"Women shouldn't be doctors or cops. They're too weak and stupid!" -- Christopher Meloni, goading with expectant relish
One thing truly innovative about Attanasio's Homicide:: Life on the Streets, was Kyle Secor's inability to solve the case of the dead black child Wanda. The very irresolution of the murder generated its dramatic tension and character development, from which cable series like The Wire drew on later; spastic only skimmed the headlines shilling for creator David Simon, conjoined to a clip about the death of the protagonist in the wild west of the ghetto. When you actually live the life as a disabled woman invariably damaged by a defiant obstinacy thicker than a three layered wedding cake, as a viewer, you're not missing out by in inability to afford a dose of this particular black neo-realism, which in an LA film like Menace II Society becomes cartoonish. Nevertheless, the interplay between Secor and Kotto during the first season was taut, and brave for its time. If we have to be inundated by procedurals in such a manner, directors and the SWG could take more chances with the truism that we don't always get the pieces of the puzzle, resetting our social structure according to the conventions we expect.
All serials weaken to some degree, over time, or we come to assume certain things about them, and Homicide developed a made for television feel as it went on, with the exception of its highbrow close, the dead in perpetual motion, playing existential poker, Wanda jumping rope, a perpetual bauble of innocence in an urban environment of sloping asphalt and concrete. If the latter day American Crime ends its story lines, and its theatrical musical chairs in the same fashion, leaving us unsatisfied, this blogger doesn't actually know, but it's more to the good.
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