The Best Damn Show (no longer) on Television?
September 27th, 2005
Patrick Pittman makes a strong argument for Homicide: Life on the Streets as the best TV drama ever made.
If you consider the show's peak – roughly speaking, the first four seasons – then it's unquestionably a strong contender for the title of best police drama. I wouldn't go any further than that, because I don't think it's very useful to compare dramas in wildly different genres. You can make a case for shows as different as St Elsewhere, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cracker, This Life, My So-Called Life, ER, Six Feet Under or Farscape as the best shows of their respective genres, but it seems to me that to rank shows across genres is usually more revealing of the writer's view of the respective merits of their genres than it is of the merits of the individual shows.
Homicide may have been outlasted by NYPD Blue and the various branches of the Law & Order franchise, but for my money Homicide was streets ahead of the two of them. I'd say that the other contenders for the title of best police drama in my time would be Hill Street Blues, Cracker (which was much less plausible in that it pushed people other than detectives into the leading role in the investigation, but which could be forgiven as it provided us with a fascinating and charismatic leading character) and The Cops. (For the record, that's a BBC drama from the late 1990s, not the similarly-named US show.)
