The Only Work of Fiction That Ever Made Me Cry

I couldn't sleep last night -- such is the curse of the night-shift workers that we're always almost falling asleep when we're at work, but can never quite fall asleep when we're home -- so I popped in a DVD of "Homicide: Life on the Street." I've already seen every episode -- some of them more than once -- but damn, does it still pack a wallop even with repeated viewings. I found myself admiring the writing on a new level, walking away from certain scenes with a different interpretation than I'd had upon my first viewing. One thing I admire about the show is how any given story arc can work on two different levels, either as a self-contained narrative or as a part of a greater whole.

The perfect example is the one scene that stood out the most for me, a scene in which homicide detective Meldrick Lewis desperately tries to talk his partner out of killing himself. Desperate to get rid of Meldrick so he can do the deed in private, Detective Mike Kellerman tries to offend Meldrick by callously insulting the memory of Meldrick's dead partner Steve Crosetti. Crosetti's been dead for years by this point, but this is one show that doesn't shy away from its history (as opposed to such shows as "Law and Order," which completely and immediately forgets its characters after they are written out of the series). So many things are happening in this scene between the lines. We're not just watching Kellerman's meltdown here, we're forced to wonder about the inner workings of Meldrick's mind. Has he always felt such affection for Crosetti, an affection that was unspoken while Crosetti was still alive? Or were the two partners merely co-workers, has Meldrick built up Crosetti's memory in his mind so much that he feels a merely posthumous affection borne of guilt? We realize something neither character in the scene realizes, that if Meldrick is able to talk Kellerman out of his suicide, he may finally purge himself of the guilt he feels over being unable to do the same for Crosetti. In his own self-involved acts of desperation, Kellerman is inadvertantly providing Meldrick with a redemption he never even knew he needed.

Yet the core relationship in the series is between detectives Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss. Yes, this is an ensemble drama, but if the show can be said to have central characters, they'd be Bayliss and Pembleton. As his own wife points out, Pembleton is not the type of man who has friends, but Bayliss is clearly the one man who comes closest to such a position; the dynamic of their not-quite friendship creates a relationship that is truly unique in television history, in its own understated way. Bayliss is ostensibly set up as the slightly more central figure, but it's Pembleton who grabs your attention, with his bombastic arrogance and uncanny, almost effortless knack of drawing confessions out of suspects.

"Homicide," incidentally, is probably the most spiritual show I've ever watched and enjoyed -- but only if you take the series as a whole. True, many, many episodes don't address spirituality at all, except in the negative: John Munch (a non-practicing Jew) and Frank Pembleton (a lapsed Catholic) are the only characters who really address the concepts of God and religion, and neither one seems to be for either concept. We get monologues and wisecracks about how a homicide detective, having seen what he's seen, could never believe in a God, or at least not one who is truly benevolent. Yet when Pembleton is finally moved to prayer, his motivation is somehow both shocking and inevitable, given the direction of the character. I'm an agnostic, but I still cried when Pembleton finally turned to God for help, because even if I can't relate to Pembleton's spiritual past, I can relate to his desperation, his fear, his grief. For that one moment (and, we realize at only this point, many other moments in the series' history) Pembleton has become more than just another quirky TV character: he has become a reflection of each of us during our darkest time.