Fresh Air - Police Procedural 'Homicide' (Finally) Comes To Streaming

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Homicide: Life on the Streets, the critically acclaimed police procedural set in Baltimore, is coming to streaming (Peacock) for the first time. The show, which ran for seven seasons, is based on a book by David Simon, from before he created The Wire. In an appreciation of the show, we're listening back to interviews with some of the people behind it: Executive producer and writer Tom Fontana, actor Andre Braugher, and actor Clark Johnson.And film critic Justin Chang reviews Alien: Romulus.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. It must seem like every TV series ever made is available on some streaming service somewhere, but that's not true. Try finding WKRP in Cincinnati or China Beach or Frank's Place or Brooklyn Bridge. However, one show that has been missing from streaming services until now, one of TV's very best, finally arrives Monday when Peacock begins streaming all seven seasons of Homicide Life on the Street. That cop show, set in Baltimore, ran on NBC from 1993 to 1999.

Its executive producers were Tom Fontana from St. Elsewhere and film director Barry Levinson. It was based on a book by David Simon, who later wrote for the show, then created a string of his own brilliant TV series, starting with The Wire. Homicide was groundbreaking TV in several different ways. Entire scenes were acted from start to finish like a stage play, and filmed with a single camera. That process was repeated several times, with the camera operator capturing different angles, and then, finally, pieces from those different takes were edited together into one jarringly intense sequence. Homicide also reflected the diverse population of Baltimore

by having, at the time, the most integrated series cast on network television. And its actors, writers, and directors were among TV's very best. Today on Fresh Air, we'll listen back to interviews with two stars of Homicide, Andre Brouwer, who gave a fabulous performance each week as Detective Frank Pembleton, and Clark Johnson, who co-starred as Detective Meldrick Lewis. And we'll also hear from co-executive producer Tom Fontana, who won an Emmy and a Peabody for writing the show's most famous episode, Three Men and Idina.

More on that in a moment. Other stars on Homicide Life on the Street included Ned Beatty, Yafet Kodo, Melissa Leo, and Richard Belzer, who first played Detective John Munch on Homicide before playing that character on many other TV series for decades, including Law & Order, The X-Files, and Arrested Development. Guest stars were just as wonderful. In one episode called Subway, Vincent D'Onofrio played a commuter named Lang, who was pushed onto the path of an oncoming train and spent the hour of homicide wedged between the train and the platform, his bottom half twisted like a pretzel. He was alive and conscious and able to talk to Andre Brower's Pembleton as a medic attended to him. But Pembleton already had been informed that as soon

as the man was freed, he would die almost instantly. In this scene, Lange is asking for a pain shot. The medic is refusing for reasons she was about to reveal to them both. You can get me something. I've already explained to Lange here that any painkiller is going to make him lose consciousness. Okay. Well, that's my problem, not yours. And it'll give you the same symptoms of bleeding out, bleeding internally. If he loses consciousness, that's a sign.

Of me dying? There's nothing you can give him? If there's any chance of saving Mr. Lange here, then I'm not going to do anything else. There's a chance? Oh, that's the sign. Of me dying? There's nothing you can give him? If there's any chance of saving Mr. Lang here, then I'm not going to do anything else. There's a chance? Oh, that's crap. You said so yourself. It's a million to one, but if there is, I'm not going to do anything now that would jeopardize that chance. You said there's a chance. No.

You just said. I said if. A million to one. You see what I'm saying? He's not a doctor, Mr. Lang. And neither the hell are you. Sounds intense? It was. And so was an episode called Bop Gun, for which Barry Levinson enlisted the star of his recent movie Good Morning Vietnam.

Robin Williams played a tourist who visited Baltimore with his wife and kids, only to have her shot and killed by a gun-toting teenager as the rest of the family watched helplessly. Here's a scene between Robin Williams and Kyle Secor, who plays Detective Tim Bayliss. They're on the roof of the police station, and Bayliss and the bereaved widower get into a very serious conversation. You always wear a gun? Yeah, pretty much all the time, sure. You live in a world where everybody wears a gun, don't you? Yeah. The funny thing is I've never even held one.

