The best way to describe Season 5 is the calm before the storm. The two more prominent women, Russert and later Kay, leave the show. The season begins with Frank dealing with returning to work after his Season 4 ending stroke. Michelle Forbes of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame opted to join the Homicide cast, giving up the chance to star in the Deep Space Nine edition of Trek. She became Baltimore’s newest M.E. and would be in for a stormy ride. The show maintains its gritty feel and camera movements continue to …eep viewers on edge.
Audio
Again you’ll find a pretty typical television 2.0 audio track on these discs. Dialogue is always clear even if some of the background sounds tend to still come out muddy. The music is usually source material and can vary greatly in quality.
Video
Each Homicide episode is presented in its original television full frame format. Most of this show is very dark Look to find a good amount of grain. This grain is the result of the low lighting and the use of super 16 film. Darks seem to contain a bit of artifacting at times.
Special Features
Again there’s only one commentary offered, and it features the writers for “The Documentary”. I found it a little bland and distracting.
“Inside Homicide” is by far one of the better features of this series. Interviews with David Simon and to a lesser extent James Yoshimura. You’ll find a lot of insight into the characters and their story arcs here.
The rest of the extras are merely stills and cast crew bios. A complete list of the songs used for each episode is a welcome feature continued in this set.
The menus are exactly like the previous releases.
Final Thoughts
Season 5, like the previous one, is considered by the show’s hardcore fans to be the transition from the original show to the redefined cast of seasons 6 and 7. Still. There is a lot of meat in this sandwich. The stories will grab you so tightly that the cast changes almost don’t matter. Dick Wolf gets credit for this phenomenon, but Homicide and Steven Bochco’s Hill Street Blues wrote the book. The changes were made less abruptly than in the past. After all: “There’s fearless and then there’s crazy”.
Special Features List
- Commentary by writers Eric Overmyer and James Yoshimura on “The Documentary”
- “Inside Homicide”: an interview with David Simon and James Yoshimura
