'Homicide: Life on the Street' Is About to Find New Life on the Streamers (2024)

Homicide: Life on the Street may be on the verge of abdicating the title of the Best TV Show You Can’t Stream.

On Monday night, David Simon — whose nonfiction book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, inspired the Emmy-winning NBC cop drama, and eventually launched Simon’s own acclaimed career in television with shows like The Wire and The Deuce — revealed that the biggest hurdle had been cleared to put the series on a streaming platform:

Homicide has long held an unfortunate position at the top of the list of classic series that aren’t available to stream for one reason or another. But from the moment it debuted after the 1993 Super Bowl, it was an obvious masterpiece: a cerebral, talky, hilarious, frequently devastating ensemble drama about a group of men and women who spoke on behalf of Baltimore’s many murder victims. It launched Andre Braugher’s career as one of TV’s all-time greatest dramatic actors, in the iconic role of master interrogator Frank Pembleton.It introduced Detective John Munch, a philosophical oddball whom Richard Belzer would play on 10 different series over 20 years, including a long stint on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It built one episode (the first season’s “Three Men and Adena”) entirely around a single interrogation, and another (Season Six’s “The Subway”) around guest star Vincent D’Onofrio as a man crushed between a train car and the station platform, having the final conversation of his life with Pembleton. Its cast at various points included Ned Beatty, Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, and Giancarlo Esposito, among many other greats, and featured guest appearances by the likes of Steve Buscemi, James Earl Jones, and Robin Williams (as a grieving husband who couldn’t comprehend how one of the homicide detectives could be cracking jokes while investigating the murder of Williams’ wife). The series also offered early roles to then-unknowns like Edie Falco, Paul Giamatti, Isaiah Washington, and Julianna Margulies.

And so far, the only way to see it is to get a DVD box set, which had gone out of print until Braugher’s death in December revived interest in the series. Meanwhile, several of the top competitors for the ignominious distinction of the best show not streaming have managed to find their way to one service or another. Moonlighting arrived on Hulu back in the fall, while fellow quirky Nineties favorite Northern Exposure came to Amazon Prime Video earlier this year.

As Simon’s tweet suggests, music has been the biggest Homicide holdup. The show featured an incredible, eclectic soundtrack of artists, from indie acts like Morphine, Cowboy Junkies, and Garbage, to classic blues and soul artists like Bo Diddley, Joan Armatrading, and Buddy Guy. Shows produced before the DVD era, much less the streaming era, had very specific licenses for use of preexisting music, and often lost the rights to certain songs once episodes were being repackaged for home video use. It can be an expensive and time-consuming process to expand those rights. This has been a barrier to streaming entry for many 20th-century classics. Producers of The Wonder Years and China Beach, two shows packed with late-Sixties and early-Seventies pop, rock, and R&B hits, eventually went through that process, to varying degrees of success: Wonder Years is on disc and on streaming, with most but not all of the original music restored, while China Beach (which would arguably inherit the title of best non-streaming show whenever Homicide vacates it) is only on DVD. Other notable series currently in limbo include Sixties legal drama The Defenders, Seventies sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati (another case of an inconvenient soundtrack), and early Aughts dramedy Ed (where the question of who actually owns the show seems to be as much of a problem as the music).

There is one other way to see snippets of Homicide without the physical discs: Here and there, random, low-res clips have been uploaded to YouTube and other video sites, like this excerpt from a Season Six episode that was framed as a documentary about the homicide unit:

But those are just a taste. Hopefully, TV fans will be able to get the full Frank Pembleton experience on streaming, and soon.