No? No. Mind? Could I hold it? I just want to feel it. Come on, let me hold it. Mr. Ellison... I'll tell you something. A thing like this happens,

and people, they spend the rest of their lives telling themselves, if I only did this, or if I only did that. But the killer is the one with the gun. Not you, Mr. Ellison. You just have to let go of that. Great writing, great acting all around. The most acclaimed episode of the entire series, Three Men and Idina, also relied heavily on the contributions of a guest star,

Moses Gunn, playing a suspected murderer. A superlative hour of television, more like a Broadway play, really, Fontana's script was about as tense as TV could get. But Fontana wasn't above or below, slipping a good joke even into this most somber of storylines. It's one of my favorite moments from the whole series, actually, so I'll include it here. Two detectives enter the men's room and make their way to separate stalls. Steve Cressetti, played by John Pulido, and Meldrick Lewis, played by Clark Johnson. All we see are the locked doors from the outside

after they've presumably sat down. Crescetti speaks first. All right. You got toilet paper over here? No. You got five ones for five? Other than that brief bathroom scene, the Three Men and Adina episode takes place almost entirely within a claustrophobic interrogation room. A murder suspect known as the Araber, played by Moses Gunn, is questioned by the two detectives working the case of the dead girl, whose name is Adina. Brower's Frank Pembleton and Secor's Tim Bayliss, only recently assigned as partners, approach both the case and the suspect

very differently. We'll hear that scene in a moment. But first, when I spoke to Tom Fontana in 1999, I asked him if he knew, when he was writing that script that the actors could pull it off. We had been shooting the first episode. So I had seen Andre in the interrogation scene in the very first episode that Barry directed. And he, we were, I was sitting with Barry while we were filming it. And when we finished the take, Barry and I turned to each other and went, okay, this is going to work. Because it was in the back of my head, but you know, you're always a little nervous when you're just going to say it's just going to be three actors.

And Kyle, I had known... This is Kyle Secor. Kyle Secor, yeah. So I had known Kyle's work, so I pretty much knew that I could write for him. And we figured we'd get somebody, you know, some good, solid guest star to play the Arab-er. So I kind of jumped in, you know, thinking, well, I'll just write it and we'll see what happens. All the time assuming, once again, you know, kamikaze television, assuming, well, we've made, we will have made six episodes and we will be canceled by this point.

So it's not like, it's not like anyone's ever going to see this, you know. And so I wrote it and Martin Campbell directed it, who later went on to direct the James Bond film, which the first one with Pierce Brosnan. Okay. And he did an amazing job shooting it. Never shot, here you're in the interrogation room for the entire hour, and he never shot it from the same angle twice, which you never really notice it until you know that.

And then when you watch it and you see that he's, you're never in the same place twice, each section he shot in from a different angle so that the room never got kind of sedentary, you know. And then we found, you know, Moses Gunn came down to play the Arab and just nailed it completely. I mean, it was just extraordinary in what he did. And they rehearsed it. They actually rehearsed it like a play first. And, you know, we shot it and off we went.

What do you think about Idina? I mean, Frank and I here, we didn't really know her that well. What would you say about her personality? Was she feisty, outgoing, energetic? Yeah. So she worked for you how long? Doing what? Taking care of Magdalene. Magdalene?

A horse. Cleaning out Magdalene's coat with a curicone, untangling the mane and the tail. That sounds like a great job for a girl. Why didn't she stop working for you? Horse died. There's any other reason? The barn burned down.

That's the only other reason? I stopped being an Arab. Any other reason? My barn burned down. That's the only other reason? I stopped being an Arab. Any other reason? There was no more job. Adina's mother didn't make her stop working for you? Huh? Isn't it true that Mrs. Watson was afraid for her daughter because you were getting a little too friendly with her?

Being an Arab or a good job, I mean, are you respected in the community? Most people think of us as vagrants. But since the economy gone sour, you see a lot of people selling on the street. Your whole family are emperors? All the way back to my great-grandfather. When was the last time you saw Dina?

When? Yeah, when was the last time that you saw Dina alive? On Sunday at the barn. On the Sunday before the Wednesday that she disappeared. Is it cold in here? I have you cold. Well, Tom, where does something like this come from as a writer? Well, it comes from two places.

One, I was terrified shooting a show in Baltimore, which had never had a TV show shot there, with a crew that had never shot a television show before, with all these feature directors, because Barry wanted to hire feature directors i thought we were going to be so over budget by the sixth episode that all i could afford was a table and three chairs i i i thought i won't i they'll you know nbc will have carted away everything else by this point so on one hand it was a kind of a all right i've got to to be able to write something that we can afford to shoot.

