loyal friend, the good cop, the guy who wouldn't even rat on the dirty cops in his old arson squad despite the fact doing so would have instantly saved his skin. His reward for this was that the stink of being dirty hung over him so much that witnesses even recognized him as "the dirty cop" from the news. The guy who tried hard to do everything right, got punished for it at every turn. The way the Mahoney saga went is entirely keeping with that. Kellerman's tragic fall comes not from something awful he did, but from the corruption of others around him. It's his lot to wear the scarlet letter that belongs to others. He's not the guy to throw others into the fire and not even two corruption scandals will take that last bit of integrity from him.

It was a clean shoot. It could never be anything BUT that given the circumstances.

Kellerman doesn't go down because he's defending the shooting. He goes down taking the bullet that belongs to Lewis's sloppy takedown, because as long as the debate stays on the shooting, no one's really out for blood there.

Kellerman is the cop he was trained to be. And this is a story about how the system and society destroy him, while less noble "good guys" thrive for far longer.

It was a clean shoot.

Happy birthday, Homicide!

Today is the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest shows in television history, Homicide: Life on the Street.  You know all those people who annoy you by telling you you HAVE to watch The Wire because it's just the greatest show ever?  Well, I'm like the hipster version of those guys because many of the creatives behind The Wire were also behind Homicide, and I was a Homicide fanatic long before The Wire was even a glimmer in David Simon's eye.

Speaking of David Simon, the series was adapted from his non-fiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, covering a year he spent shadowing the detectives of the Baltimore Homicide Unit. It's a fascinating examination of the officers who "speak for the dead," and a great insight into the sorts of people who are drawn to that line of work. It's easy to see how someone would have read this and concluded there was enough depth to sustain an entire series.

There really had been no show like Homicide on TV.  It focuses on murder police, but is more character-driven than procedural.  The characters grew and changed to a greater degree than most of the principals who drive the Law & Orders and CSIs.  Visually, it was distinct too, shot on 16mm with handheld cameras and often with jarring jump-cuts.

And the writing... If you want to see a master class in how to write a pilot, check out the premiere episode "Gone For Goode," written by Paul Attanasio  In the span of 45 minutes, a fairly large ensemble is introduced and if you don't have a handle on each of the characters by the end, you haven't been paying attention.  The characters are so well-defined through their actions and dialogue that you'd swear this was an episode deep into the first or second season, from a point where the writers really had the show figured out.

And then there were scenes in "The Box" - the interrogation room.  Andre Braugher frequently shined in these moments as Frank Pembleton, master interrogator.  This scene is the first time we see him in action.



But the show wasn't all drama. It was frequently funny, sometimes even funnier than the sitcoms of the day. It was sort of like if Quentin Tarantino did a dialogue polish on Law & Order. Frequently, the show would lapse into funny exchanges that often revealed much about the characters and their philosophies.  It wasn't unusual for the show to take a few minutes and let Richard Belzer's Munch drop a new conspiracy theory on the squad, or have a few cops take an... unorthodox approach to getting a witness to talk...



And then just as frequently, it would hit you in the gut.

One episode that made a huge impression on me when I first saw it was a third-season episode called "Crosetti."  In it, Ned Beatty's Detective Bolander is given the unenviable task of investigating the death of one of the squad's own, Det. Crosetti.  Crosetti's body is fished out of the harbor in what is almost certainly a suicide.  Largely out of respect to Crosetti's partner, Meldrick Lewis (the fantastic Clark Johnson, who graces the screen too little these days), Lt. Giardello agrees to let the case be treated as "wrongful death."

The episode deals with the entire squad's reactions to the loss.  Bolander is frustrated by everyone's denial that their comrade killed himself; Giardello clashes with the bosses, who deny permission for an honor guard at the funeral; Pembleton and Bayliss provide moments of lightness as they deal with arranging the catering for the memorial service.

But it's Lewis's denial that forms the emotional core of the story, and it brings him into conflict with Bolander.  As Bolander pursues an answer he can never get ("Why did he do it?"), Lewis does his best to get to Crosetti's friends first and block them from saying anything that would support the suicide theory.  And that's where we pick this up...



Lewis's breakdown gets me every time I watch it.  The way you can almost see him feel the room spin around him, the undignified way his voice breaks as he finally gives in to the truth, and then his collapse in Bolander's bear hug.  These aren't touchy-feely guys, and so when we see this kind of display from them, it just guts you.

I've talked before about how I ran a half-hour drama series for two years in college.  It sort of aspired to be a WB-type show, though I'll admit that our ambitions often exceeded our grasp.  Part way through the first season, I started planting seeds for a later storyline that would see one character ending up in a dark place emotionally and the other characters coming to her rescue.

