Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “Kujaku,” which Nujabes composed for Samurai Champloo. It surfaces during the brief fight between Mugen and Ishimatsu in the Samurai Champloo episode “Ishindenshin sono ichi (Tacit Understanding 1),” which was retitled “Hellhounds for Hire (Part 1)” for English-speaking countries, and again during clips from the eating contest episode in the clip show episode “Onkochishin (Learning from the Past),” which was retitled “The Disorder Diaries.”

Nujabes was a terrific hip-hop producer. Speaking of hip-hop, it was central to some of my favorite musical moments on Homicide: Life on the Street, like when Public Enemy’s rousing “Lost at Birth,” one of the greatest opening tracks on a hip-hop album, popped up twice in the “Something Sacred” two-parter. Homicide finally comes to streaming via Peacock next Monday after the death of Homicide alum Andre Braugher stoked Braugher fans’ demands for the ’90s crime drama’s streaming debut.

I was a Homicide fan when it first aired on NBC while I was in high school and university. I remember writing a complimentary message about Homicide‘s fondness for jump cuts to Homicide editor Cindy Mollo, who later edited The Book of Eli and Ozark, on America Online, and I still have with me her thankful reply. I envy anyone who will be watching Homicide for the first time on Peacock.

Shout! Factory was able to clear the 100-plus songs Homicide used in montages or scenes with diegetic music for its Homicide complete series box set. I finally bought that Shout! box set two years ago partly so that I could rewatch one of its extras: the made-for-PBS documentary Anatomy of a Homicide: Life on the Street, which I liked when it first aired in 1998 because it gave a lot of screen time to one of Homicide‘s best writers, James Yoshimura, whom I look up to as an Asian American writer.

But when it came time for NBCUniversal, which now owns Homicide, to clear the songs for Homicide‘s streaming debut, I kept hearing that resolving the music rights issues was going to take a long time. Well, I’m glad the wait is over, and viewers who never saw Homicide before can finally experience exquisitely edited sequences I’m fond of, like the use of Belly’s 1993 song “Full Moon, Empty Heart” in the “Every Mother’s Son” episode, a highlight of Braugher’s dazzling run as skilled interrogator Frank Pembleton, or Pembleton’s realization that he has to stop skipping his stroke medication at the end of the “Bad Medicine” episode. That montage of Pembleton finally taking his medication while two of his co-workers find one of their confidential informants dead on the street was the first place where I ever heard “Cold, Cold Ground,” a Tom Waits song I really like. It comes from the same 1987 album that contains the version of Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole” The Wire used in its second-season opening titles.

For those who are unfamiliar with Homicide, it’s the show that introduced John Munch, a gallows-humored ex-hippie the late Richard Belzer ended up playing in everything from The X-Files to Sesame Street. In the two or three first-season Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes I watched before quitting the show because it was mediocre compared to Homicide (John Mulaney’s stand-up routine about Ice-T’s dialogue as Fin—which always comes off to me as awkwardly written whenever I occasionally see clips of SVU—was dead-on), I never liked how Munch was used on SVU. Homicide used him perfectly. Munch’s dialogue with characters like his partner Stan “the Big Man” Bolander, played by the late Ned Beatty, and Tim Bayliss, Pembleton’s partner, was often funnier than most ’90s sitcoms.

Homicide was based on Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, a 1991 book in which journalist David Simon, the future creator/showrunner of The Wire, shadowed Baltimore homicide detectives for a year. In his book, Simon wanted to enact what he referred to as “the demythification of the American detective.”

Although he wrote episodes like “Something Sacred: Part 2” and “Bad Medicine,” Simon didn’t showrun the TV version of his book—veteran St. Elsewhere writer Tom Fontana, Simon’s screenwriting mentor and the future creator/showrunner of Oz, did—and the journalist felt that it didn’t fully realize the demythification of the American detective. Simon later saw The Wire as an opportunity to go a step further than Homicide in that demythification.