On the other hand, when I started doing research about homicide investigations, it seemed to me that this interrogation process or at least this interview process had a lot of drama to it inherently in it that no one had ever done an hour's worth of before. You always see little bits and pieces and, you know, somebody slaps somebody on the head and the guy goes, all right, I confess, I confess. You're still doing that, by the way. My thought was, is that if we could really explore how everyone in the room manipulates everyone else in the room, that it would tell us not just about homicide investigations, but about the nature of how men deal with each other in these kind of situations. Tom Fontana, recorded in 1999. We'll continue my interview with him after a break. This is Fresh Air. in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate

with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Hey there, this is Felix Contreras, one of the co-hosts of Alt Latino, the podcast from NPR Music where we discuss Latinx culture, music, and heritage

with the artists that create it. Listen now to the Alt vibrant place. NPR podcasts, more voices, all ears. Find NPR wherever you get your podcasts. Today, we're listening back to our interviews about the acclaimed NBC series Homicide Life on the Street. Next week, the entire series will be available to stream for the first time on Peacock. Writer Tom Fontana teamed up with director Barry Levinson to make Homicide. Before that, Fontana worked on the hospital drama St. Elsewhere and later created another pioneering TV show, the HBO prison drama Oz. In 1999, I asked Tom Fontana how he began working on Homicide.

So I had all these plans and I got this call from John Tinker, actually, who said to me that Barry Levinson had talked to him about doing Homicide, this show Homicide, and that he had decided he wasn't going to do it. He and Mache actually decided to go do L.A. Law that year. And it was an East Coast-based thing. He wanted to shoot it in Baltimore. And I was kind of really not very interested only in the sense of that, um, uh, you know, uh, in my mind, Hill Street Blues was the best cop show ever, you know, and I, and I, and I couldn't think of how you would do it

better than that. But being, uh, being, uh, you know, as much of a whore as anybody else, I went out to LA to, uh, to meet Barry Levinson. And, uh, I went out to L.A. to meet Barry Levinson. And he said to me, I want to do a show, a cop show, with no gun battles and no car chases. And I said, this man is crazy. I have to do it. I have to work with him.

He's completely insane. And off of that, we started working. He had already hired Paul Antanasio to write the first episode. And so I kind of jumped in in the middle of it. And we had David Simon's book, Homicide a Year on the Killing Streets, as a launching pad. And that's really how it came about. I went down to Baltimore, which had never had a television series shot there before.

Really not sure was there enough acting talent down there? What were the locations like? How could you get around? I mean, I'd shot in New York, I'd shot in LA, but Baltimore was to me, you know, the end of the earth. And as it turned out, Baltimore was just, became a major character in the show and a wonderful place to film. And the acting pool and the crew was extraordinary. So for seven years, we got a chance to do that. One last question I have to ask you about St. Elsewhere. With Bruce Paltrow bringing you in without much experience and sort of pulling you over and giving you a chance,

and now it seems to be that that's something you aggressively do in all of your shows in reaching for actors being first-time directors, people who have never done television before coming in to both write and act. I mean it really does seem to be a theme in what you're trying to do. Well, I think it's important to – I mean the danger of episodic television is that you get into a rhythm and you get comfortable and the formula kind the formula kind of settles in and, and you know the show too well and you know the characters too well. And what I've found over the course of time is that if you bring in somebody who has talent, even though it may not be, you know, an actor who, who may not have ever directed before, if you, if you bring them in, they're going to shake things up. They're going to make you and the actors and the writers and everybody, the crew, they're going to just make you not let the dust settle on what you've been doing for 15 episodes or 20 episodes.

A perfect example of that was Kathy Bates when I asked her, because I've known Kathy a thousand years, when I asked her to come in and do an episode of Homicide. I just called her one day and I said, you know, have you ever thought about directing? And she was like, well, yeah, actually, I have been thinking about directing. I said, why don't you come and play with us here? And it was great because the actors on the show,

all who had kind of by that point in the year settled into a kind of a rhythm, you know, she got in and she was, oh, why are you doing that? And they couldn't get away with any of their tricks. You know what I mean? Oh, because as an actress, she was looking at it. Because she knew all the tricks.

You know what I mean? And so it stimulated them. And it just, it gives it a kind of a, just it breaks the kind of rhythm of it. And I think that's when the best work comes out. At least I hope it is. Tom Fontana speaking to me in 1999. Most recently, he teamed with Scott Frank of The Queen's Gambit to co-create Monsieur Spade, the AMC detective series about a retired Philip Marlowe in the south of France. Now let's hear from Clark Johnson, one of the stars of Homicide Life on the

Street. He played Meldrick Lewis for the entire run of that series, and by the time it was over, had directed a handful of episodes, which set him up with a second career directing episodes of NYPD Blue, The West Wing, The Shield, Homeland, and The Wire, which he also appeared in. Terry spoke to Clark Johnson in 2008. Here's a scene from Homicide in which Johnson, as Detective Meldrick, is interrogating a drug lord named Luther Mahoney, who's been charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Meldrick and another detective from narcotics

are trying to get a confession of murder from the drug dealer, who's played by Eric Dellums. The narcotic detective speaks first. You know, we did a raid on Ashland. Bojack's stash. Oh, the late Mr. Reed. We had a nice long run before he fell. Did you find any of that poison?

