Homicide: Life on the Street (Seasons 1–7)

Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–1999) is the NBC police drama you can watch online on iFILM. It grew out of David Simon's nonfiction book about a year spent shadowing the detectives of Baltimore's homicide squad.

Forget car chases and clean shootouts. The heart of this show is a board of victims' names — closed cases in black, open ones in red — and an interrogation room the cops call the Box. Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) breaks suspects with nothing but words. Around him are sardonic John Munch (Richard Belzer), unflappable Lt. Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) and rookie Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), haunted for years by the murder of a little girl.

Barry Levinson produced it, and this same hard look at Baltimore would later give rise to The Wire. Across seven seasons it claimed four Emmy Awards and a name as the most honest cop show of its era — short on heroics, long on real people on both sides of the table. Stream every season of Homicide: Life on the Street online on iFILM.