Eye-gouging pseudorealism comes as standard equipment on crime-and-punishment series on TV these days -- whether you're talking ABC's NYPD Blue, NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street and Law and Order, or British import Prime Suspect.
Tune in and, though the settings and accents might vary, you get a reliable diet of heartless mayhem, cops who aren't afraid to twist arms to find killers, gruesome autopsies and crime-scene pix, rotten plea bargains, and plenty of pockmarks, personal problems, and well-concealed humane streaks among lead characters.
From that hard-case lineup, Homicide stands out for its commitment to translating its gritty world to the Web. The show's highly regarded, two-year-old Second Shift site features a separate set of characters and Web-only episodes in which the cast occasionally interacts with its TV counterparts.
Now the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning show -- which airs Fridays at 10 p.m. PST -- is pushing that innovation much further: The series is launching a three-act episode on Second Shift that will start 3 and 4 February, continue on air 5 February, and conclude a week later back on the Web. The storyline concerns a murderer who hacks into Web sites to Netcast his ritualistic killings and investigators who must sweep cyberspace for evidence.
Tom Hjelm, NBC's director of interactive programming and executive producer of NBC Digtal programming, says on one level, the crossover episode is merely in line with the network's commitment to be more than just a broadcast network and to explore programming opportunities in new media.
But creatively and commercially, the Homicide crossover represents a lot more than that.
"We hope to prove that this is a viable business model," Hjelm notes. Snagging Microsoft as one of the sponsors of the crossover event "is a powerful argument for that case."
Hjelm hesitates to call the online/on-air show an experiment, pointing out that besides the well-thought-through Second Shift, network shows like Profiler and Late Night with Conan O'Brien have made prominent efforts to engage their broadcast audiences through their Web sites.
The Homicide crossover is another milestone in showing "that we can really expand the horizons of what's possible," Hjelm says. "The end game? In my perfect world, every show would have producers from the online side sitting down at the same table with the rest of the creative team. Interactive elements should be built into every show we do." Among the challenges the project presented -- it was, Hjelm notes, the first show in the series' more than 100 episodes that depicted Homicide detectives using computers -- was authenticity.
Writers can choose from lots of urban ugliness in gleaning details for their scripts. But a real-life example of a cybermurder is hard to come by. (Unless you stretch a point and count last year's case involving a Vermont teenager who died in a parcel bombing -- the alleged victim of an Indiana man he had reportedly swindled online.)
In putting together the broadcast episode, the show's producers got a hold of some authorities in online wrongdoing: Luke Reiter and Alex Wellen, creators of and correspondents for ZDTV's CyberCrime show.
A true duo -- both 28, both New Yorkers, classmates at Temple University Law School in Philadelphia, both fans of Homicide -- they advised executive story editor Sara Charno on some of the technological and investigative realities her fictional detectives might encounter.
"The writers came to us for our creative input in terms of how to make a high-tech story line appealing to people, and they knew they wanted to have a murder that was part of a high-tech story line," Reiter says. Wellen adds, "They would ask, 'Can you do this?' 'Does this make sense?' And we would come up with ideas and collaborate."
Before selling ZDTV on their CyberCrime idea, Wellen was paying his junior-lawyer dues (70-hour-plus hours a week) at Pennie & Edmonds, a New York-based intellectual-property and antitrust firm.
Reiter was the kind of guy who might be turned into a character on one of the cop shows -- a young assistant district attorney in the New York City borough of Queens who in two years handled about two dozen homicide prosecutions. That experience came into play when he consulted on the NBC show.
"One of the things that was interesting about this particular investigation [on Homicide] is that you're dealing with very advanced technology generally in terms of what the story line involves, but you're also dealing with old-world Baltimore homicide detectives who aren't really familiar with that technology," he said. "So, maybe I was able to provide for Sara, the writer, some sort of insight into how old-world detectives -- and I have had the privilege of helping my share -- might view a high-tech murder and how they might go about investigating it. Some of the things they would know, some of the things they would instinctively elect to pursue first that they should or shouldn't."
The result? Dial up 12 February to see.
