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“Homicide is not The Wire. But, maybe because so many of the people who were central to its creative team had developed their skills somewhere else besides television, it was something that no one had ever quite seen on TV before: an experimental cop show. By definition, experiments don’t always work, and among the reasons the show never became a popular success, there are some good ones. The editing, with its reliance on jump cuts, could be mannered, and so could the dialogue, which sometimes strained to be clipped and hard-boiled by way of David Mamet. But even when the results were shaky, it was exciting to see so many talented people working without a net. Homicide was both bad and uninteresting only when NBC went too far in tinkering with it in its later seasons, in the forlorn hope that it might become a worthy ratings competitor for Nash Bridges.”