I hadn't really thought about that before, but yeah, in 2 they extended to the docks and general port area, and like you say in 4, they had the school. OK, in 3 the political offices maybe weren't as exciting but at least it was an upmarket change of scenery. But in 5, the journalists, their clothes, their bosses, and the office itself were kinda interchangeable with the Homicide unit. It could even have been filmed in the same room! You even have Gus drinking in a cop bar by the end of it (ironically played by one of the original actors from Homicide!).
I think because it was only a 10 episode series, there wasn't time to flesh out the characters enough, and i've read elsewhere that that, combined maybe with David Simon's bias from his own experience as a journalist, caused the Baltimore Sun staff, especially Templeton and the bosses, to come across as caricatures .
It's a shame because Gus and the guy who does the story on Bubs were kinda cool and I'd like to have seen a bit more depth to them. But the fact that I can't tell you his name speaks volumes. The only other one I could name was Alma.
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Mister Babadook (2623)
4 months ago
Yeah the setting was just way too similar to the Homicide Unit, and when you would go from scenes at Homicide over to the newspaper it wasn't giving you any variety in characters or setting, just another group of suits in cubicles. It just made me groan whenever it would go to the newspaper cause its just basically Homicide with characters we've never seen before and who are less interesting than the other group from Homicide.
The docks was a vastly different setting with vastly different people, the school was a vastly different setting with vastly different characters, and yeah the political stuff was more people in suits but it was different enough there wasn't cubicles but its also my least favorite theme after the newspaper they focused on.
There needs to be a good pace of going to different settings to keep it fresh so you don't get overloaded on one, from Homicide, to the streets, to whatever the new theme of the season is, but going from Homicide to the newsroom just felt like the same thing and it got boring.
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daveyh (587)
4 months ago
and it doesn't help that in S5, the Homicide offices has so much more screen-time than in the other series - between McNulty being back there and then the whole fake-serial-killer story, Kima working murders on her own, and Bunk working back on old cases relating to Marlo, so really it needed a change of scenery for other scenes more than any other series, and instead we got more of the same
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