The scene: a courthouse in downtown Baltimore. Detective Frank Pembleton sits lost in thought in a hallway, awaiting his judicial turn. He’s handed over his badge on a point of principle — a higher-up lied to his face, scapegoating him for political favor.
Lt. Al Giardello, his shift commander, makes his way down the hall. “Have some coffee, Frank,” he says, handing him a paper cup.
“I’ve already had three cups,” Frank answers.
“Have some more. It’s rancid, it’s tepid, I have no cream and sugar. If that doesn’t make you homesick for the office, nothing else will.”
That, in a nutshell, is what’s great about “Homicide: Life on the Street,” added at last to the mini-universe of NBC’s Peacock streaming service. “At last” meaning late summer, a long wait for the best network show of the 1990s.
It’s not just the writing in that hallway exchange. It’s the fact that it involves Andre Braugher, rightly praised and Emmy-awarded for the intelligence and elocution of his Pembleton, a cop Jesuitical of mind and training, and, as Giardello, Yaphet Kotto, maybe best known for his movie work in “Alien” and “The Running Man,” whose measured delivery is as oddly mesmerizing as his broad features and gap-toothed grin.
Behind the scenes, Tom Fontana deserves credit, a guy who got his start as a writer turned producer on “St. Elsewhere,” that 1980s drama that you might say transposed the ensemble “Hill Street Blues” to a struggling Boston hospital.
These days you’d call him a showrunner. Though he’s not particularly varnished, as Hollywood goes; he’s straight-talking, and all the more admirable for his less-than-elite background, as a Buffalo State grad. (No, not giant SUNY Buffalo, obscure Buffalo State, where a national champion hurdler, Natalia Sawyer, was a recent bright spot.) And early episodes of “Homicide” are shot through with the Catholicism of Fontana’s youth in that “City of Good Neighbors.” (His sister is apparently a nun.)
The show is talky, philosophical. It flat holds up.
As Fontana has put it, lamenting certain elements of the show’s continued relevance three decades later, “prejudice and misogyny and inequality are still part of day-to-day life.” But there’s more. There’s the squad room, the “community of detectives” (including the excellent, Springs-connected Melissa Leo). There’s Giardello’s fondness for pastries.
“I didn’t know we had jelly doughnuts today,” he says in season three, making his way to a modest table next to the stained coffee maker and below the crappy TV atop the fridge. He carefully selects one, carrying it with reverence past his colleagues and back to his office before closing the door.