'Homicide' escapes streaming limbo — mostly
Plus, a farewell to 'Evil,' 'Pachinko' returns, and more
This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I say, “Please don’t be an idiot. Thank you.”
Here comes Homicide
The good news of this TV week — no, the great news of this TV week — is that Homicide: Life on the Street is finally available to stream in its entirety on Peacock. To commemorate the end of its run as the Best Show You Can’t Stream, I picked 10 episodes that newcomers could watch to see what the big deal is, or that longtime Homicide fans could revisit to jog their memories of the good old days.
But as a wise man once said, every silver lining’s got a touch of gray, and in this case, Homicide comes to streaming with a cost: the music. For years, we were told that the music rights to a show with one of the best and most eclectic soundtracks of all time was the big hold-up to get it to streaming. And the solution appears to have been to remove the great majority of those incredible songs and insert cheaper replacements. I haven’t done an exhaustive search by any means, but I looked for a half-dozen of my favorite Homicide music moments, and found that the only one to survive was Munch listening to Lou Reed’s “Busload of Faith.” And that’s a situation where there was no choice but to pony up for the song, because Richard Belzer sings along to it, so there’s no way to insert something else. It’s a big disappointment that this is the approach that was taken, but also not a surprising one. The Wonder Years had to ditch a lot of its famous soundtrack for streaming, and as recently mentioned, you can’t stream China Beach at all because of the music. Better, I suppose, that people can more easily experience those performances and stories, even if the music was such a huge part of the experience. I once again am thankful I own the DVD box set.
The good of Evil
As promised a few weeks ago, I wrote a tribute to Evil in time for this week’s series finale of the wonderfully weird supernatural drama. Before writing that new column, I went back and read my review of the series when it debuted on CBS five years ago. TV reviews of network series, when I rarely have complete seasons to look at, always have to be as much fortunetelling as analysis, as I extrapolate from what I’ve seen to try to predict what the show can become. I wasn’t hugely impressed by the four episodes I had way back then, but I held out hope because of the track record of Robert and Michelle King. In the end, I would say Evil wildly exceeded my best-case scenario for it, even if the series finale felt understandably rushed.
Odds and/or ends
This week, in long-delayed seasons of beloved streaming shows: Pachinko returns to Apple, nearly two and a half years after its first season premiered. I haven’t had a chance to watch the full season yet, and will hopefully write a column sometime later this month or in September. But the episodes I’ve seen very much live up to the show I wrote so glowingly about back in 2022.
Finally, a couple of notes from my ongoing Rod Serling deep dive: 1)Serling’s post-Twilight Zone Western drama, The Loner, starred Lloyd Bridges, and one of the episodes I watched this week featured Bridges’ future Airplane! co-star Leslie Nielsen. Serling, you can’t be serious! 2)In Patterns, a collection of four of Serling’s early teleplays, he included this note on the state of television criticism circa 1957. It’s interesting to compare this to the period in the mid-late 2000s where TV critics were, like their Fifties counterparts, focusing more on writing about things after they aired than on reviewing things before the audience had seen them.
That’s it for this week? What did everybody else think?
There are a lot of rights holders cutting off their noses to spite their faces when it comes to streaming. It's not as if there's a clamor to license a lot of these songs and they have to pick a few high-profile, high-paying examples to prevent them from being overexposed. And especially for older music, I think it's more important to keep it in the public consciousness and introduce your artist to new audiences than wring every last penny out of an existing use.
For an example, I believe the Hendrix estate is notorious for licensing his music very sparingly and expensively. And I would estimate that he's fading into obscurity among younger potential fans who may be familiar with other artists of the era.
Many streaming shows feel padded but a show called “The DNC” had four perfect episodes including a great finale!