Homicide: Life on the Street
By 1994, Robin Williams was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Between ’91 and ’93 alone, he was responsible for over $1 billion in global box office receipts, thanks to a trifecta of marquee performances in Hook, Mrs. Doubtfire and Aladdin. More than just a box office draw, Williams by this point had three Academy Award nominations to his name, and a Golden Globe for Best Actor which he had won for Good Morning, Vietnam.
Mork & Mindy, the show that introduced and endeared Williams to America and elsewhere (regularly pulling in a whopping 60 million viewers every week), had been off the air for 12 years. The actor had become one of the Hollywood’s biggest players, and save for the occasional bit of voice work, or proving he truly had made it by playing himself on The Larry Sanders Show, home viewing audiences hadn’t seen Williams on their TV since 1987.
Then, as a favor to Good Morning, Vietnam director Barry Levinson, Williams decided to make his triumphant return to TV during the second season premiere of NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street. Critically acclaimed but lowly rated in its first year, the Levinson-produced show was given a stay of execution by the network to see if a retooled, shortened second season would catch on. Guest stars of the time couldn’t get much bigger than Williams, so unsurprisingly, his sizeable role in the episode, titled “Bop Gun,” helped rocket Homicide to the best ratings it had seen seen since the series premiere.
The real shock of the appearance is that, at the time, you couldn’t get two more distinct flavors of entertainment than Williams and Homicide. One was a walking sunbeam, all light and energy; the other was a grim, earthy police procedural set in Baltimore. While Williams had made a healthy dramatic career for himself playing eccentrics, what stands out about his turn on Homicide is the everyday humanity of it. He doesn’t motor-mouth, riff, or do a funny voice at any point during the hour. You might as well be asking a magician to leave their top hat and wand at home. Stripped of his comedy toolkit, Williams used Homicide to reveal the raw emotional sensitivity that’s always been hiding under that smile and arm hair.
Williams plays Robert Ellison, a married father of two touring Baltimore with the rest of his family. The episode begins with a music montage that showcases the Ellisons seeing the sights. It’s a completely unassuming and mundane sequence, and to see Williams in plainclothes with a broom mustache makes you wonder if he could have had another life as a high school math teacher. Cut back from the opening credits, and the next time we see Robert is in a police station, hurrying up the steps while cradling his daughter, his son (a young Jake Gyllenhaal) lagging behind. Robert’s wife has just been killed in front of him during a mugging gone wrong. As the detectives ask him questions, Robert delivers confused answers in a distant monotone, holding onto his daughter like a security blanket, sweating uncontrollably the whole time.
This is a hard hour in Williams’ career to re-watch, as it calls on the experience of dealing with an individual’s sudden passing. “Bop Gun” is an episode dedicated to grief and its processes; Robert transitions from shock, to heartbreak, to anger, to depression, with a final resting place found in bitter acceptance. Williams brilliantly, painfully embodies a man trying to feel his way out of the void left by senseless and random loss. He nails every single phase of Robert’s evolution, all while keeping his trademark excitement and charm leashed. It’s only in his final scene that Williams lets his comedic instincts poke their head out a bit. He’s not looking to go out on a laugh, though; adding the right pinch of sarcasm to Robert’s somber farewell, it’s a reminder that humor, no matter how dark, is often the only thing in arm’s reach that most can protect themselves with in the face of tragedy.
– Sam Woolf