We did. Not all of it, probably, but enough to convince us that the bad bags were from his crew. Well, that they were. Well, he was pointing the finger at you. Are you suggesting a motive? Well, you have, say, a theoretical drug slinger. You know, he's marketing a viable product, proper purity, proper cut. until some no-name, no-nothing, old-school, just-out-of-Jessup knucklehead starts messing around with his home chemistry set,

and he starts killing off the customers quick. As opposed to killing them slow. Even if this drug slinger, this theoretical drug slinger, was a reasonable man, I mean, your guy might be compelled to act. You know, your case makes sense. I like it. I like it, too. Except I don't sling bags, and I didn't kill BoJack Reed.

Then who did? A guy named Carlton Phipps. No, he's dead, too. You know, I heard that. Hmm. Carlton Phipps. No, he's dead, too. You know, I heard that. See, our problem is that we don't have any way of connecting Carlton Phipps with the murderer BoJack Reed. Well, see, I worked that case. I talked to Carlton's people. You know what they told me?

They said that he was despondent. That he may even have taken his own life. He killed himself. He shot himself in the back of the head. Who are you fooling? He was murdered. Bojack's people came back on him. And he had the gun that killed Bojack right on the table.

Let me ask you this. How do you know where Carlton caught that bullet? And let me ask you this. How in the hell did you know what was on the table in front of the man? Well, the world was all over about what happened to Carlton. Oh, Luther, Luther, Luther, you just fell for the oldest trick we got, baby. That's my guest, Clark Johnson, as Detective Meldrick Lewis on an episode of Homicide. How'd you get the part in Homicide? The classic actor story, you know.

I was in California, and I really despised the town of Los Angeles in a lot of ways. It's just, I was struggling there, and, you know, sleeping on a friend's couch, two young kids back east, and trying to get going. And the one last audition before I go home with my tail between my legs was this thing. It was Barry Levinson. It was the only name I knew at the time. Auditioned for a new cop show. And I go to read for the casting director.

And there's no script. There's a book. And it's a book by David Simon, Homicide, The Year on the Killing Streets. And they said, pick anything from there and read from it. So what? So I read from the actual book. And then, of course, the process continued, and I went back to New York and met Fontana and Barry, and subsequent auditions later got the part, but that was the initial audition. And I read that, and I went, this is something that's going to be groundbreaking. I just know it. Was there a lot of dialogue in it that you had to read?

Yeah. I mean, his book, I mean, I don't know if you read it or remember it, but his book is like a screenplay in a lot of ways. There is a lot of dialogue in it, so it wasn't hard to pick stuff out. And I think my character is a combination of elements of that book that Paul Antonazio and Simon, I mean, and Fontana and Barry Levinson concocted, but also elements of my own experience of having played a cop on another series and my uncle's back home in Philadelphia with the pork pie hat. So it was a combination of things that arrive at that character. Did they ever explain to you why they had you read from the book instead of reading from a script? There was no script yet.

Oh. As far as I know, there was no script yet. Clark Johnson speaking to Terry Gross in 2008. After a break, we'll hear from another Homicide cast member, Emmy-winning actor Andre Brouwer, who died last year at age 61. And film critic Justin Chang reviews Alien Romulus. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. For the first time, Homicide Life on the Street will be available for streaming, starting Monday, August 19th on Peacock. We're listening back to our interviews today with some who were part of that critically acclaimed series.

Andre Brouwer played Frank Pembleton, a detective who was smart, obsessive, and aloof, and at the time was the best dramatic actor on television. Terry Gross spoke with him in 1995. He told her that the Homicide cast would get the scripts one episode at a time, so that he and his character, Detective Pembleton, would both be in the dark about where the story was heading. Well, my problem with not knowing where my character is going is the tendency sometimes to paint myself into a corner that I can't get out of. I remember early in the first three episodes of this year, I only had the first episode, and it was the beginning of Pembleton's religious angst,

but I didn't know that. So consequently, I didn't play certain parts, certain scenes. I didn't play with a kind of fervor or doubt or intensity that I needed, as a matter of fact. And writers would come up to me on a set and say, I think you should play it this way, and I think you should play it this way. And of course, I didn't know what they were talking about, and I couldn't see the justification. Now, of course, when I hear that a script will be in one, two, or three parts, I try to find out what the overarching idea or theme or journey for my character will be so that I won't paint myself into a corner. I won't goof up in the elemental scene setting.