When he directed Superman—I’ll never call it Superman: The Movie because that’s not what it says in the opening titles, man—Richard Donner had a one-word mantra: “verisimilitude.” If Homicide had a one-word mantra, it would have been “demythification.” The Dragnet franchise, which began on radio, wanted to emphasize the tedium of police work. But it was—I hate the word “copaganda,” and I’ll never use that overused term in these Couch Avocados columns—a love letter to the LAPD. Homicide—which emerged in an age of action blockbusters (on both the big and small screens) about maverick cops whose jobs are always exciting and violent, and it was meant to act as a counter to that type of storytelling—was a far better show than the first two Dragnets on TV about the tedium of police work. That’s partly because in its first few seasons, it wasn’t a love letter to the Baltimore Police Department. (Also, nobody on Homicide read their lines off cue cards, which was what everyone did on Dragnet.)

I thought those first few seasons were the most riveting thing on network TV at the time. The filming of Homicide on location in Baltimore—instead of L.A., San Francisco, New York, or 21 Jump Street and The Commish‘s home base of Vancouver—gave it a distinctive look that hadn’t been seen on an American cop show since the days of Miami Vice filming on location in Miami. Baltimore native Barry Levinson directed a pilot episode that remains one of my favorite first episodes of a TV show because of its strangeness and sense of humor. (“Gone for Goode” wasn’t technically a pilot because NBC already ordered six episodes of Homicide before the filming of “Gone for Goode.”) The dialogue in “Gone for Goode,” which includes a few lines from Simon’s book (like Pembleton’s list of signs that a suspect in the interrogation room known as the Box is guilty), sounds more like the partially improvised banter in Diner, Levinson’s breakout movie, than the plot-driven dialogue from a typical procedural.

In the DVD commentrak for “Gone for Goode,” Fontana got a kick out of a shot of flies buzzing around an off-screen corpse, and he admitted that the horrendous odor of corpses was something Homicide didn’t do enough in its run. The flies were a good example of the grit and grime of Homicide.

But badly decomposing corpses aren’t why the streaming generation is so interested in catching (or revisiting) this show. The streaming generation will be there for Melissa Leo—long before she won an Oscar for her performance in The Fighter in 2011—as Kay Howard, a detective with a 100% clearance rate. Or Belzer’s comic timing—and the occasional dramatic moments that deepened his character. (“It’s the best of both worlds: I get to do the straight dramatic acting and invest a character with humor, which is true to how these guys are. Homicide detectives see so much horror every day that the humor becomes a reflexive thing,” said Belzer to TV Guide in 1996.) Or the late Yaphet Kotto as Lieutenant Al Giardello, one of the greatest workplace dads in TV history. Or Giancarlo Esposito as Giardello’s estranged FBI agent son. (Unfortunately, the arc about Mike Giardello’s tensions with his dad was such a drag when it first aired. Esposito’s character didn’t really shine until the tense, Kathryn Bigelow-directed “Lines of Fire,” a reunion between Esposito and Ron Eldard, who played partners five years before on the short-lived Bakersfield P.D., a great single-camera comedy that starred Esposito as a Washington, D.C. cop struggling to adjust to podunk Bakersfield, California.)

Or Braugher, who won an Emmy for playing Pembleton.

On Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Braugher was completely reserved (and hilarious) as “meep morp zeep robot captain” Ray Holt, whereas the volatile, chain-smoking Pembleton—taught by Jesuits just like Fontana was in high school—was a tragic figure straight out of the Shakespeare plays where Braugher honed his craft in the late ’80s. Hundreds of Black cop characters popped up on TV before Homicide came along, but the show—which, as David P. Kalat wrote in 1998’s Homicide: Life on the Street—The Unofficial Companion, “merely strove to depict the overwhelmingly black-majority [sic] city of Baltimore honestly”—felt different in its depiction of Black cops. They were complex and not exactly saintly.

In “Gone for Goode,” Pembleton explains to Bayliss on his first day on the homicide squad that he approaches interrogation as if it’s salesmanship—”What I am selling is a long prison term to a client who has no genuine use for the product”—and his salesman tactics in the Box immediately appall Bayliss. A year later in “Black and Blue,” my favorite Homicide episode about police racism, Pembleton uses some of those same salesman tactics to gaslight Lane Staley, an innocent Black suspect played by a pre-Grey’s Anatomy Isaiah Washington, into a false confession—just to humiliate Giardello for opposing his investigation of a racist white cop who killed the unarmed Black drug dealer Staley was friends with—and the sweat on Pembleton’s face as he hands his pen to the tearful Staley for the signing of the confession means that even Pembleton is appalled by his own actions. (James Yoshimura wrote “Black and Blue.” He once called it his favorite Homicide script. “Black and Blue” also pissed off several Baltimore cops so much that they wrote a letter of protest to Levinson, Homicide‘s co-executive producer.)