I presented the idea to my fellow writers, and no matter how many times I denied it, they were convinced I'd been inspired by a different "serious" episode of a show.  See, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "The Body" had aired just a few weeks prior to this and they were all "Oh, you want to write your version of 'The Body.'"

No. That's also a great hour of television, but if I'm being honest, I don't want to write "The Body." But I'd die a happy man if I ever write anything as masterfully done as "Crosetti."  It manages to be a powerful and standout episode without feeling too aggressively a departure from the norm.  "The Body" is clearly a very different animal from most Buffys, but "Crosetti" is pure Homicide, through and through.

If you want to see how to write great characters, watch Homicide.  It was a show ahead of its time, and 20 years later, it still feels unlike few other shows on TV.

Friday Free-For-All: Great Scenes - Homicide: Life on the Street interrogation

This is one of the most pivotal scenes in the pilot of Homicide: Life on the Street. This is the moment that introduces one of the most significant elements in the show - "the box." Scenes in the interrogation room are among the most dramatic in the entire series run, and no one was better in the box that Andre Braugher's Frank Pembleton.

In this scene, rookie detective Tim Bayliss sits in on an interrogation and gets his first taste of how Frank operates. It's not only an incredibly well-written sequence, but it's well-acted. (Note actor Kyle Secor's reactions as Bayliss.)

It's probably worth noting that at the time Homicide premiered, there hadn't been many realistic police dramas, and most often, interrogations were scenes where the cops would flatly confront the suspects with what they knew in an effort to intimidate them, or they'd just flat out resort to threats of violence. This is something much more well-crafted. Watch the scene and pay attention to everything we learn about Frank and Tim during this sequence, both as individuals and their dynamic together.

Friday Free-for-All - The Tommy Westphall Multiverse Theory

Some of you might remember that a while back I noted that actor/comedian Richard Belzer has appeared as Detective John Munch on six different shows: Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The X-Files, The Beat and The Wire. The obvious implication of this is simple - via the transitive property, Law & Order and The X-Files exist in the same universe.

Better still, since Law & Order has crossed over with several other spin-offs (Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury, Law & Order: Los Angeles and Conviction) and The X-Files crossed over with Millennium and The Lone Gunman, that means that this TV universe contains at least 12 distinct TV shows.

And yet, Homicide has a few other crossovers to add to the mix - notably St. Elsewhere, and here's where things get interesting. See, St. Elsewhere crossed over with Cheers (no, really!). Cheers spun off Frasier and crossed over with Wings, and because of NBC's ubiquitous crossover and cameo stunts in the 90s, Frasier is linked to many other sitcoms.

So in theory, it's possible that Fox Mulder could have stopped into Boston and had a beer with Norm and Cliff, then headed to New York and butted heads with Detective Lennie Briscoe over jurisdiction.

(These are the things I spent my days thinking about when I was in college. All of this is from memory - not from research.)

Ready for me to blow your mind? In the final episode of St. Elsewhere, we were shown that the entire series had actually been a fantasy existing only in the mind of an autistic child named Tommy Westphall.

So in theory, not only do all of these shows exist in the same universe - they ALL exist in the mind of an autistic child!

One night in college I was poking around the internet, and I stumbled onto a site discussing this very phenomenon... but their take on the Tommy Westphall Universe was far more comprehensive than mine. I established connections based only on direct contact between the shows - they tend to be a bit looser, using common references between different series as enough to establish a link. Currently, the site alleges a link between 282 series!

So if you're into TV geekery and want to see just how you can get from All in the Family to CSI: NY, head on over to Tommy Westphall's Mind - A multiverse explored and drink in the TV trivia. They even have a handy chart showing how each show connects to the others.

UPDATE: Thanks to poster Nat G on Ken Levine's site, I've rediscovered another TV crossover site.

Friday Free-For-All: Richard Belzer as Detective John Munch

Detective John Munch is one of my favorite characters in all of TV. Actor/comedian Richard Belzer has the distinction of being the only actor to play the same character across so many shows and networks. The character originated on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1993, and Belzer spent seven seasons on that show. During that run, he appeared on Law & Order in three crossover episodes, and made a cameo as Munch in an episode of The X-Files.

After Homicide was canceled, Dick Wolf moved the Munch character over to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where unfortunately his part seems to have gotten smaller every year. Belzer also made a cameo as Munch on the short-lived UPN series The Beat, and popped up briefly on HBO's The Wire. That's six different shows across four networks. Not too shabby.

(There's also an Arrested Development cameo, though most Munch fans debate the canonocity of that appearance.)

"The Belz," as he is sometimes called, has a new music video - "The Vampire Song."



However, that's not the first time he's sung on camera, as we see in this clip from Homicide, where Munch gives in to karaoke.



And finally, one of my all-time favorite Homicide moments, which I dare not spoil.