Looks like they managed to clear the music rights. I caught some of it when it first aired, but was never able to watch it consistently. This might be the thing that pushes me over the edge and convinces me to sign up for Peacock.
On a tangent, but related…what is the logic behind not granting permission to use a piece of music that was already licensed before? I asked this once before on the Dope, but I think I might have worded my question imprecisely.
Let’s say I own the rights to a particular piece of music that’s used in a TV show, but when I licensed it for broadcast, the contract didn’t anticipate a new medium (DVD, streaming, hologram, whatever). If the show is not airing/streaming/whatever, I am getting no revenue for the music I licensed (at least not through that vehicle). If I agree to license the music, I get revenue, even if it’s not a ton. I understand that greed capitalism incentivizes me to get as much for the music as I possibly can, but isn’t any revenue better than no revenue? I’ve never really understood this.
Anyway, “Homicide” will be streaming, and that’s a good thing.
Sometimes it’s not really a matter of “any revenue is better than no revenue”. It’s sometimes a matter of not wanting to normalize a lower price * - if I license the streaming rights to Homicide for $X, it’s going to limit how much I can charge in the future for streaming rights to that song.
And sometimes it’s not even about the price- it’s about the difficulty of tracking down the rights holders for all the songs used in a series.
What I’m not sure about regarding Homicide is how necessary it really was to get the songs that were used in the original broadcast. There have been other shows that replaced the music and I just don’t remember whether Homicide was one of the shows where the original music was important.
* I’m dying to ditch cable, but the problem is that my husband’s sports channels are not all available on Fubo or Hulu etc. There used to be one or two that had all the channels he wants, but one channel was dropped by all of those services because they couldn’t agree on the fee. If they lower the price to what Fubo/Hulu are willing to pay, then cable providers will want a lower price too. It’s eventually going to cause a spiral , where even more cable subscribers cut the cord because they don’t want to pay inflated prices for sports networks they don’t want which causes the price the networks charges the cable providers to increase which causes more people to cut the cord and so on…
This is particularly true when the rights are jointly held, or rights for difference uses or medium belong to or have priority to various rightholders or licensees.
One of the best shows ever made, China Beach, has been held in limbo from streaming because of music rights issues which are unlikely to ever be resolved because of competing interests and recalcitrant parties, and in this case, subbing out the songs for ‘generic’ or available-to-license songs is just not viable because of how intrinsic it was to setting the time and place of the show. There was low quality DVD release in the ‘Oughts and a slightly higher quality release in 2014 as a 25th anniversary edition, but both became mired lawsuits over music rights even after it had been though to be resolved and never had further releases.
The worst examples of a show being held up were WKRP in Cincinnatti because of the music issues, and “Wiseguy”, which was released with generic studio music used in place of tunes that they couldn’t get the rights for. I don’t think the “Dead Dog Records” arc ever made it to DVD.
Sweet. I read the book before the show came out. The book was hysterical in spots, in a gallows humor way and the show, in the earliest seasons, based some situations on real-life events.
I once had my picture taken with the actors who played Bayliss and Stivers. It was at a charity fund-raiser at a Baltimore bar and you could get a pic with Homicide cast members for a donation. Everybody was getting theirs inside the bar. I laid on the sidewalk outside the bar like a dead body with the actors bending over me in character. This was before cell phones and the guy whose camera we used never sent me the shot!
I read the book too, but after I was already hooked on the TV series. Some similarities, some differences, but each had a good vibe in its own way. I still have the book. I just might read it again.
I was an avid viewer of the series, and I can’t recall many (if any) instances where music rights would be an issue.
I don’t have Peacock. One rip on this new presentation is that the series was shot in the 4x3 TV screen scale of the time, and now it’s been blown up to wide screen. I’m curious what those of you who are watching it now think about that.
One personal note: My older brother was a cop in a major city, and he loved this series. He said it was the most accurate portrayal of police work as he knew it that he had ever seen on TV.
