Homicide Life on the Street-related stories
Posted Jan 11th 2010 2:01PM by Mike Moody
Filed under: Other Drama Shows, Programming, Reality-Free
David Simon, creator of
The Wire, is shifting his lens from the mean streets of Baltimore to post-Katrina New Orleans with
Treme. The HBO series is set in a Crescent City neighborhood rich in Créole and African American history. Unlike
The Wire,
Treme will tighten its scope to focus on the musicians and working class people living among the city's ongoing reconstruction efforts.
The Wire was a dense and sprawling tale, unearthing corruption and secrets everywhere from grimy back alleys to city hall.
Treme's reportedly smaller scope recalls Simon's first series,
Homicide: Life on the Street. The pioneering NBC drama centered on the tough and streetwise detectives sweating away at a Baltimore police precinct. Simply put, the show was a masterpiece that offered a rich, compelling and sometimes avant-garde micro-study of overworked cops.
Continue reading David Simon's Treme gets a teaser trailer and a premiere date
Posted Dec 9th 2009 6:19PM by Isabelle Carreau
Filed under: TV on DVD, Ask TV Squad, Reality-Free
The "
Ask TV Squad" column, published every Wednesday, answers your questions about current and past TV shows, as well as about the celebrities appearing on TV. Every week, I will pick a question (or more) sent to us and provide answers in the column. If your question is not picked for a column, it may be answered in a subsequent column or in
TV Squad's APB Podcast.
To submit questions to the "Ask TV Squad" column, you can post them below in comments or email them to asktvsquad@gmail.com.
This week, I follow up on
the last "Ask TV Squad" about TV shows on DVD and answer a question about which TV DVDs you should own.
Continue reading Ask TV Squad: Which DVDs to own
Posted Oct 28th 2009 10:00AM by Allison Waldman
Filed under: Industry, Programming, OpEd, Reality-Free
For the longest time, I've kvetched about the fact that the television industry has stopped programming for Saturday night. For years, Saturday was a great night of television. I remember
M*A*S*H and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, not to mention guilty pleasures like
The Facts of Life and
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Even NBC's thrillogy,
The Pretender and
Profiler were fun. All those shows were Saturday night hits (some bigger than others).
Well,
I'm not alone in missing Saturday TV; Oscar-winner Barry Levinson feels the same. Levinson is also a TV producer -- he did
Homicide: Life on the Street and
The Philanthropist -- and he thinks the networks are making a big mistake by not seizing on Saturday primetime. He knows the business pretty well and he's confused by the networks' strategy.
"I don't think the answer is to retreat," he told the New York Daily News. "When you give up Saturday night, you open the door for people to go somewhere else. Basically, they're shrinking their own audience."
Continue reading Barry Levinson urges TV to take back Saturday night
Posted Jun 3rd 2009 12:30PM by Nick Zaino
Filed under: Law and Order, Casting, Reality-Free
"You always made me feel safe, John."
Perfect. Beautiful. That line was delivered by Carol Kane to Richard Belzer on last night's season finale of
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. A bit of history. Kane played Gwen Munch, the conspiracy-minded ex-wife of Belzer's Detective John Munch. The last time the two of them played those roles was more than a decade ago, not even on the same show.
When last Detective Munch fans saw the pairing, it was in 1997 on
Homicide: Life on the Street. And they picked one hell of an episode to bring her back. Fans of Belzer know he was having fun with the black helicopter crowd before he brought that particular obsession to his character, and last night's episode was tailor-made for him, even if he wasn't really in the forefront of the plot.
Continue reading Carol Kane and Richard Belzer - Together again on Law & Order: SVU
Posted Mar 19th 2008 5:24PM by Jonathan Toomey
Filed under: Other Drama Shows, TV on DVD, Retro Squad, Standout Episodes, Episode Reviews
(S02E04) Originally aired on January 6, 1994
It's been named one of the top 100 shows of all time by Time. You can't have a conversation about cop shows without mentioning it. Stacked up against other classics such as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, the Law & Order franchise, The Shield, and The Wire, it often meets and sometimes exceeds. It's arguably one of the top three police dramas ever made. And this was the episode where people really started to talk about Homicide: Life on the Street.
Continue reading Homicide: Life on the Street - Bop Gun
Posted Nov 20th 2007 11:43AM by Jackie Schnoop
Filed under: OpEd, Law and Order, The Wire, TV Squad Lists
Police stories make for some of the best stories either in real life or on television. I've been lucky enough to know cops over the years (not in a criminal sense, mind you) and find that it's sometimes a mutual macabre or jaded sense of humor we share. There are the by-the-book cops, the hot-doggers, the idealists, the cynical, the naive, the jaded, the good, the bad, and the "I want to get through my twenty and retire" kind of cops.
My favorite cop television shows over the years often reflect those characters and it's sometimes a bit surprising how close they come to actual police I know ... or how far they stray from the reality of police work.
Continue reading Seven of my all-time favorite cop shows
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on 'Faces of America' and the Beer Summit
Six Reasons Why '24' Has Jumped the You-Know-What
The Super Bowl Commercials: The Best