On Homicide, you have a different director each week. So does each director want to put their own touch on the character? And do you find that you have to assert yourself to maintain certain things about the character consistently from week to week? Well, there are two things going on. The directors are all talented individuals and they come in and they'd like to put their personal stamp on Homicide. But Homicide is a show that has its own theme, its own style, and it, too, constantly reinvents itself. But pretty much I know more about my character than my director does. I take suggestions and I work with my director,

but I do know the fundamental aspects of my character and I know how to maintain my character's integrity. You've done a fair amount of Shakespeare. Oh, yeah, I love Shakespeare. On stage. Oh, yeah. The way that a Shakespearean character uses English is different than the way a contemporary detective speaks. What can you learn from Shakespeare that you can apply to contemporary film and television? In terms of speech.

I don't mean making speeches, but intonation. Oh, all of that work came to me from the Juilliard School. Breaking up, communicating, breaking up the sentences into understandable parts and putting them back together again. The pure technique of speaking in order to be understood through complex thoughts was taught to me at the Juilliard School. Shakespeare, of course, his thoughts are quite long and quite expressive and quite complex. And the actor is forced to think through the line from beginning to end. And as opposed to modern speech, modern, I guess you could call it that,

it's not broken down into short fragments, but rather longer and more subtle thoughts. So consequently, when I go over to Homicide, when I get a long sentence, I break it down into its component parts, and I use the entire sentence, you know. Is there any way I could get you to take a line from Shakespeare or to take a long sentence from Homicide and show us how you break it down and how you actually analyze that line before delivering it?

Wow, I don't have a script in front of me. Let me think. So we're looking for a van that... I can't remember the line. We're looking for a van that does not exist, which carried kidnappers who never lived, which did not abscond with U.S. congressmen and then didn't drop them off here. So the line.

I think I got the line. This is from last week's episode. Is that last week's episode? Right, last week's episode. So that last week's episode? Right. Yes. Last week's episode. So we're looking for a van which does not exist, which carried kidnappers who never lived, which did not abscond with a U.S. congressman and then didn't drop them off here, I guess,

is what the other character responds. Now, that's a long and complicated thought, which you typically don't get. Typically, it's like, where is this guy? Or these kidnappers don't exist, or some smaller thought. And I relish the idea of taking a long thought, breaking it down to its component parts, putting it back together again, and being able to deliver it in one breath from beginning to end and have it end up sounding like a question that I actually asked and have made my own rather than sounding like a newspaper clipping or something in effect.

You said before you loved Shakespeare even when you were young. What did you find when you were young in Shakespeare? A lot of young people just don't like Shakespeare because it's such a different period and because the language can be very difficult to understand compared to contemporary writing. This is my impression, that if your vocabulary is limited, then your thoughts are limited.

And I'm not a man who wants to be limited, and I found something really, really beautiful in Shakespeare, something very spiritual and lovely in Shakespeare, and I'm not willing to give it up. I'd like to be, I'd like to feel the kinds of feelings that Laertes feels upon hearing about the death of his sister, you know, or when he sees his sister mad with flowers in her hair and talking outrageous gibberish and acting her behavior, acting with an incredible kind of sexual license that he's never seen her act with, he says simply, oh God, do you see this? Now, a lot of people would say, what's wrong with her? Let's get her to a doctor. They try to solve the problem. They do a lot of different things, but Laertes is a very spiritual man. And he looks up and he says, oh God, do you see this? It's a crime against nature in a certain way, you know? And his strange love for his sister is expressed in this way. And it can't be beat. It can't be beat by cop shows, and it can't be beat by the most interesting kind of television

drama. Shakespeare lives, and his characters express the deepest parts of themselves. Pimpleton doesn't express the deepest part of himself. There's so many chameleon-like layers and aspects to Pembleton's behavior and his speech and his relationships with everyone else. But in Shakespeare, I find the opportunity to really glimpse the most elemental and human part of a person. I read that your grandmother taught you

how to read before you even started school. What do you remember about that? About my grandma? About her teaching you to read. Well, she read from the Bible, you know, she's a very, very religious woman, the sweetest woman I've ever known. And yeah, she would read to me from the Bible, and I'd look it up, and I'd keep reading with her. So when I got to first grade with the C. Dick run and C. Jane run stuff, I knew it already, you know, and I remember being, I guess, in third grade at a school called Spencer, which is over in my old neighborhood in Austin, and I could read so well that the teacher no longer called on me. So I remember going home one day and I told my father, I said, Daddy, they won't let me read. And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, when we sit in a circle

and everybody else reads, I raise my hand and the teacher doesn't call on me. And, you know, I never saw that school ever again. The next day I was in St. Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic school right around the corner. I didn't clean out my locker. I didn't clean out my desk. I didn't take my pencils away. My father figured way back then, it must've been 1969, that education is life, you know, and without education, you really can't make anything of your life. And so I remember the most impressive thing about my father is he decided in that instant that his son was not going to be in a school where they did not let him read. And I was moved the very next day. When your parents decided that you're going to go to Catholic school right away, did you thrive there? Did you like it?

