Homicide: Life On The Street might actually come to streaming at some point
The iconic police procedural has been stuck in limbo due to music licensing issues
The death of Andre Braugher last week has apparently pushed NBCUniversal to finally try and figure out how to get influential police procedural Homicide: Life On The Street—which gave Braugher his breakout role, as Detective Frank Pembleton—onto streaming. That comes from David Simon, who later created The Wire and wrote the book that Homicide was based on, who posted on Twitter that he’s been informed by “a reliable source” that the network is finally trying to the show’s music rights so it can be released on streaming. He says he’s been told that it will be a “lot of work” to actually do that, but the proverbial wheels seem to be in motion. “Andre alone ought to rate such,” he added.
Homicide, which followed the fictional cases (though based on Simon’s true stories) of the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit, was essentially the prototype version of Simon’s The Wire and also NBC’s Law & Order franchise (with Special Victims Unit later adopting Homicide character John Munch, played by the great Richard Belzer). That makes it historically significant, if nothing else, and as Simon noted, it would be a fitting tribute to Braugher for NBC to put in the work to actually make it accessible to a modern audience—especially when other companies that will go unnamed have been gutting their streaming libraries of classic shows and movies.
The sticking point is that Homicide used a bunch of contemporary music when it first aired, and while that hasn’t stopped it from coming out on DVD a few times, it has made it impossible to release on streaming intact. Thankfully, other seemingly impossible licensing deals have been worked out in the past—and by NBC!—so it’s not completely unheard of.