Watching Homicide: Life on the Street again last night, aside from my on-going adoration of Munch, I decided that I want Lt Al Giardello as my boss.Normally senior police, the shift commanders and chief superintendents etc, aren’t portrayed that sympathetically. They are often careerist, obsessed with targets and budgets, and out of touch with the ordinary detectives.
Chief Superintendent Strange isn’t wholly unsympathetic to Morse, especially towards the end when they are aligned as part of the old order, which is rapidly being replaced with a new generation.
The high ranking officers in The Wire are a mixed bunch – Daniels and Colvin are good men with good intentions, but the others are a nightmare mixture of vanity, petty rivalry and incompetence – you wouldn’t want to work for Burrell, Rawls or Valchek.
Waking The Dead’s Boyd is forever shouting at his team but then he is conflict of those higher up, with the unit constantly under threat of being shut down. A similar cloud hangs over the department in its light-hearted counterpart, New Tricks with Pullman and her team of oldies under pressure from the big bosses.
Captain Aceveda in The Shield is a mess - ambitious but a mess. Not much better than his renegade strike team. His replacement, Glenn Close as Captian Rawling isn’t an inspiring leader either.
Nope, Giardello is the only one I’d like to work for. He’s far superior to my actual real-life boss in so many ways. He's charming but efficient. He's a family man. He's firm but fair. He's part Italian so cooks good pasta. And he can hussle at the card game hearts (far preferably to my own bosses miserable attempts at betting on the horses!).
Alas, I fear my chances of working for a fictional Baltimore police department are slim.
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2 comments:
Hello there,
I am currently watching season 3 of Homicide on DVD from Netflix, and of course I absolutely love it. I decided to do a Google Blog Search for "Homicide: Life on the Streets", and your blog was the first to come up.
Homicide was on network TV here in the US back in the 90's and I watched it on and off at the time, but I am a huge fan of The Wire and everything David Simon touches. I read his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and decided that I had I had to go back and see the series as well.
Anyhoo, I noticed that about a year ago you wrote in anticipation of Season 4 of The Wire. Did you get the chance to see it? What were your impressions?
Hello Anon. Thank you for your comment.
Homicide never really got the screening it deserved here - tucked away in late night slots, moved around and most recently repeated on one of the lesser cable channels. So I only really came across it through The Wire, so haven't seen too much of it yet. But it is brilliant so far. I have the book but haven't got round to reading it yet (lame excuse that its in very small print) but I will read it soon.
We did get hold of Season 4 of The Wire and as ever, it was fantastic. The progression to the education theme was done very well and although I missed characters like Stringer, I was soon caring about what happened to the young kids. I was gutted by Boadie's death though and will miss his relationship with the Carver etc in the fifth series.
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