Andre Braugher gave the best acting performance you probably never saw

His work in "Homicide: Life on the Street" was captivating and astonishing.

An awkward early meeting between Detectives Tim Bayliss (played by Kyle Secor) and Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher)

I spent last night scouring the internet for clips of “Homicide: Life on The Street,” after the news that Andre Braugher — the riveting performer who starred as Detective Frank Pembleton — passed away at 61.

And I can’t imagine I was the only one desperate to hear Pembleton’s voice once, twice or 10 more times.

RIP to an actor who was impossibly gifted, who became beloved for his comedy work, even if too few people got to see Braugher’s greatest dramatic performance.¹ Homicide was poorly rated when it aired on NBC in the 1990s; it’s not streaming on any service now. Somehow, a dark show about murder detectives failed to win over much of America.

But in Baltimore, we knew.

Growing up in the city, it was impossible to escape Homicide’s shadow. It was the rare major TV network drama that actually filmed in our town. It churned out episodes that were catnip to critics. It constantly brought local foibles to national attention, such as our mayor’s claim that crime-ridden Baltimore was the “city that reads.”

(The common joke was that we were actually “the city that bleeds” — which became the title of an inevitable Homicide episode.)

The fact that Homicide was perma-imperiled, as it struggled to draw viewers, added some frisson; you never knew if the episode you were watching would be the last.²

It was not a perfect show. The characters could be too quirky, and some plotlines were too weird. It was filmed in a jumpy, jittery way that could be grating. Most annoyingly, it aired at 10 PM on Friday nights; I remember missing episodes after starting to develop a meager teenage social life.

But being forced to work to watch Homicide only made me love it more. And it had Braugher, who leapt off the screen in his first appearance and didn’t stop jumping for the next six years.

Viewers hear about Braugher’s character before meeting him, roughly 15 minutes into Homicide’s debut episode, as his colleagues debate why the aloof Detective Pembleton refuses to work with a partner.

“The guy thinks he’s smart because he listens to Emmylou Harris,” says one detective, played by Daniel Baldwin, before he ends up in an ill-fated partnership with Pembleton that implodes before they leave the police parking lot.

It’s clear that Homicide’s creators knew the talent they had in Braugher, who they kept off-screen for most of the first episode, deploying him like the shark in Jaws for maximum effect.

In the final minutes, the episode pivots to Pembleton and his new partner, rookie detective Tim Bayliss, as they try to close a case. After a suspect is arrested, Bayliss requests to sit in on Pembleton’s “interrogation.”

Pembleton: Then what you will be privileged to witness will not be an interrogation, but an act of salesmanship as silver-tongued and thieving as ever moved used cars, Florida swampland or bibles. But what I am selling is a long prison term, to a client who has no genuine use for the product.

(You can find the episode online here.)

Pembleton’s interrogations quickly became appointment television. In one first-season plotline, Pembleton and Bayliss would try and try and try and try to get a suspect to confess to murdering a child — a deeply frustrating episode that “was a stark, dramatic example of what made ‘Homicide’ different from other cop shows,” Saul Austerlitz wrote in the New York Times earlier this year.

From that oral history:

Braugher: We performed it like a theater piece. There’s nowhere to go. It’s a strangely shaped little room with a door and a window. So it’s just three men going around and around and around again.

Homicide mostly lives today in essays like the one I’m writing, where the author wants to assure you that you missed out on something great.

And the legacy is indeed profound. It was “The Wire” before “The Wire,” with both shows drawing on author David Simon’s pen, sharing actors and crew and telling complicated stories of police work in Baltimore. It inadvertently sent Detective John Munch, played by actor Richard Belzer, on an exploration of the television multiverse before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a gleam in Disney’s eye. Its struggles on network TV helped fuel debates about whether great shows needed to instead live on premium channels like HBO.

But Homicide’s brilliance was anchored in Frank Pembleton and his show-stopping scenes, the struggles of a devout Catholic trying to navigate an amoral world. And behind the fictional detective, there was the real Andre Braugher.

“This is for all the people in Baltimore,” Braugher said as he accepted his 1998 Emmy Award. “This is a town that I love. We have finally made it.”

We loved him back.

I had one passing encounter with Braugher. It was the late 1990s. We were waiting at a midwest airport to fly back to Baltimore, and my dad pointed out Braugher sitting nearby, near the boarding gate. To my teenage brain, this was both the most exciting and most terrifying thing that could have possibly happened — at least, next to seeing local baseball legend Cal Ripken, Jr.

Braugher boarded before we did, and as we walked past his seat in first class, while he was mid-conversation with someone else, I blurted out something. I don’t remember what. It’s possible it wasn’t even English, as my tongue (along with the rest of me) was suffering from a severe case of being star-struck.

Braugher didn’t break his conversation, but stuck out his hand and firmly shook mine.

In case I didn’t say it then, I want to be sure to say it now: thanks for everything, Mr. Braugher. You made Baltimore proud.

1. Here’s Washington Post critic Tom Shales in 1995: “Each week, Braugher becomes Pembleton in an incredibly intense and borderline mystical way. He's a team player and yet a completely magnetic presence in all his scenes. Braugher's Pembleton is not a case of an actor showing off. It's a case of a highly skilled craftsman who has found, for now, the perfect role for his talents.”

2. Somehow, Homicide made it seven seasons and a TV movie.