I’ve spent the last month time traveling back to the ’90s in a marathon rewatching all seven seasons of my favorite show, “Homicide: Life On The Street,” finally streaming on Peacock.
Filmed largely in and around Fells Point, it’s a sometimes grim but achingly hopeful love letter to Baltimore. Taking it in again, all these years later, I realized I’d missed the characters like they were dear friends, none more than tragically cocky hot shot Detective Mike Kellerman, a former arson squad detective whose meteoric rise and spectacular fall are a focus in seasons 4-6. He’s also the all-time favorite of Reed Diamond, the actor who played him.
“Mike Kellerman is the greatest character I have ever had the opportunity or will ever have the opportunity to play,” said Diamond, who you might also know from “Memphis Belle,” “Judging Amy,” “The Shield” and “Law & Order: Organized Crime.” Three decades later, the show and the city it was made in are still momentous to the actor, who next week premieres “Homicide: Life on Repeat,” his own rewatch podcast with former cast member Kyle Secor, who played Detective Tim Bayliss.
I recently chatted with Diamond about all things “Homicide,” including his three-year push to get on the show, fighting typecasting and some delicious backstage dish.
‘Homicide’ was his dream project.
The Juilliard School-trained actor, who spent the early part of his career playing cute boyfriends in various projects, had “a brief existential crisis, where I didn’t believe what I was doing was meaningful.” Diamond actually considered becoming a police officer before doing a ride-along in Los Angeles and found that “all the cops I met at the station house wanted to be actors,” and then just deciding he wanted to “play a cop realistically.” When he saw the 1993 premiere of “Homicide,” starring former Juilliard classmate Andre Braugher, Diamond said, he thought, “‘I believe this was my part.’”
When he finally got to the show, his welcome was initially less than warm.
When Diamond joined the show in the fourth season, the cast was in flux, having lost a few original members. The actor, who’d been preparing to channel authenticity into the role, didn’t realize at the time that “I was brought on to be, quote unquote, ‘the hunk.’” So when this cute, floppy-haired kid, the first new detective to be introduced since the show started, came onto the scene, “there was a great deal of resistance to me. No one was happy to see me,” he said. Ever the professional actor, he just used that resistance in his craft. “I was like, ‘This is what it would be like! If you’re the new guy, no one’s gonna be nice to you. No one’s going to talk to you! Gotta earn their respect!’”
But he still had to fight the cute boyfriend image.
Diamond told me that “Homicide” showrunner Tom Fontana had initially described Mike Kellerman as “a frat boy with a badge,” a plan apparent when one of the character’s first scenes was with a sexy woman pretending to have witnessed a crime so she can seduce him. But in that episode, Diamond said, he realized that Kellerman was “still in love with his ex-wife” and that the key to his character was that “it can never work out for him. He’s got too big a heart. He’s not going to be in a great relationship.” Even when he was written into a relationship with the equally emotionally messy medical examiner Julianna Cox, he and actress Michelle Forbes told the writers the relationship “had to stay true to ‘Homicide.’ It was always going to be toxic.”
Thankfully, Fontana and the writing staff were willing to listen, and the character “went in a direction no one had planned or predicted. I was acting for the thing you didn’t expect.”
Unhappily ever after.
Kellerman has an almost Shakespearean arc of triumph and defeat (spoiler alert!). He makes a splash in the Homicide unit, escapes a corruption charge and seems to avoid the fate of becoming his dad, who works at a distillery, or his knucklehead conman brothers (played in one memorable episode by “Memphis Belle” co-stars Tate Donovan and Eric Stoltz). But he falls under the weight of his own arrogance and pride, killing nemesis drug kingpin Luther Mahoney, dragging two other cops into his mess and eventually losing his badge.
“He was too sensitive for the job,” Diamond said. “He knew he needed to get out, but he had signed on to make the world a better place for kids and old ladies. I know I wouldn’t have been a good cop, either. It would have broken me the way it broke him.”
Controlled chaos on Thames Street.
Although the “Homicide” set, in the city’s former recreation pier, now the swanky Sagamore Pendry hotel, was “creatively incredible, it was chaos,” Diamond remembered. The cast was full of “very strong personalities. Oftentimes I was the only actor on set because all the other actors had stormed off.” But that balance worked, isolated far away from the network suits. “As long as this show was made on time and under budget, no one cared,” he said. That friction, Fontana told him, “was the secret sauce,” and when Diamond returned in the seventh and final season for a two-part guest starring role, he found a newer, more congenial dynamic full of younger, hotter detectives. “They were all getting along. I was like, ‘What show is this?’ They were having a really good time, all liking each other, and that was it,” he said, laughing. “They were doomed.”
He fell in love with Charm City.
Before landing “Homicide,” the New York-raised Diamond knew the city mostly from spending time at the Inner Harbor as a kid on a business trip with his dad, and because his mother had briefly attended Towson High School when her family lived in the area. “It was just one of the stops on the train on the way to D.C.,” until he moved here near the end of the show.
“Baltimore is an essential character to the show. It’s the most unique city I’ve ever been in. It’s got such a profound culture — multiple cultures — within that town,” he said. “No other town looks like Baltimore.” And he still comes back, recently staying at the Pendry, the aforementioned fancy hotel that inhabits his former workplace. “It was hilarious to bring my family down and say, ‘That’s where my desk was!’ and now it’s a banquet room.”
