“Three Men and Adina”: Watch a Complete, Brilliant, Heart-Breaking Early Episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets (1992) S01E05

Re-posted by N.S.



Cuadicles
2 years ago (edited)

I stopped watching this show immediately after I saw this episode, because I just felt like it could never get any better than Moses Gunn's performance [chuckle]. Honestly one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen, and definitely the greatest acting performance.

Nicholas Stix
1 second ago

I know very well how good this episode is, because I saw it only once, almost 30 years ago, yet I remember so much of it. I had not known, however, that Moses Gunn died shortly after making it. I remember “G” [Yaphet Kotto] telling Bayliss [Kyle Secor], “You never forget your first child murder.” But I have seen other dramatic TV episodes that were about as good as this one. Most of them were also on Homicide (later on).

One was where Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) gets a white female serial killer in “the box” [the intyerrogation room], where she gives a virtuoso performance-within-a-performance as someone suffering from multiple-personality disorder. (Except she’s not! She's playing the crazy card.) The scene is a brilliant, dramatic chess game, and, last I checked, it was here. The first two-to-four seasons were like that. Then it faded, because some of the stars left the show, or demanded soap opera back-stories, and its greatest producer-writers focused on new shows.

But Yaphet Kotto never left, and he was the secret star, all along. He almost never got his due, except when he wrote his own scripts, but anytime he got a scene revolving around him, however brief, he left no doubt that he was one of the best things on a screen of any size.