The new political thriller, A House of Dynamite, now available to stream on Netflix, marked the return of Kathryn Bigelow, one of the most accomplished and seminal directors. After an eight-year hiatus from feature filmmaking, she is back with her familiar brand of gripping docudrama about pressing issues concerning the United States Military-Industrial complex. While the divisive response to A House of Dynamite, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, indicates that this isn’t her finest work, having Bigelow back in the rotation is a promising sign for the film landscape.
Before becoming the first woman to win Best Director at the Academy Awards for The Hurt Locker, Bigelow took a brief sojourn into the world of television. During this inflection point in her career, she directed three episodes of the ahead-of-its-time police procedural,Homicide: Life on the Street. The series, based on the book by David Simon, paving the way for The Wire, signaled Bigelow’s future as a filmmaker behind gritty, lifelike portraits of U.S. institutions and their demonstration of power.
Kathryn Bigelow Brought Her Action Background to ‘Homicide: Life on the Streets’
Homicide: Life on the Street had been so overlooked that, until recently, it had no presence on any streaming services. Luckily, for those who don’t have possession of the DVD copies, the formative cop drama is now available to watch on Peacock. Created by Paul Attanasio, and featuring writing contributions from David Simon and Tom Fontana, future showrunner of Oz, the NBC series is a grounded, documentary-like look at the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit a decade before Simon continued exploring similar themes in The Wire, which took an even more expansive anthropological look at the police through the lens of the entire city of Baltimore. Supported by a deep ensemble cast including Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, Daniel Baldwin, Ned Beatty, and Giancarlo Esposito, Homicide is best remembered for being a breakthrough showcase for the late Andre Braugher.
Kathryn Bigelow directed three episodes of Homicide, including the two-part Season 6 finale, “Fallen Heroes,” and one of the last episodes of the seventh and final season, “Lines of Fire.” Her efforts directing episodic television came at a crucial (albeit not entirely fruitful) point in her career.The Homicide episodes were her immediate follow-up projects after Strange Days, her lofty dystopian sci-fi epic that flopped upon release and derailed her momentum post-Point Break, but it has since been reappraised as one of her finest films. In the years succeeding her TV stint, The Weight of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker seemed to have permanently ended Bigelow’s status as a revered director, only to make a roaring comeback with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.
‘Homicide’ Paved the Way for Prestige Television and Kathryn Bigelow’s Future Career
Homicide‘s two-part finale, “Fallen Heroes,” is a highly-regarded episode, centering around detectives Bayliss (Kyle Secor) and Pembleton (Braugher) being handed a case involving the stabbing of a judge on the sidewalk in broad daylight. The climactic episode is also bittersweet for Homicide audiences, as it featured the final appearance of fan-favorite Detective Pembleton. The main suspect in the case, “Junior Bunk” Mahoney (Mekhi Phifer), became an instant stand-out guest appearance on the series. Featuring some intense confrontations and shootings between suspects and officers, “Fallen Heroes” pushes the series to new dramatic heights. Miraculously, the raised stakes and cinematic flavor of the finale does not betray the commitment to authenticity pushed forward by the writers.
The stakes were cranked to the maximum in Bigelow’s third episode, “Lines of Fire,” which depicts a hostage situation between Giardello (Esposito) and Gharty (Peter Gerety) and a man who lost his children and job in a custody battle, holding his kids at gunpoint, as he threatens to blow up an apartment building. Like in the Season 6 finale, Bigelow’s direction is faithful to Homicide‘s house style, but her background in high-octane action filmmaking elevates rote sequences into dazzling numbers.Homicide was intelligent, thought-provoking, and nuanced on its own, but when it was fortunate enough to have overqualified, cinematic talent like Bigelow, it signaled that television could transcend to new heights.
The gritty realism of Homicide arguably laid the groundwork for Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker revival following her creative fallow period. This period marked her gradual transition from slick, heavily stylized, and emotionally operatic action movies like Blue Steel and Point Break to intimate and austere docudramas about war and other issues written by insider journalists Mark Boal and Noah Oppenheim, including Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit, and A House of Dynamite. Complementing both aspects of her creative vision, Homicide has the thorough, investigative research of a newspaper and the excitement of pulp fiction and lurid thrillers.
The prestige television boom of the 2000s is rightfully credited for revolutionizing the artistic scope of the medium, but shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and David Simon’s own follow-up, The Wire, are all working off the blueprint crafted by Homicide: Life on the Street.
