10 Reasons Why Everyone Should Watch Homicide Life On The Street

You'd be forgiven for thinking Homicide was nothing more than a cop show. Indeed, that was the way it was advertised. But you'd be wrong.

A decade before The Wire came along and let a series of police investigations provide us with a peephole into the inner and outer workings of contemporary Baltimore, Homicide had basically done the same. We were treated with insight into the political machinations of the police force and the way in which the media approaches difficult subjects. We followed the lives of people from every corner of society: from the filthy rich to the disturbingly poor.

Granted, where The Wire tended to shift focus every new season, Homicide always closely followed Baltimore's Homicide Department - but the investigations still provided a lot more than just tension and drama concerning the perpetrator's identity. Sometimes the murderer proved to be a sympathetic character.

Sometimes the murderer got away (often due to juridical loopholes). At times perhaps the police officers themselves could be considered guilty of not only breaking the law but also crossing the line of justifiable moral behaviour. Simply put: the characters we followed were human beings.

Racial issues were often brought to focus. Giardello spent the entire series being overlooked for promotion because of his refusal to succumb to the political interests of his (often less qualified) superiors. He also suspected his ethnicity had something to do with it and claimed that he suffered from prejudice not only from white colleagues but also from African-Americans with a lighter complexion than himself.