If you were too young to watch NBC’s groundbreaking police drama, Homicide: Life on the Street when it first debuted in 1993, you may wonder why there’s still so much fuss about the show more than three decades later. That’s because so much of what Homicide presented was stuff you just didn’t see on network television back then: shaky, kinetic camera work; working stiff police detectives cracking jokes at gruesome murder scenes instead of solemnly vowing justice; serialized stories that arced over several episodes; heart-rending killings that never got solved. It was a cop show without gun battles or car chases, with a bracing shot of street-level realism, filmed mostly in Baltimore.
TV fans can step back in time Monday, when NBCUniversal rights a longtime injustice and makes all seven seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street available on its streaming service, Peacock – along with 2000's Homicide: the Movie . There’s a total 122 episodes, plus the TV movie. One person glad to see these episodes finally arrive on streaming is Tom Fontana, who served as executive producer and showrunner for Homicide , helping develop its singular storytelling style.
He wasn’t directly involved with bringing the series to Peacock, though Fontana says he and fellow Homicide producers Barry Levinson and Gail Mutrux had been bugging the company to put the show online for years. “We could never understand why they [didn’t do it sooner],” adds the producer, who created the prison .