Were there things that you didn't like about the discipline or the uniform you had to wear? The uniform, the blue pants, and oh, my goodness. Things that I didn't like about the Catholic school. No, I actually loved it. It was a very challenging environment, and I thrived in that kind of environment. I thrived with that kind of discipline, not because I believed that rules were made to be broken, but I enjoyed structure in my life.

That same sort of discipline makes me sit at home and really break down a script into all its intimate characteristics so that I can do the best kind of work when I get to the set. So that I learn my lines before I get there, you know, and I ask questions before I get there, before I get to the set. And I look for changes a couple of days before by calling the writers and discussing aspects of the character or the script before so that things aren't left to chance. I love to rehearse.

Homicide is not a show in which we get rehearsal before we begin the film. But in all the best work that I've seen myself do on television, and I see a lot of flaws in my own work, the best part of my work is always involved rehearsal. I remember back in 1992 when we did Three Men in Edina with Moses Gunn and Kyle Secor and myself. This was the interrogation episode. The interrogation episode. We rehearsed every day two hours before we started shooting. That was a great episode. Well, the homework we

did in rehearsal showed up on screen. What kind of homework did you do? We would actually run through the lines, and we made choices right then and there. We rehearsed as if we were doing a play. We found the best choice, not the first choice. We found the best choice, and I loved the work that way. Back in 1993, Isaiah Washington, who was the kid in that episode, Black and Blue, the kid who I get a confession out of, although I know he's innocent. We rehearsed the day before that. And that made that episode, that interrogation so much better for me is because I was no longer worried or

filled with anxiety about what I might do, what choices would be best. And consequently, when we got to the set and we had to do, we chose to do eight and a half pages, maybe nine and a half pages in one take, I knew what I was doing from beginning to end. You want to know what the polygraph test says? You're lying. You're a liar. You even tried to hold your breath to cover up. You know what blew it off the says? You're lying. You're a liar. You even tried to hold your breath to cover up. You know what blew it off the charts? Off the screen? Look here.

Your heart. Your heart just blew those needles right off the screen. Man, a man could get whiplash looking at your test. And this guy says it's the highest he's ever seen. And this guy is an expert. Your heart. Your heart of all things. That's perfect for you, Risley.

Don't you see? Your heart. Because your heart doesn't want to lie. Let me see that. No, no, no, no. This is police property. That's perfect for you, Risley. Don't you see? Your heart, because your heart doesn't want to lie. Let me see that. No, no, no, no. This is police property. This is evidence for your trial. I know enough about the law to know you can't use that in court. You do? This is Mr. Legal Beagle here. He knows all about the law.

Is that because you watched the court channel? I didn't lie. Well, then how come you failed the test? I don't know. I don't know. That's your answer for everything. It's not going to work now. If you weren't lying, why'd you fail your test? I was nervous.

Why were you nervous? I feel guilty. You feel's your answer for everything. It's not going to work now. If you weren't lying, why'd you fail your test? I was nervous. Why were you nervous? I feel guilty. You feel guilty because you did it. No. Because you made me feel guilty. No, you failed this test because you are guilty. If I was guilty and knew it, then why would I take the test? You tell us.

No, I know why. I'll tell you why. Because you know we got you. You know it's over, Risley. You're going to jail. You're going to do time. That's right. Tim, look at his eyes. What's wrong with my eyes? Tears coming out of your eyes.

Ain't no tears coming from my eyes. His eyes are brimming with tears. Ready to burst. It's gonna get a lot worse. A lot worse. It never gets any better. Probably go back to drinking. Back to being a drunk.

No, I ain't never gonna do that. And you wind up killing yourself. If you're lucky. I didn't kill her. Why you putting your head down? Cause I'm tired of saying it. You're tired of saying it cause it's not true. Be a man for once. Don't up to it. I would. kill her. Why are you putting your head down? Because I'm tired of saying it. You're tired of saying it because it's not true. Be a man for once.

