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‘Homicide: Life on the Street’ Is Streaming for the First Time Ever

LOOKING FOR A new TV show binge to get totally lost in? Well, consider your search over, because one of the best shows of all time is now streaming, in remastered form, for the first time ever. After a lengthy wait (and several rights-related issues holding things up), Homicide: Life on the Street is now streaming on Peacock. The show, which aired for seven seasons and 122 episodes on NBC between 1993 and 1999, is available in its entirety, along with 2000's Homicide: The Movie, which serves as the series finale.

Homicide is not only one of the straight-up best shows in TV history, but also one of the most influential. The Baltimore-set series is still known to this day for it's grounded sense of realism, and how not every story has a happy ending, and not every case is solved neatly within the course of the episode's runtime. That kind of tone has become more popular in recent decades, but at the time it was absolutely groundbreaking, and still never short of compelling. And the show, as a result, holds up.

The series is based on David Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets that he wrote while he was a crime reporter with the Baltimore Sun; Simon would become a writer, producer and consultant with Homicide, and eventually created The Wire, Treme, Show Me a Hero, and more for HBO.

The cast includes Daniel Baldwin, the late Andre Braugher (who won a Primetime Emmy in 1998 for his work on the show), Yaphet Kotto, Academy Award winner Melissa Leo, and Richard Belzer (who would eventually portray his character, Detective Mulch, on both Law and Order and other shows like Arrested Development). Homicide was also notable for featuring a number of notable guest stars, including Robin Williams and Vincent D'Onofrio.

Now that Homicide is streaming for the first time, it's certain to start getting more and more popular as fans of more contemporary police procedurals, like Law & Order: SVU, The Wire, or even something like Presumed Innocent begin looking for a new show to sink their teeth into.

And now, for the first time, they'll get a taste of one of the very best.

For the first time ever, Homicide: Life on the Street is exclusively available to stream in HD (with a 4K version also coming soon) on Peacock. According to NPR, the show will include "most" of the original music, which was supposedly the root of the rights issue that held up the show's streaming for all these years (a similar thing happened with the '90s cult favorite comedy Freaks and Geeks before it landed on Hulu a few years back).

To watch the show in its complete original edition (although not remastered in HD or 4K), you can still buy the complete series in DVD box set form.