Tube Talk

Andre Braugher: Detective Frank Pembleton on NBC's critically-acclaimed Friday night police drama "Homicide: Life on the Streets." Braugher plays a New York native who comes to Charm City to be the most professional, most effective homicide cop on the force. Pembleton, a cradle Catholic, also faces some serious personal problems, not least of which is his lapsed faith.

Pembleton: A man in a predicament

Walker Percy, the late author, would have liked the television character Frank Pembleton.

Although Percy saw TV as escapism and preferred "Barnaby Jones" or "The Incredible Hulk" -- as respites from his writing routine -- to more serious fare, the American novelist would have admired the crafty detective in NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Streets," for Pembleton is a man stuck in a predicament. Percy, who acknowledged Anton Chekhov as his writing hero, saw the essence of novel-writing as problem-solving, detection or matching symptom with cause. Percy, who studied medicine and switched to writing after contracting TB from work in the pathology lab, would have been attracted to the odd mixture of these three that occurs in "Homicide." Yet it is not Pembleton's impressive detecting skills that would have led Percy to his admiration of the "Homicide" hero. Rather, it would have been the fact that after several seasons of being the most prescient and yet the most obnoxious detective on the Baltimore Police force, Pembleton has come back down to earth this season. That is, he is a man in a major pickle.

Pembleton, played by dramatic actor and one-time "Kojak" bit player Andre Braugher (best known for his work in "Tuskegee Airmen"), is the Homicide squad's most prolific detective. Using a combination of street smarts, induction and bravado, Pembleton finds the murderers faster than anyone of Lt. Al Giardello's interesting cast of cops. Braugher's character is so good at finding the murderer or forcing a confession that he's cocky and proud, and he prefers to work alone, savoring the autonomy. You see, Frank knows that working alone means only he can mess up the investigation. Of course, Giardello, played a bit better season by season by Yaphet Kotto, insists on pairing all of his detectives. Still, Pembleton remains aloof and is solo in spirit.

At the end of last season, creator Paul Anastassio and his script writers decided to throw a little curveball into the life of this pre-eminent character. In short, the seemingly indestructible Pembleton has a stroke while interrogating a suspect in "the box," a holding area where witnesses are giving the once over in hopes of a confession. The detective was rushed to Johns Hopkins and, though his life was saved, he was reduced to a near infantile state. He was no longer Mr. Independent. The brash cockiness had been replaced by baby-like dependence.

The price, as the writers have played it out so far this season, is a long rehabilitation and the loss of the two things that mean the most to him in the world: his wife Mary (and their baby girl) and his ability to be a superior detective. Mary's leaving him at first appears to be a matter of lost masculine prowess. But that's the superficial story. In reality, Frank's wife is upset at her husband's lapsed Catholicism. He no longer attends mass, he doesn't want their young daughter to be baptised and he's become so obsessed with his work that he's forgotten his all other aspects of his life completely. Hence, he loses Mary. Get it? Loses Mary? And he a cradle Catholic.

Of course, Pembleton is engrossed in his work precisely because of his cradle Catholicism. Since he has a strongly developed Catholic conscience, he feels a great deal of empathy with the victims of the awful murders that he investigates. Year after year of often meaningless, always mundane violence -- in David Simon's book on which the series is based, the Baltimore Sun writer refers to it as misdemeanor homicide, since most of the crimes go unsolved and nobody really seems to care about the human element -- has caused Frank to question the very character of creation, if not the existence of a benevolent diety. He tells partner Tim Bayless (Kyle Secor) after they investigate the surreal murder of a police canine, "Life would be perfect it there were only kids and dogs." Thus, Frank has come to put his detective work first. Maybe he can right a few wrongs -- play Satan's avenger -- in what to him has become an increasingly bankrupt moral universe.

At first, I was shocked by Frank's being abandoned by his wife, who took their darling daughter with her back to her family. Yet somehow it is so typical of a whole generation of professionals who grew up in the '60s and '70s and now live in a brave new world where, as Percy would put it, the center did not hold and we are waiting for the next thing -- the next theory of man -- to pop up and take the place of the older order. But that's not the reason I like what Attanasio has done with Pembleton. What he's done is he's testing this character's mettle in a Jobian way. We've seen it over and over in this series, but this is the first time that the great detective Frank Pembleton and his sumgness have been so challenged. This is not a mid-life crisis. This is reality. Bad things happen to good people. And every hero has a flaw -- in this case, Frank's pride. Pembleton is a man in a predicament and the season's suspense rests in how he will overcome this catastrophe.

There are parallel predicaments facing other characters this season.

First, Mike Kellerman (played by Reed Diamond) has been put on administrative duty while a federal grand jury checks into allegations against his old arson unit. Kellerman gets railroaded by his former colleagues, all of whom are guilty but who cop pleas for ratting on Kellerman, who is the only innocent man.

The new Chief Medical Examiner, Julianna Cox (Michelle Forbes, who I first spotted on a "Seinfield" episodes a few years ago), has just seen her father pass away. She also has a thing for Kellerman, who at first is attracted but grows distracted by his own plight.

A continuing saga from last season is the marriage status of Meldrick Lewis (J. Clark Johnson). Last season, he married a woman whom he fell for over night and they separate before consummating the marriage. It's a puzzling anti-climax for the Homicide squad's most likable character, who refers to the wedding ceremony as "jumping the broom," an old Baltimore rite of passage that Executive Director Barry Levinson (director minor Baltimore film hits "Diner" and "The Tin Men" before his big-moneymaker "Rainman") must have loved. This season Meldrick and his wife remain in and out of sync, and nobody in the office quite knows what to make of the situation.

