Andre Braugher has died, at 61, after what is described only as a brief illness. He will be remembered as one of the greatest television performers of my lifetime (and he was memorable on the big screen, too). His great, career-making role was as Baltimore homicide detective Frank Pembleton in the classic, mid 1990s show Homicide: Life on the Street — one of the all-time great television characters, whom you could never take your eyes off:
Homicide is a criminally underrated show today, apparently in large part because the show used so much music that getting the rights to it all has proved prohibitive to re-airing it on streaming services. I have the full series on DVD, and if you can scour the web to gather it all, it will reward you. The show’s writing, production, and ensemble cast are all fantastic, but it is Braugher who consistently steals the show as the high-strung, chain-smoking, lapsed-Catholic maestro of the confession box who is wound too tight for his own good but needs to be in order to deal with the carnival of lapsed humanity that makes up a Baltimore homicide detective’s beat. Braugher plowed new fields not only in humanizing that character’s vulnerabilities but also in his scenes with Yaphet Kotto, who played his commanding officer. Theirs was one of the first fully developed dramatic workplace relationships between two very different black men. In the 1990s, that was novel.
Braugher brought his excellent and varied talents to other roles. He was touching as the overeducated, bespectacled New Englander trying to fit in with an all-black company of Civil War soldiers composed mainly of illiterate slaves, in Glory. He was a fine comedic foil as a stuffy, pedantic gay police detective in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He was even good in the short-lived Men of a Certain Age, in which he, Ray Romano, and Scott Bakula played middle-aged friends (yes, I watched it).