Homicide: New York arrives on Netflix as the first part of Law & Order creator Dick Wolf’s new true crime series for the streamer, which will release Homicide: Los Angeles later this year. Each Homicide episode presents a high-profile murder case, interviews the detectives, medical examiners, prosecutors, and other authorities who worked to solve it, and includes interviews with witnesses to the crimes as well as friends and family members of the victims. It’s “Dick Wolf’s Real-Life Law & Order,” as Tudum, Netflix’s promotional arm, likes to shout. And in the first episode, we travel to busy midtown Manhattan, where a massacre occurred just months before 9/11.
Opening Shot: The available sound is ambient city noise, and not a narrator’s sobering tone. But the disclaimer that appears at the outset of Homicide: New York owes its entire aesthetic to Law & Order. “On the island of Manhattan, there are two detective squads dedicated to homicides: Manhattan North and Manhattan South. They investigate the most brutal and difficult murders. THESE ARE THEIR STORIES.”
The Gist: In May 2001, in a fifth-floor apartment above the original Carnegie Deli in midtown Manhattan, five people were tied up and shot. With two victims dead at the scene, another in serious condition and not expected to live, and two more severely wounded, the call went out immediately. “You can’t shoot five people in New York,” says Barbara Butcher, an author and retired death investigator for the New York Medical Examiner’s office. “They’re gonna hunt your ass down. They’re gonna find you.”
In the NYPD, evidence of the body belongs to an investigator like Butcher, but the entire crime scene belongs to the cops, and we meet a few of the responding detectives, all of whom are now retired, including Irma Rivera, Scott Wagner, and Bill McNeely. Retired police lieutenant Roger Parrino was also on the scene – Parrino has a few choice words for Bernard Kerik, the police commissioner at that time – and retired detective sergeant Wally Zeins of the “Nightwatch” is also interviewed. A few of these individuals, like Butcher and McNeely, will also appear in later episodes of Homicide: New York, alongside interviews with additional NYPD personnel.
As police gathered evidence, a picture of the Carnegie Deli massacre emerged. Jennifer Stahl, the apartment’s owner, was an actor and singer who sold weed on the side, often to members of New York’s creative community. Stahl’s apartment was a gathering place, and it soon became clear that the victims were all in the wrong place at the wrong time, part of a robbery of drugs and money gone extremely bad. Homicide includes interviews with Anthony Veader, who was shot but survived, as well as friends of Stahl and family members of one of the deceased victims. And once the perpetrators are identified and apprehended – including chasing one guy all the way to Florida – their interrogation becomes a team effort. Police employ different personal styles of questioning, at long last achieve a result, and finally send the case along. It’s like Law & Order says. The people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. And in Homicide: New York, these really are their stories.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Craig Turk, Dick Wolf’s co-creator on CBS’s FBI franchise, is also the exec producer of FBI True, a Paramount+ docuseries that follows a similar format to Homicide, featuring interviews with FBI special agents about their biggest cases. And the Carnegie Deli murders, covered in episode one of Homicide: New York, were also covered on the true crime series New York Homicide. Originally part of Oxygen, that series is available to rent on Prime Video.
Our Take: The interviews with police and prosecutors are the biggest draw in Homicide: New York. At least in the first episode of the docuseries, these interviews are held individually. But the retired detectives and other authorities often reference each other in their recollections of the case, and how their different professional skill sets were applied in the most effective way possible. When the murder suspect in the Carnegie Deli case would not break under repeated questioning, veteran homicide detective Irma Rivera went into the room alone and used a more personal tack to strike a nerve, which ultimately revealed crucial cracks in his story. The interview portions are powerful, because the participants in these cases are giving us the information and their memories firsthand. Which is much more than you can say for the reenactments and other, more static portions of Homicide, which have the look and feel of a typical true crime docuseries and therefore appear rather generic.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Before we see a few scenes from the next episode of Homicide, a few of the detectives share their unique perspective on the closure a criminal conviction can offer. “It’s not like winning the World Series or something like that…You’re not elated, because someone had to die for this to happen…You have no control what’s gonna happen, so you learn to live a day at a time…”
Sleeper Star: “He does a very good job of denying it, but keeps on talking,” retired NYPD lieutenant Roger Parrino says of their murder suspect. ”And detectives always joke about the levels of denial. Like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I wasn’t there. Well, I know what you’re talking about, but I wasn’t there.’ To ‘I know what you’re talking about and I was there, but I didn’t do it,’ to eventually, ‘I was there, and I did it.’”
Most Pilot-y Line: Hours after the Carnegie Deli murders, Jennifer Stahl’s friend Barbara Coleman received a visit that felt right out of a police procedural. She references a Steven Bochco-David Milch production and not one of Dick Wolf’s, but still. “Homicide detectives walked into my house. They looked like they were off a set of NYPD Blue…”
Our Call: STREAM IT, as Homicide: New York really does feel like a true crime addendum to scripted series like Law & Order. Here, the character comes out in the individual personalities and professional insight of the real-life detectives and other police personnel interviewed, and that perspective buoys the more basic true crime portions of Homicide.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.