A lesser cop show would have depicted Pembleton or Meldrick Lewis (well played by Clark Johnson, who used everything he learned from acting on Homicide and directing five of its episodes to spice up the pilots he directed for The Shield and The Wire) as saintly. And that’s why I’m not so fond of Homicide‘s later seasons: Several of the new additions to the squad were saintly or simply bland.

During the summer when Black Lives Matter shook the world, San Francisco Chronicle contributor Raheem Hosseini wrote one of my favorite articles about how Homicide told painful truths about policing. He said that “while astute cultural critics are dead right that Hollywood has long glamorized, heroized and simplified cops doing righteous cop things, ‘Homicide’ was different. There’s no ducking that it was a detective show or that it told its 44-minute teleplays from the perspective of people with the power to take our lives and freedom… But unlike 99% of cop shows, which celebrate their paper-thin leads for breaking the rules, ‘Homicide’ didn’t forgive its detectives for their trespasses. And it never forgot. See the seven-season-and-a-movie tragic fall of Detective Tim Bayliss.”

The arc Kyle Secor’s Bayliss character experienced from “Gone for Goode” to 2000’s Homicide: The Movie was a forerunner of the whirlwind arcs Fontana came up with for the characters on Oz. If Oz made you cover your eyes a lot, don’t worry. Nobody gets crucified to the floor during Bayliss’s series-long arc.

The events in “Three Men and Adena” forever haunted Bayliss. “Three Men and Adena” was the sixth Homicide episode that was produced, but it became the fifth that aired because of NBC’s unhappiness with “Night of the Dead Living,” a bottle episode that was third in the production order. Written by Fontana and directed by Martin Campbell, the future director of GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro, and Casino Royale, “Three Men and Adena” centered on Pembleton and Bayliss’s 12-hour interrogation of an elderly arabber suspected of murdering 11-year-old Adena Watson. My favorite Moses Gunn role was when he played gangster Bumpy Jonas in the Shaft flicks, but his scenes as Bumpy were outshined by his performance as the arabber in what ended up being his final role.

I remember watching “Three Men and Adena” twice on the night it premiered—March 3, 1993—and then watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s “Duet” episode, which centered on Major Kira’s interrogation of a suspected war criminal, twice on its premiere week of June 14-20, 1993. After being blown away by “Duet” that week, I wanted to see someone put “Three Men and Adena” on a double bill with “Duet” somewhere because they both take place almost entirely in interrogation rooms. It would be a depressing-as-hell double bill, but there’s so much amazing acting in both episodes.

“Three Men and Adena” is Exhibit A in Homicide‘s effectiveness at depicting the grueling nature of homicide investigations and the reasons why, as Hosseini said, “[the series] certainly did not make me want me to be a cop. It made me feel for everyone who comes into contact with them.”

I’m not sure if Homicide will experience a Suits-like resurgence in popularity, but I’m glad that people who are curious about the show can finally see all the episodes and performances I praised above or the often argumentative car conversations between Pembleton and Bayliss. Their car scenes were among my favorite scenes on Homicide. The conversations alternated between insightful and humorous.

Due to Homicide‘s arrival on Peacock, today’s prompt is: Which long-lost show do you wish you could access on a streaming service? It could be Space: Above and Beyond or Infinity Train, a casualty of the ongoing, David Zaslav-mandated Max animation purge (I can never type that MAGAt motherfucker’s last name without thinking of Mr. Zsasz, the serial killer from the Batman comics). Or maybe it’s the show that was my top pick for a long time: Frank’s Place. That was the one-season wonder that starred Tim Reid, who doubled as a co-executive producer, as a Black Ivy League professor who knows nothing about Creole culture or the restaurant business and has to adjust to both of them after reluctantly inheriting his dead father’s Creole restaurant in New Orleans.