Don't up to it. I would. I would. Anybody else would, too. Be a man for once. Why don't you want to tell me, Risley? Huh? Why don't you want to tell me?

Huh? Why? Why? Why? That's a sample from the famous award-winning Three Men and Idina episode from the NBC series Homicide Life on the Street. Terry Gross spoke with Andre Brouwer in 1995. He went on to play another cop, but a much less intense one, on the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Earlier this year, Terry spoke with actor Sterling K. Brown, who told her about making a guest appearance on that comedy series. I want to play another clip. And you talked about Andre Brouwer. Yes. And how your lives Andre Brouwer. Yes. And how your lives intersected and how you looked up with him. You got a chance to do an episode of the comedy series Brooklyn Nine-Nine with him. And in the series, he plays a police captain and Andy Samberg plays a police detective. So this is basically a parody. This episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a parody of a famous episode from Homicide in which Brouwer and one of the other detectives are interrogating one witness for the entire episode, for the entire hour-long episode.

And that's what happens in the episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine that Brouwer and Sandberg are interrogating you. You play a dentist who is accused of murdering his partner, his dental partner. Yeah. And they want to get a confession out of you, and you keep coming up with answers. So let's play a clip from that episode. Okay. So the night of the murder,

you met with Robert in the surgical suite. Why there? Why not your office? I was just preparing for the next day's surgeries. Don't you have an assistant who does that? I'm a meticulous person. I'm careful how I do things. So careful that you... I'm sorry, I forgot what I was going to say.

Come back to me. Now, we did a sweep of the room where you and Robert fought. Talked. Right, talked. The entire room had been scrubbed. It had been cleaned. It had undergone industrial sterilization to remove all traces of blood and DNA. It's a surgical sweep.

People bleed in there every day. We have to sanitize it by law. Ooh, I remember what I was going to ask. Did you kill him? No. If you had said yes, I would have had you. So, after you and Robert fought, you left the office, but you didn't take your car? I went to a bar. I'm a Scotchman. I didn't want to drive drunk, so I took a cab.

And you didn't have your phone? I left it charging in my office, and I didn't realize until I was already out of the building. Oh, man. If I go ten minutes without looking at my phone, my pumpkin crop dies on my little farm. This is not the time for stories about your digital squash, Peralta. Fine. I'm talking about your phone. Why does it matter that I forgot it? Oh, if I had it on me,

you could have seen it pinging off the cell tower. Doesn't matter. Didn't have it on me. So you took a cab to this bar, but we talked to the employees of the Scotchman. Nobody saw you there. Nobody remembers seeing me. But let me ask you this. Did you kill him?

Nah. You know, it's not surprising nobody remembers seeing me. The bar was extremely crowded that night, and I spent my whole time in the corner talking to this woman, Dana. Oh, so you said. But when we ran all the credit card receipts, nobody named Dana bought any drinks that night. Hey, trust me. Dana wasn't buying her own drinks.

That is such a great scene, and your timing is so good. I really want to see you in more comedy. Thank you very much. It made me smile just listening to it. It was so much fun to do. Can you talk about doing that scene and getting the timing right and getting the kind of nonchalance that your character is aiming for? Yeah, it is just dogged repetition.

And you show up. One thing you learn in the world of television is that you don't get a lot of rehearsals. So you do a lot of that work on your own by yourself so that when you come to the set, you're ready to dance. And you know that Andy and Andre are going to be ready to go. So you're like, all right, let me not be the weak link in this threesome here. Let me show up ready to play ball the same way as everybody else. And they make it so much fun that it sort of just happens naturally. You'll go over the scene a couple of times before the cameras start rolling, and then you'll start to do it or whatnot. And there's a little bit of a hiccup.

It's just like anything else. You'll take it back to the beginning, and you'll do it again. And you just breathe, Terry. I think for me more than anything else is that when you try to stay in the moment, the next moment has a way of taking care of itself. When you're trying to project to the future and be like, oh, I hope I make it to this crescendo at the very, very end, then you sort of like wind up missing what's happening just right now. That's what I try to do as a performer. I think those two gentlemen in particular are wonderful at it.

And so they made it easy for me to join in the symphony. Actor Sterling K. Brown from earlier this year. Homicide Life on the Street will begin streaming on Peacock on Monday. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews Alien Romulus. This is Fresh Air. Hey, it's Aisha Roscoe from NPR's Up First podcast. I'm one of thousands of NPR Network voices coming to you from over 200 local newsrooms across the country. We bring all Americans closer together through free and independent journalism, music, politics, culture, and so much more.