There's also the plight of staff video man J.H. Brodie (Max Perlich), who has the lowest job in the department and is basically homeless. He tries being apartment mates with just about every detective, but always gets the boot.

Finally, there's the case of John Munch, the squad's coldest cynic and most hilarious character. Munch (played convincingly by comedian Richard Belzer) has been through several marriages and finds himself a bachelor in mid-life. He's a solid professional, but has grown numb to the world of crime and is very matter of fact in his approach to his vocation. Like Pembleton, he has lapsed from his childhood culture. Growing up in suburban Baltimore, Munch is part of that generation of American Jews who saw much of the religious nature of their culture slowly whittled away by an American culture so polymorphous that Hebrew tradition got watered down into a pale imitation of itself. But in a perhaps more palatable episode of introspection than Frank's, Munch the loner begins to come to terms with his lost Jewish roots at the funeral of a female high school classmate for whom he had the major hots several decades before. The senseless murder of this suburban beauty opens a deep psychic wound in the often demented Munch. He grapples mightily with it in the episode titled "Kaddish" (Hebrew Prayer of the Dead). Munch finally begins to recite the prayer, which becomes the defining moment of the season. Redemption is possible.

While Munch's soul-searching has been the poetry of this season, the demise of Pembleton's personal life has been the most unnerving development. Of course, he regains his detective's credentials (he has to pass a shooting test, a difficult feat since he is on medication that effects his hand-eye coordination, though he stops taking it to improve his odds, at great peril to his precarious health) to walk the streets again in search of murderers. But his family remains estranged. All he has left is his job. For now Frank can focus on the interrogation room, where he turns the art of gaining a confession into a sort of ubran inquisition with his expert playing of suspects' character weaknesses. But soon we will find out how long success in the box will be enough for Frank to sustain his mind and soul.

I doubt very long, because Pembleton really loves his family -- and maybe even his God. The restoration of one or both figures to be the major plot development of next season.

While "Homicide" has never received superior ratings, it remains the critics' first choice of serious TV programming. And Lifetime likes it so much that that network is running it in syndication Monday-Friday nights at 11 o'clock.

Sometimes I get a little annoyed when the writers write in a character, begin to develop him or her, and then, poof, that character is gone. Last fall they had a fine episode about a new police beat writer from the Sun who screws up a story by being a little too cocky herself. The Elizabeth Wu (Joan Chen) episode was something of a ripoff of "Absence of Malice," but there was a nice little romantic tension developing between Giardello and Wu, the Asian-American reporter. (Giardello's mother was African American, his father Italian American.) But after "Wu's on First?," Chen disappeared and hasn't been seen since.

If you don't have "Homicide" in your viewing life, you don't even realize what a predicament you're in. Or, as Percy's philosophy hero Kierkegaard would say, the nature of despair is not knowing that you despair. Get "Homicide" and get a life.

'Homicide' update

"Deception," airing April 25, was the second installment of "Homicide" after a month-long hiatus before the April ratings sweeeps. Writers Debbie Sargeant, Tom Fontana, Julie Martin and James Yoshimura center the episode around Baltimore drug deal Luther Mahoney, whose arrogance is only matched by his aloofness from the law.

The cops catch a big break when a Nigerian delivery man dies when one of the 77 latex-enclosed baggies of pure heroin that he has ingested bursts. The decision is made to send a substitute delivery man with attenuated stuff (primarily baking soda). Meldrick innocently forecasts: "You have to admit, if we pull this off, we're going to rock Luther's world."

Mahoney (played by Erik Todd Dellums), of course, becomes unnerved, sets up a meeting with the relevant parties and chooses to scapegoat his homey, Antonio Brookdale, whom the drug kingpin zaps at Druid Hill Park with the cops watching from a high-rise apartment half a mile away.

The able writers have the show's Professor Moriarity done in during the episode's penultimate scene. Luther, who is responsible for at least nine drug-related murders, has been savvy enough to wriggle out of prosecution each time the Baltimore Homicide squad has gotten close to him. But Sargeant and her colleagues decided enough is enough, so they have Kellerman kill the great antagonist.

Meldrick chases Mahoney back to Luther's downtown apartment and asks how a brother could make own kind ghosts without a conscience? Meldrick puts his .38 in his holster and begins to physically abuse the murderer. But the ever-canny Mahoney wrestles the revolver away and is ready to blow the detective away.

That's when Kellerman and narcotics Detective Terry Stivers (Toni Lewis) enter to rescue their partner. Mahoney appears to be surrendering, but Kellerman play judge and executioner. Before Mahoney dies, Kellerman tells the hood that it was the cops, not Brookdale, who set the drug dealer up.

Meldrick and Stivers say they are good with what has happened, though Stivers is less convinced that what has happened is kosher. Giardello asks if this is not a tainted shooting. Meldrick says, "It was good clean shooting," so the cover-up is on. What will the writers do for the remainder of this season and next year, the seventh season? Kellerman already has one strike against him with the arson investigation, though he was vindicated.

With Baltimore being a city of majority African American population, Kellerman could be scapegoated himself during a difficult political season. There are many possibilites and I just wonder if Diamond's contract may be in jeopardy.

There are still three or four shows left in the season, but unless Giardello has an aorta or Pembleton another stroke, I imagine we are in for anti-climax after last Friday night's shocking show.

"Homicide: Life on the Streets." Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, co-executive producers. NBC. [Based on the book HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS by David Simon (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1991, 599 pages).] Created by Paul Attanasio. Airs Friday at 10 p.m. Contains violence.

"Homicide" homepage

"In Baltimore, A Show to Die For." By Dana Hull, Washington Post.

� 1997 [email protected]

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page