If you loved Reservation Dogs—especially its mix of irreverent humor and quiet drama and its dismantling of the notion that Indigenous folks are a monolith—you’ll like Frank’s Place, which alternated between drama and series creator Hugh Wilson’s sense of humor from his WKRP in Cincinnati days and was adored by Black viewers in the late ’80s for its dismantling of the notion that Black folks are a monolith. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness author Herman Gray, who was one of my teachers at UC Santa Cruz, admires Frank’s Place. He wrote in Watching Race that the show captured well a lot of details he remembered from his younger days as a Black Southerner, and it represented aspects of Black working-class life in New Orleans with integrity rather than with “the derision, exaggeration, and marginalization that too often are found in other television representations of blacks [sic] and working-class people.”

Gray also said in Watching Race that Frank’s Place “is not simply didactic nor does it merely offer a voyeuristic tour of black [sic] experiences that disempowers or exoticizes black [sic] subjects.”

Hmm, that’s a lot like what showrunner Sterlin Harjo and his all-Indigenous writing staff dazzlingly did for their peoples 35 years later on Reservation Dogs.

But because I recently found the entire run of Frank’s Place on Internet Archive, and I’ve been savoring its only season, the long-lost show I wish I could access the most right now is Midnight Caller, which never hit DVD or streaming because of music rights issues.

Midnight Caller was created by Richard DiLello, one of the writers of 1988’s Colors, the infamous LAPD-vs.-gangbangers movie that was told from the point of view of two white cops. (Colors‘s emphasis on white cops so frustrated John Singleton, a South Central L.A. native, that he said to his friends that he could make a movie about South Central better than Dennis Hopper could make a movie about South Central. That movie ended up being Boyz n the Hood.)

During its run, Midnight Caller was a big deal in the Bay Area because it was filmed on location in San Francisco. Midnight Caller was so big there that smooth jazz trumpeter Rick Braun and Terminator composer Brad Fiedel’s faithful 1992 re-recording of Fiedel’s bluesy Midnight Caller main title theme, which also featured Braun, received regular airplay on KKSF-FM, San Francisco’s smooth jazz station, in the ’90s. Fiedel’s most famous instrumental is the Terminator theme, but the Midnight Caller theme remains my favorite instrumental Fiedel wrote. It always reminds me of doing my high-school homework late at night while KKSF played Braun’s laid-back performance of the theme.

Before Midnight Caller, Gary Cole—the future Harvey Birdman—was a runner-up for the role of Crockett on Miami Vice. Then he almost played arms dealer Mel Profitt on Wiseguy, and I long for the parallel universe where I could rewatch Wiseguy‘s entertaining Profitt arc without having to see Kevin Spacey’s fucking face. (As the heroin-addicted Profitt, whose incestuous relationship with Susan, his hot sister/business partner, was the granddaddy of a million Game of Thrones incest storylines, the sex pest wasn’t even the best actor in the Profitt arc. William Russ, the future dad on Boy Meets World, was. Russ was better than Spacey whenever he brought to life the character of Roger Lococco, an assassin who calls everybody “Buckwheat.”)

On Midnight Caller, Cole was great as Jack Killian, a disgraced ex-San Francisco cop who hosts Midnight Caller, a nighttime talk radio program on the fictional KJCM 98.3, and uses his platform to help the helpless in the City. (Us Bay Area folks never call it “San Fran.” It’s always “the City” or “the Sucka Free.”) Midnight Caller was basically “Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio meets the original version of The Equalizer.” As “the Nighthawk,” Jack signed off each KJCM broadcast (and each episode of Midnight Caller) with one of my favorite catchphrases from the late ’80s: “Good night, America, wherever you are.”

I was lucky to rip the Midnight Caller pilot, which someone on YouTube posted in its entirety, before that YouTuber removed it. The gorgeously shot pilot, which guest-starred Jenny Wright—the star of one of the only three or four vampire movies I love, Near Dark—as a serial killer who stalks Jack, heavily used one of my favorite Sade tunes, “Is It a Crime?” Then it concluded with Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way.” Yeah, I doubt Warner Bros. Discovery—Midnight Caller was produced by Lorimar, which Warner absorbed in 1993, so the show belongs to Warner—would bend over backward to clear them.

