"Gone for Goode" or "Pilot" is the series premiere of the American police drama television series Homicide: Life on the Street. It originally aired on NBC in the United States on January 31, 1993, immediately following Super Bowl XXVII. The episode was written by series creator Paul Attanasio and directed by executive producer Barry Levinson. "Gone for Goode" introduced regular cast members Daniel Baldwin, Ned Beatty, Richard Belzer, Andre Braugher, Wendy Hughes, Clark Johnson, Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, Jon Polito, and Kyle Secor.
The episode connects several subplots involving the detectives of a Baltimore Police Department homicide unit and establishes story arcs that continued through the first season. Among them are an investigation by Meldrick Lewis (Johnson) and Steve Crosetti (Polito) into a widow killing husbands for insurance money, as well as rookie Tim Bayliss (Secor) being assigned the murder of an 11-year-old girl for his first case. Both of those subplots were taken directly from Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, the 1991 David Simon non-fiction book from which the series was adapted.
"Gone for Goode" was seen by 18.24 million viewers, the largest viewership of the first season, although NBC was initially disappointed with the ratings. The episode received generally positive reviews upon its original broadcast. Barry Levinson won an Emmy Award for his direction in "Gone for Goode", and was nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award. Paul Attanasio received a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for the episode's script.
Plot summary The episode opens with Baltimore Police detectives Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) and Steve Crosetti (Jon Polito) looking for a projectile a few yards away from the body of a man shot to death. The victim's girlfriend (Oni Faida Lampley), who was shot in the head during the incident but survived, tells police during questioning that her aunt, Calpurnia Church, hired a hit man to kill her for insurance money. The detectives learn Church previously collected life insurance from five deceased husbands. Suspecting Church of murdering her husbands, Lewis and Crosetti have the body of her most recent husband exhumed for an autopsy but reach a dead-end when it turns out the wrong body is in his grave.
Detective Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) hesitates to take a new murder case because he fears it will be too difficult to solve, so it is taken on by his partner, Kay Howard (Melissa Leo), who has recently experienced a perfect streak of solving eleven consecutive cases. They investigate the body of a man dead in a basement, and much to Felton's bewilderment, Howard solves the case easily. The owner of the house, Jerry Jempson (Jim Grollman), literally calls Howard at the house while she is investigating and agrees to a police interview, during which he acts extremely nervous and is eventually charged with the murder.
Detective John Munch (Richard Belzer) is reluctant to follow up on the case of murdered drug addict Jenny Goode, who was run over by a car. The case has been cold for three months, but he is guilted by his partner Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty) into reexamining it. Munch makes no progress after speaking with the family and reexamining notes. Based on witness accounts of a man with long blond hair and a black car, Munch spends all night looking through suspect photos until he finds a man with a black car with front end damage and long black hair, but blond eyebrows. Munch and Bolander question him, believing the suspect (Joe Hansard) to have dyed his hair to change his appearance after killing the woman. He quickly confesses to having hit her accidentally while driving drunk.
Lieutenant Al "Gee" Giardello (Yaphet Kotto) tells Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher), an excellent detective but a lone wolf, that he must work with a partner. Pembleton ends up investigating the death of a 65-year-old man with rookie detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor). Bayliss initially believes the death to be a heart attack, but Pembleton correctly determines it is a murder because the man's car is missing. Police later arrest a man named Johnny (Alexander Chaplin), who is found driving the dead man's car. During interrogation, Pembleton fools Johnny into waiving his Miranda rights, then sneakily persuades him into confessing to the murder. Bayliss, although convinced of Johnny's guilt, nevertheless questions the ethics of Pembleton's approach (Reid technique), prompting Pembleton to yell angrily at him in front of the other officers. The episode ends with Bayliss responding to his first homicide as the primary detective: the brutal murder of an 11-year-old girl named Adena Watson.
