Homicide: Life on the Street/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Music: Many examples. The soundtrack fits in the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Collective Soul, Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega and Jimi Hendrix and it is awesome.
  • Complete Monster - Averted for the most part as many criminals were portrayed as too stupid to understand the depths of their actions. Even mass-murderers such as Pamela Wilgis and the snipers (the original and his Jack the Ripoff) were portrayed as insane or pathetic.
    • On the other hand, Luther Mahoney was very much a monster: a smooth, intelligent, charismatic man who could have done anything he wanted in life and instead chose to be drug lord who had children murdered over a few hundred dollars and ordered a rival's heroin spiked with poison to drive away what customers it didn't kill.
    • His nephew Junior Bunk also qualifies. In the course of a few episodes, he murders witnesses, kills a judge and shoots up the Homicide unit (Killing three officers and wounding two detectives) with a joyful smile on his face. Of course his mother Georgia Rae isn't any better, waging a psychological war on the Homicide unit, taking over the drug deals and using her son to get revenge for her brother's death.
  • Creator's Pet -- Falsone
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Munch has retro-actively become this.
  • Gary Stu -- Falsone, especially in the sixth season.
  • Harsher in Hindsight -- In "A Many Splendored Thing" Adrienne Shelly plays the friend of a murder victim who thanks Bayliss and says she is happy to know that if she is murdered, Bayliss will avenge her. In 2006, she was murdered in a robbery of her NYC office.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel -- The episode "Subway." A man is shoved on a subway platform and is pinched at the waist between the platform and a subway train. We spend the rest of the episode with him as he's waiting around to die. He is lucid the entire time.
  • Ho Yay -- Bayliss and Pembleton.
  • Moral Event Horizon -- An interesting example of this trope involves Kellerman. His point of no return does not seem to be the execution of Luther Mahoney, but rather a smaller, quieter scene in which he laughs at a young dead drug dealer on a crime scene, arriving as far as posing for a mock picture next to his corpse. From that point on, the writers portrayed him as increasingly bitter and unlikable - no longer an Anti-Hero, but simply a Jerkass.

Det Ballard: We speak for the dead, remember?
Det Kellerman: Screw the dead. What have their moldering asses ever done for me?

  • Nightmare Fuel -- The infamous "peach scene" involving Falsone and Ballard horrified and traumatized many fans.
  • Replacement Scrappy -- Ballard, Sheppard, the younger Giardello, Falsone. Basically any character introduced after S5.
  • Retroactive Recognition -- Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice appears as a redneck spree killer. And his mild-mannered twin brother!
  • The Scrappy -- Falsone was so loathed by some fans that a "I hate Falsone" webpage was created.
    • The fact that Sheppard was almost universally referred to by fans as "Sheepdog" shows that she qualifies for this too -- without being competent enough to be a Creator's Pet.
  • Too Good to Last -- Although it somehow managed to last seven seasons (with the last two being generally regarded as mediocre, thanks to some tragic Executive Meddling) the show was never really popular and *always* struggled with ratings.
  • The Woobie -- Bayliss.
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