I’m curious about the rest of Midnight Caller‘s run (NBC canceled it in 1991), especially because I became a Big Trouble in Little China fan in the early ’00s, and BTILC star Dennis Dun was a regular on Midnight Caller as Billy Po, Jack’s producer/engineer and a resident in the Asian Mullet Hall of Fame.

The only Midnight Caller episode that’s currently on the internet is the most infamous and controversial one: “After It Happened,” directed by a pre-ER Mimi Leder. The 1988 episode is about Jack’s hunt for Mike Barnes, a bisexual sociopath who deliberately infects his sexual partners with HIV. One of Barnes’s victims is Tina, Jack’s pregnant ex-girlfriend—played by Kay Lenz, who won an Emmy for her performance in “After It Happened.” The San Francisco LGBTQ community protested against “After It Happened” before its premiere on NBC and stormed the lobby of KRON-TV, the San Francisco NBC affiliate at the time, to stop it from airing it. In response to the picketing, KRON ran a disclaimer about proper AIDS education before the premiere of “After It Happened.”

The station also did a post-show discussion between a KRON news anchor, LGBTQ activists, and city health officials about the AIDS crisis and the activists and health officials’ frustrations with the episode that just aired, as well as a live interview with Midnight Caller co-executive producer (and future Supernatural showrunner) Robert Singer, who defended “After It Happened.” (He’s the same guy Bobby Singer was named after on Supernatural. I only rarely watched Supernatural, whereas I watched every episode so far of Supernatural creator Eric Kripke’s adaptation of The Boys, where Jim Beaver, who played Bobby, currently appears as a politician who’s also named Robert Singer.) The entire episode and KRON’s post-show discussions are streamable on Internet Archive.

The last time I watched “After It Happened” was when it was on Lifetime in the early ’90s, and the only thing I remember about catching it on Lifetime was the fancy tux guest star Richard Cox always wore as Barnes. In KRON’s post-show discussion, the activists and health officials condemned the episode because either the Midnight Caller producers didn’t listen to a lot of the creative input they provided to them or the bi antagonist was another stereotypical depiction of bisexuality that they feared would lead to more hate crimes against the LGBTQ community.

I rewatched “After It Happened” earlier this week. I was surprised by a non-stereotypical scene where a gay owner of a Castro District club says to Jack that Barnes is a disgrace to their community, which the activists and health officials didn’t mention in the post-show discussion. But at the same time, the activists and health officials were also right to be offended.

I’m not a member of the LGBTQ community, but I’m aware that in 1988, Hollywood was still stuck in Diamonds Are Forever/Freebie and the Bean mode when it came to LGBTQ villains, and Cox’s scenes as the Lothario in “After It Happened” have a little bit of the stench of that era (while Alan Cumming’s scenes as the queer-coded villain in 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats, a cult favorite Cumming recently said he’s fond of because “it was so ahead of its time,” don’t). Two of KRON’s panelists pointed out that nobody in the San Francisco LGBTQ community would ever abandon their lovers like Barnes did. Their comments made me realize that Cox’s promiscuous character didn’t need to be bi. He would have been a more believable character if he were only interested in the opposite sex like the HIV-positive Telly was in Kids (a film I’ve never seen, but I remember the uproar over Kids in the summer of 1995).

Lenz reprised her role in “Someone to Love,” the 1989 sequel to “After It Happened.” The sequel, which is about Tina’s final days, was more favorably received by the San Francisco LGBTQ community and Bay Area AIDS organizations because “After It Happened” and “Someone to Love” writer Stephen Zito was more willing to listen to activists this time and had spent about six months doing research for “Someone to Love.”

“After It Happened” is one of a few examples of Midnight Caller not aging as well as Homicide has. However, I’m still interested in watching the rest of the show’s run, and I still think Cole, who currently plays the team leader on NCIS, was great on Midnight Caller as the Nighthawk. “Good night, America, wherever you are” still goes hard.

Again, if you have a long-lost show that you wish were streamable on Peacock, Hulu, Disney+, Max, Netflix, Paramount+, BritBox, or Tubi, which one is it?