Production
Development and writing
"Gone for Goode" was written by series creator Paul Attanasio and directed by executive producer Barry Levinson. Levinson was seeking to create a television series based on Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, a 1991 non-fiction book by David Simon based on one year he spent with Baltimore Police Department homicide detectives. Levinson and fellow executive producer Tom Fontana hired Attanasio to adapt elements of the book into the teleplay for the first episode. It was the first television script Attanasio ever wrote. The episode was shot by director of photography Wayne Ewing. Stan Warnow started out working as editor, but departed before the process was done due to creative differences with Levinson. Tony Black finished the editing for "Gone for Goode",Kalat, p. 107 but did not return for the rest of the season, and Jay Rabinowitz worked as editor for the remaining episodes. The costumes for the episode were designed by Van Smith, but he also did not return to work on subsequent episodes.Kalat, p. 110 Although it was first episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, it was not technically a television pilot because the network had already ordered a full season of episodes before "Gone for Goode" was produced. The first episode was noted at the time for weaving four separate storylines into a single episode, the first in a trend of multiple subplots in each Homicide show. NBC executives indicated to Attanasio and Levinson they would have preferred the script to focus on a single homicide case rather than four, but ultimately allowed the script to be filmed with all subplots included. Additionally, despite intense advance promotion of the Homicide premiere, Attanasio deliberately sought to introduce the show with little fanfare, avoiding sensational gimmicks in favor of character-driven plot, quirky dialogue and morbid dark humor.Kalat, p. 111
"Gone for Goode" included several storylines, and even exact bits of dialogue, adapted straight from Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Among them were the investigation into Calpurnia Smith, an elderly woman suspected of murdering five husbands in order to collect their life insurance policies. This was based on the real-life case of Geraldine Parrish, who was also accused of killing five husbands for insurance money, and was eventually convicted for three of their deaths. A scene involving a funeral director accidentally exhuming the wrong body while investigating the Church case mirrored a similar situation described in Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets from the Parrish case. The Adena Watson murder case, which is assigned to Bayliss in the final scene of "Gone for Goode", was adapted from the unsolved 1988 slaying of Latonya Kim Wallace, which made up a major part of the book. The Watson case became an important story arc throughout the first season which ended without the case being solved. The hit-and-run murder of Jenny Goode was also based on Simon's book, and the murder of the elderly man was inspired by a case featured in the book in which a young homosexual man killed his elderly lover and stole his car.
Attanasio also based the characters in Homicide on the detectives featured in Simon's book. The difficulties Bayliss experienced with the case, as well as the extremely personal approach he took in attempting to solve it, were inspired by the real-life Baltimore detective Tom Pellegrini, who was the primary detective in the Wallace case. Most of the detectives featured in the Homicide book said they were happy with their on-screen counterparts, although Detective Harry Edgerton, the inspiration for Frank Pembleton, objected to a scene in "Gone for Goode" in which the character drinks milk in a bar, something Edgerton said he never does.
The episode opens with Crosetti and Lewis looking for clues in a dark alley. Levinson and Attanasio specifically wanted a dialogue-driven prologue scene that did not immediately clarify the fact that the two men were detectives or what they were looking for. The dialogue and staging of the scene were imitated in the final scene of the last Homicide episode, "Forgive Us Our Trespasses", which aired on May 21, 1999. In that final scene, Detective Rene Sheppard (played by Michael Michele) says to Lewis, "Life is a mystery, just accept it", a line spoken by Crosetti in the first episode. Lewis also said, "That's what's wrong with this job. It ain't got nothin' to do do with life", a line also spoken by Crosetti in the first episode. Early scenes in "Gone for Goode" also involved Giardello introducing rookie detective Bayliss to the homicide unit. Attanasio sought to use Bayliss' orientation as a way of introducing exposition and background about the show to the viewer as well.
In writing the script, Attanasio, Levinson and Fontana wanted the dialogue to reflect the kinds of things detectives would talk about when not discussing murders or cases, which led to the inclusion of several scenes in which detectives talk casually among themselves during lunch or around the office. Fontana, who compared the scenes to Levinson's 1982 film Diner, said, "That really made the show different from other shows, because we had the room to have conversations that seemingly didn't (storywise) connect anything, but they did reveal a lot about the characters." Levinson specifically asked that the body by Howard and Felton be badly decomposing and attracting flies because he felt other police dramas did not portray corpses in a realistic way.
Photography style
Levinson and Fontana sought to establish many of the stylistic elements in the episode which would define the series for its entire run. Among them were near-constant movement with hand-held Super 16 cameras to give the episode a naturalistic documentary look and an editing style involving jump cuts that was unusual for television at the time. Levinson said this camera and editing style was partially inspired by Breathless, the 1960 Jean-Luc Godard film. The scenes were shot on-location in Baltimore, as would be the case throughout the duration of the series. The use of hand-held cameras allowed the film to be shot more easily in the city, rather than on a sound-stage in Los Angeles or New York City, where most shows are typically shot. Levinson said being on location at all times allowed Baltimore "to be a character in the show".