When Kyle Secor (Bayliss) came up to me for a donation, I said “Sure, but can we take a picture on the sidewalk outside…” He replied, “That would be awesome!” He even suggested how to pose on the sidewalk.
I haven’t seen it in the new aspect ratio yet, but I am struggling to think of an example where a studio remastered a 4x3 show in 16x9 (that hadn’t been framed to eventually accommodate 16x9) and it was met with praise.
IIRC, The Wire, Buffy, and The Simpsons conversions pissed off a lot of fans.
Neither Tom Fontana nor Barry Levinson were involved in the remastering so that’s not a great sign.
And FWIW, some posters on Reddit who spot checked some episodes are saying a fair bit of the music has actually changed.
Last I saw the show, it was pretty dark and grainy (which makes it hard to recommend to others). Any chance that they’ve cleaned up the visuals for modern TV?
I rewatched the first episode on Peacock. I’m fine with the appearance.
What struck me was how many of the first season cast are no longer with us: Richard Belzer, Andre Bragher, Yaphet Kotto, Jon Polito, and Ned Beatty (and Wendy Hughes–the coroner). I know it’s been 30 years and they weren’t exactly young at the time, but it was like “he’s gone, he’s gone,…”. Bragher was 61, Polito 65, and Hughes 61 when they died; not that old nowadays.
For some reason I never watched it during the original run, despite having heard good things about it. I’ll had it to the list of shows to start watching.
You may have encountered Richard Belzer’s character, Det. John Munch, already:
Munch has become the only fictional character, played by a single actor, to physically appear on 10 different television series. These shows were on five different networks: NBC (Homicide: Life on the Street , Law & Order , Law & Order: Special Victims Unit , Law & Order: Trial by Jury , and 30 Rock ), Fox (The X-Files and Arrested Development ), UPN (The Beat ), HBO (The Wire ) and ABC (Jimmy Kimmel Live! ). Munch has been one of the few television characters to cross genres, appearing not only in crime drama series, but sitcom (Arrested Development ), adult animated sitcom (American Dad ), late night comedy (Jimmy Kimmel Live! ) and horror and science fiction (The X-Files ).
I wonder if my recollection of the series is correct. It seemed to me that when the show started they turned the usual cop show format on its ear. Some cases got solved in 5 minutes because the suspect was dumb. Some took several episodes and some never got solved. It felt like as the show was fighting for its ratings life it became a more standard crime of the week solved in 40 minutes show.
Season 6 Episode 7 remains one of the best episodes of any series ever. The episode is basically Braugher and Vincent D’Onofrio talking but that’s all you need.
Could be true but, I think, even in the later seasons it’s still largely a show about police officers talking to each other. My recollection is that, to try and make it more attractive to the average TV viewer, they added more sex, soap opera, and weirdness. Thus we had such occasions, towards the end of the show, Bayliss turning Buddhist and having sex in a casket with a crazy artist lady. (Granted, all of Bayliss’ weirdness ends up being explained in the final movie, which does absolve it a bit.)
My sense would be that the Executives started to get involved starting around season 5 but didn’t ever have any true impact until season 7.
I’m not sure whether you can skip the final season and go straight to the movie.
EDIT: Now that I look closer at the Wikipedia listing of episodes, I see that Tom Fontana was writing the episodes pretty steadily through season 6, episode 3. He then disappears until season 7, writing the second half of the two-parter that begins at episode 8. I suspect that you could cut out most of the episodes between there, selecting just a few to be able to pick up any major plot-lines, without much loss.
I wasn’t personally as moved by the episode. I suppose that it’s weird for TV but there’s plenty of stage plays that are simple dialogues between two characters. It’s a good format but, personally, I feel like it tends to work better on the stage.
For me, I’d say that the highlight episodes are the ones around Adena Watson and “Black and Blue”. The latter is a sort of single-episode, stand-alone abbreviated version of Homicide, that you could show someone to let them determine whether they’d be interested in the rest.
