‘Homicide’ Deserves Its Latest Reprieve : Television: The complex and distinctive NBC series gets a four-episode lease on life after flopping last season in the rating, but the odds are stacked against it.

“Homicide: Life on the Street” returns at 10 tonight with a new lease on law-breakers, mingling gun power and Robin Williams’ power at the end of NBC’s biggest, most affluent evening in prime time.

Following last season’s flop in the ratings, this four-episode reprieve (on Channels 4, 36 and 39) is surely the final chance for “Homicide.” Its appeals are used up, the last meal is warming. If the ratings aren’t good this time, there won’t be another phone call from the governor a few seconds before the executioner throws the switch.

NBC’s monthlong gift to “Homicide” executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana is the time slot behind a self-mocking comic and two effete shrinks and their cranky dad. What has been NBC’s keystone combo of “Seinfeld” to “Fraser” to “L.A. Law” will now be “Seinfeld” to “Fraser” to “Homicide: Life on the Street,” with the weakest of the previous trio getting temporarily benched.

If ever a series deserved another shot, it’s “Homicide,” whose view of urban America’s carousel of miseries is complex and distinctive, one apart from ABC’s own superior cop series “NYPD Blue.” You want “Homicide” to streak and succeed on NBC’s terms at 10 p.m., but logic tells you that it won’t.

The odds are mightily against a crime drama that rejects the quickie cures that we ache for in these times when we’re as apt to watch TV holding a can of mace as a can of Bud Light, when neighborhoods are increasingly war zones that transform houses and businesses into armed sentry posts.

Day after day, the news is filled with crime stories that have you muttering, “That shouldn’t have happened.” Yet irrational as they are, they do happen. Mimicking real life on the streets, little in tonight’s script by David Simon and David Mills turns out as you’d want it to. An innocent tourist who shouldn’t get slain does get slain, a youth who shouldn’t be a perpetrator is a perpetrator, and the Baltimore cops who shouldn’t be indifferent are indifferent.

You never see the violence. But so intimate and effective is the direction of Stephen Gyllenhaal (“A Dangerous Woman”) that you feel it touching you as it touches the characters on the screen.

Performer Williams shares a checkered history with producer Levinson (“Good Morning, Vietnam” and “Toys”); whether Mrs. Doubtfire will torch “PrimeTime Live” on ABC and “Second Chances” on CBS as he did his foam breasts in the movie remains to be seen. But he affirms in this raw, scintillating episode what a fine dramatic actor he is.

Williams plays a man named Ellison who is visiting Baltimore with his wife and two kids when they’re spotted by some street thugs. The next thing you know, the wife is dead and Ellison, looking as dazed as someone who gets clobbered with a Louisville Slugger and doesn’t know why, is wearing her blood on his shirt and jacket.

*

Ellison wants to grieve; the police want to investigate. He objects when his son is questioned too aggressively. He objects when he finds his wife stretched out on a slab in the morgue minus her wedding band, dehumanized by her nudity. He objects when one of the cops working his case (Daniel Baldwin) seems callous and cynical. The captain (Yaphet Kotto) politely tells Ellison, “He’s not going to feel what you feel; none of us are.”

And no wonder, for unlike Ellison, they spend their hours nose to nose with the bodies “piling up around here,” their routine dictated by a board listing homicides the way the hucksters in “Glengarry Glen Ross” are ruled by the sales board in their real estate office.

More than anything, Ellison is overcome by terrible, gnawing guilt, the feeling that he could have, should have, done something to save his wife. He pleads with one of the cops to let him hold his gun, and when he does handle it, he feels “the power” enter his fingers the way it did his wife’s murderer, a kid with options in his life, but who nevertheless assured his own oblivion as soon as he pulled the trigger.

The naked city and its 8 million cycles of dysfunction rage in “Homicide.” As does the race thing, with the captain (who is black) tonight wondering aloud whether the murdered young mother would have drawn as much attention had she been black instead of white (“How do you feel, Mr. Ellison?” shouts an idiot TV reporter fronting the media pack).

“Homicide” and ABC’s hit “NYPD Blue” are cousins, if not close siblings. Their first-rate casts, hand-held cameras, quality writing and general intelligence are common denominators. And on both shows, the boss in the squad room is black.

*

There’s infinitely more to “NYPD Blue” than the female nudity and blue utterances that initially rammed a white-hot poker up the blue noses of the show’s most conservative critics. Its language remains coarse by network standards, but not gratuitously so. More significantly, its rule-bending Kelly (David Caruso) and Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) are an intriguing pair of detectives whose volatile personal lives compete for our attention each episode with a revolving door of crimes and other conflicts ranging from Mob hits to territorial battles within the department. It definitely holds your interest.

“Homicide,” on the other hand, has an alternate agenda, essentially following a one-crime-per-episode formula in which the police revolve around the case instead of vice versa. The result is more attention to the crime and the investigation than to the cop.

Or in tonight’s episode, more wattage on the victim of the crime, and by extension, all of us who are watching. Says Ellison, speaking for the multitudes, “It’s not ‘Why me?’ anymore. It’s ‘ When me?’ ”

Typically, “Homicide” doesn’t attach easy answers to its questions about life and death in the 1990s. Nor will we know for a while whether its eloquent approach to storytelling will attract enough viewers to ensure its own survival beyond January.