When ‘Homicide’ Hit Its Stride

For television historians amateur and professional, the easiest place to begin the story of the contemporary Golden Age of Television is on Jan. 10, 1999, when Tony Soprano first paid a toll on the New Jersey Turnpike. But perhaps we might be better served to rewind the clock approximately six years, to Jan. 31, 1993, the night of Super Bowl XXVII. The Dallas Cowboys demolished the Buffalo Bills, 52-17, and the broadcast was followed by the premiere of a new NBC drama, set in Baltimore, studying the work of the city’s homicide detectives.

The series was called “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and it was based on a book by David Simon, then a Baltimore Sun reporter who had spent a year tagging along with the police department’s homicide squad. Post-Super Bowl premiere notwithstanding, “Homicide” was never a ratings success, but it stayed on the air for seven seasons, winning four Emmys and three Peabody Awards. The show was prickly, funny, morally forceful, endlessly discursive and filled with a murderers’ row of actors, including the future stars Andre Braugher (who won an Emmy for his performance as Frank Pembleton), Melissa Leo and Giancarlo Esposito, along with veterans like Ned Beatty, Yaphet Kotto and Richard Belzer, known primarily then as a stand-up comedian.

The show’s sixth episode, “Three Men and Adena,” which first aired in March, was a stark, dramatic example of what made “Homicide” different from other cop shows. It takes place almost entirely within the confines of an interrogation room, with the detectives Pembleton and Bayliss (Kyle Secor) attempting to wring a confession out of Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn), an itinerant fruit-and-vegetable man, after the murder of a little girl named Adena Watson. Pembleton and Bayliss prod, provoke and rage, but “Homicide” refuses to grant the audience the resolution they crave. Tucker doesn’t crack. Adena’s case is never solved. (The showrunner, Tom Fontana, won an Emmy for writing the episode)

Thirty years later, Fontana, the executive producers Barry Levinson and Paul Attanasio and the actors Andre Braugher and Kyle Secor reflected on “Three Men and Adena,” in particular, and on the broader legacy of the series and their frustration at its still not being available to stream. These are edited excerpts from conversations with them.