The NPR Network. What you hear changes everything. Learn more at npr.org slash network. Alien Romulus is the latest movie in the long-running Alien sci-fi horror series. But it takes place shortly after the events of the very first film in the franchise, Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, Alien. The new movie was directed by Fede Alvarez and it stars Kaylee Spaney as a space traveler who comes face to face with the iconic monster. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review. If you've gone to the movies lately, you might have noticed, or even purchased, one of those novelty popcorn buckets promoting the year's big blockbusters. Maybe you dug into the gaping maw of a Dune Part II sandworm, or more recently into the hollowed-out head of Deadpool or Wolverine. Now there are at least two popcorn bucket models promoting the new movie Alien Romulus.

One is shaped like the head of a xenomorph, that most terrifying of horror movie demons, though I suspect without the drooling retractable tongue. Another bucket comes affixed with a facehugger, a skittering critter that's famously fond of attaching itself to a human's head and laying an egg in their throat. These concession stand gimmicks may be new, but the iconography of alien Romulus could hardly be more familiar. That's no surprise. These monsters, brilliantly conceived decades ago by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, have kept this series alive. In recent years, Ridley Scott, the director of the unimprovable 1979 Alien, has tried to push the franchise in a more philosophical direction, in movies like Prometheus and Alien Covenant. By contrast, Alien Romulus,

which was directed and co-written by the Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez, has no such weighty ambitions. It's an efficient and reasonably entertaining thriller that, like a lot of franchise movies nowadays, traffics more in nostalgia than novelty. Alvarez does set his sights somewhat high. He means to take us back to the franchise's glory days. The story, set in the year 2142, is sandwiched between the events of the first Alien and James Cameron's hugely entertaining 1986 sequel, Aliens. As in those films, starring the incomparable Sigourney Weaver,

there's a tough-minded female protagonist. Her name is Rain, and she's played by Kaylee Spaney, the versatile young actor from Priscilla and Civil War. There's also a friendly, not entirely reliable android sidekick, Andy, played by the English actor David Johnson. We're in a period that you might call late, late capitalism, where villainous corporations rule the day, and rain, like most people her age, is part of a heavily exploited labor class, working off debts that will never be repaid. And so when she and Andy hear of a possible way out, they seize the opportunity, along with a few friends. Never mind that it means heading up into space and boarding a large, rust-bucket ship that's not quite so abandoned as it appears. As for what lurks aboard the ship, Alvarez knows there's no point in building mystery

or suspense, and he unleashes his army of facehuggers and xenomorphs almost immediately. His human characters, however, do intend to put up a fight. In this scene, Tyler, played by Archie Renault, shows Rain how to use a high-tech weapon. Right, this is an F-44 AA pulse rifle. It's a rotating breech electronic pulse action. That's what the Colonial Marines used. AA stands for Raining Assist. So, right, you put that under your arm.

Is that it? Right, and this, Andy? Yeah. Aim it towards Andy. Pull the trigger halfway. Alvarez has a knack for rebooting You point it in this general direction, you'll never miss. Where'd you learn all this? Uh-uh. Games and magazines. Alvarez has a knack for rebooting horror properties, having made his debut with a fresh 2013 spin on Evil Dead. He followed that with the Walking on Eggshell's thriller Don't Breathe, about a group of young burglars trying to rob a blind homeowner. Alvarez is a

strong director of action, and he riffs inventively on classic alien beats. The xenomorphs, as usual, have corrosive acid for blood, a detail that the movie exploits ingeniously in a suspenseful, gravity-defying set piece. And there's at least one memorable moment that reminds us that the xenomorphs, with their phallic heads and goopy secretions, are among the most psychosexual of cinematic nightmares. In the end, though, Alvarez's command of craft only gets him so far. The problem isn't just that the characters, apart from Rain and Andy, are pretty bland monster fodder. It's that while the director seems content to update the Alien movies, with young fresh faces and state-of-the-art technology, he has no apparent idea how to push

them forward. His boldest and least successful gambit is to resurrect a key figure from an earlier film, a visual effects coup that tries to honor the series' roots, but feels more like a desecration. I'll never pass up an Alien movie, but I do hope the next one has something more than elaborate fan service in mind. Dwelling too obsessively on the past is no way to guarantee a franchise's future. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker.

He reviewed Alien Romulus, which opens in theaters today. On Monday's show, actor Angelou Ellis-Taylor, the star of the movie Origin, talks about how she chooses characters that allow her to communicate elements of herself and where she comes from. She stars in the new coming-of-age film The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat. I hope you can join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Chirac. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. Inhul. Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College?

All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR.