Men in the Box: ‘Three Men And Adena’

It begins with TV. MTV to be precise, the video for “Surround” by the British shoegaze band Bleach, and it’s on the set in the breakroom where Detective Tim Bayliss is staring blankly at the screen — it’s clear the specifics of the program are not important, what matters is it’s on and it’s something to look at. But Bayliss can only veg out for so long. He has a job to do, a case to solve, a man to break. A TV episode of his own.

***

“Three Men And Adena,” the sixth episode of Homicide: Life On The Street, is widely acclaimed as the best episode of an excellent show and in the conversation of the best TV episodes ever made. The episode is the culmination of an investigation into the rape and murder of a teenage girl that has been the unifying thread of the show to this point, an investigation led by Bayliss and partner Frank Pembleton that has run into wall after wall. And because this is episodic TV from 1993, at the episode’s start that backstory is casually yet clearly laid out along with the stakes of the drama: Bayliss and Pembleton have 12 hours to interrogate the best suspect they have, an itinerant produce vendor named Risley Tucker. But because they’ve interviewed him several times before, there is a hard catch: if they are unable to get a confession then Tucker goes free. The bulk of the episode — but not all — is devoted to these three men in the interrogation room, a concrete block cell with a table at one end and a one-way mirror at the other, a pressure cooker known to the detectives as the Box.

Homicide: Life On The Street is based on David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, in which the then-Baltimore Sun reporter embedded with the city’s detectives for a year. The fictional killing of Adena Watson is directly inspired by the investigation of the murder of Latonya Kim Wallace, which Simon tracks throughout the book, and at one point he details a lengthy interrogation between detectives and their main suspect. Writer Tom Fontana had all of this to build on, as well as the police procedural techniques and tropes that have existed seemingly forever — the good cop/bad cop routine, the cop losing his shit on a suspect, the turn on a slipped detail to crack open an admission. What Fontana constructs here does not transcend these things, it digs into them. Without veering into flowery soliloquy on one end or clipped Mametian rhythm on the other, Fontana writes dialogue that fills out those forms. Bayliss’ intense frustration, Pembleton’s smooth insinuations, Tucker’s beaten-down wariness all harmonize in the reality of their surroundings. Their words strain the structures that contain them, turning expectation against itself as it becomes clear the standard clichés are not going to play out as usual.

But Fontana also knows that he needs to write for his instruments, the people portraying the characters who will be delivering this dialogue. As Bayliss, Kyle Secor is callow and jagged — Bayliss is new to the homicide unit and untested as murder police, and the drive to prove himself as such is nearly as strong as the drive to find justice for this dead girl. It’s easy to read some of this onto Secor himself, a lead character in a cast full of heavy hitters like Ned Beatty and Yaphet Kotto. Andre Braugher had already gotten attention for Glory but his performance as Pembleton made him the breakout star of the show — arrogant, quick-witted, both incisive and immediately reactive to his instincts. The two are partnered at the start of the show and of course clash, and even more of course wind up finding a way to work with each other. In “Three Men And Adena,” their styles are distinct and occasionally clashing, but sometimes purposefully so, to set up discordance that resolves into the two sharing a rhythm and a tone that is totally in sync and relentless, blaring in stereo at the man they must turn from suspect to criminal.

And that man is played by longtime stage and screen actor Moses Gunn, in his final role. While Tucker was discussed as a suspect in previous episodes, Gunn was only on the show this one time. Bayliss is convinced Tucker is guilty, Pembleton is not, and Gunn plays this uncertainty from the start, with no way for the audience to get a handle on him — no past glimpses, no clues other than what Bayliss and Pembleton lay down, and while they have a lot they clearly don’t have something solid enough to charge Tucker with. He could be a depraved killer, he could be an old man the cops are brutally interrogating. If Bayliss and Pembleton are familiar types — eager rookie, cocky hotshot — fleshed out, Tucker is a Rorschach blot with only one unambiguous aspect: he never wavers in insisting that he did not kill Adena Watson. But the genius of Gunn’s performance is that while he is convincing in his denials (but many killer are good liars, right?) and suspicious in his gaps and lapses (but who wouldn’t be under this pressure?), he radiates a wrongness. A sense of something unsaid, something concealed. Something that can’t be bared.

***

As noted before, “Three Men And Adena” was declared an instant classic from its initial airdate and it has never lost its luster. I am going to be lazy here and just rip from Wikipedia: “David P. Kalat, writer of Homicide: Life on the Street: The Unofficial Companion, described the episode as ‘an astonishing tour de force of writing and acting that demonstrates all of Homicide’s best qualities.'” “Rocky Mountain News critic Dusty Saunders said the episode was ‘as good as dramatic television gets’, and showed how the quality of Homicide is anchored in strong writing and acting rather than action.” “Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik said the episode established The Box as ‘the main stage for Pembleton and the moral center of the Homicide universe.’ Zurawik also said, ‘Stark and minimalist, the episode was musical theater as much as television.'” And here is Braugher himself on the episode: “In essence, we were doing a play. We were doing a drama in which it was just as dangerous, in a certain way, as if we were on stage and it was happening right there before our very eyes.” What these raves note is the acting and writing and the combination of the two. This, as Zurawik and Braugher state outright, is theater. And the early days of television were full of live theater, immediacy filmed for broadcast. But “Three Men And Adena” is not that.

Martin Campbell directed “Three Men And Adena,” the only time he worked on the show. Campbell has also directed Goldeneye and Casino Royale and The Mask Of Zorro and my beloved The Foreigner (as well as the extremely well-regarded Edge Of Darkness series for British television), and at a certain point you have to wonder how many stone cold classics a person needs on their resume before they are recognized. The preceding films are action-heavy and full of great setpieces, but while they are memorable and frequently outsized they are not spectacular in the way of Tom Cruise’s stunts in the latter Mission: Impossible movies and they are certainly not weightless empty destruction (I have never seen Campbell’s Green Lantern, by all accounts a disaster and one that Campbell himself stated he shouldn’t have worked on). Campbell does not have a signature style visually, instead his signature is written in invisible ink: a clarity of distance and motion, of action and reaction, that is designed to build and release tension in the service of the scene and the larger drama. Campbell’s work at its best makes you lean forward in your seat without realizing it, directing your focus to those actors delivering and performing that writing more than his own filming of it.

And in “Three Men And Adena,” Campbell deploys this skill in the context of television. Of the Box. Barry Levinson directed the first episode of Homicide and set the tone for the show’s visual style, which uses handheld cameras that move and zoom to catch action and quips on the fly and depicts the methodical business of investigating murder and its downtime with restlessness that skirts irreverence. The show’s signature move is the jump cut, either within a scene (two sentences of dialogue cut three times) or around a scene (the same action seen three times from three different angles). It calls attention to itself almost playfully, goosing banal bullshitting and deadly consequences alike. But Campbell dials that back. The editing is more deliberately paced, the jump cuts mostly absent, especially in the early going. What Campbell focuses on instead is position, where in the Box to film from to show the men in the Box — as far as I can tell, there is no cheating in terms of grabbing shots from somewhere outside of what is possible in the set — and what that position means. 

This reaches its apex in the astonishing sequence of Pembleton cozying up to Tucker, insinuating and cozening, urging a confession, all of this filmed with the two men in the frame at a slightly low angle to show Pembleton as the literal Devil on Tucker’s shoulder. Boundaries are constantly implied and then violated, Bayliss at one point jams Tucker’s face next to a steam pipe and this is filmed with the jaggedness of a man hurtling over the edge, but Campbell places these intrusions against the pedal point of one man on one side of a table and two men on the other side, a dynamic returned to over and over again but never quite from the same angle. The destabilizing jump cut jars the viewer with its stuttered intrusion on how we watch, Campbell keeps the shift in perspective and slows the tempo, making the technique rhythm instead of accent. While it’s less televisual or cinematic, this could not be done on stage and it’s something Campbell executes without ever calling attention to it.

***

Homicide is a show about detectives and its style is their style. They have the power and the camera follows this power, whether it is breaking down a perp or butting up against higher powers (the loathed brass). Bayliss and Pembleton bring their power to bear on Tucker over and over, on every aspect of his being and his shaky alibi for when Adena Watson was killed, and they crack him again and again — he knew Adena but he doesn’t know how she died; Adena’s mother did not like him but he doesn’t know why; Adena watched TV at Tucker’s house before she died but he doesn’t know what they watched; Adena’s skirt showed soot from the barn where Tucker kept his produce cart but he doesn’t know how it got there; Tucker used to get blackout drunk but he doesn’t know if he got drunk recently; Tucker was charged with statutory rape of a 14-year-old in the past but he doesn’t know how to prove his innocence other than saying the charges didn’t stick — and they unveil photos of Adena’s raped and mutilated body (the jump cuts finally smashing in hard as the detectives’ power reaches its height) and finally Tucker says he is no longer sure he didn’t kill Adena. All of those things he doesn’t know have been set up as mirrors to reflect that uncertainty back at himself. He is at the end of his rope, or maybe the end of a line Bayliss and Pembleton have been playing for hours at this point. And, with their deadline fast approaching, they give Tucker some slack.

And the power shifts. Campbell charts what Fontana writes and what Secor and Braugher and especially Gunn play out. Because these men have spent nearly 12 hours together (and that clock is still ticking) and every ploy Bayliss and Pembleton use on Tucker is an opportunity for Tucker to see who they are. Tucker sees Bayliss’ fury and tells him that he has a dark side that he denies as he pursues the darkness in others, and that his dark side is the only thing that keeps him from being a fraud. Bayliss is opposite Tucker, where he has physically been most of the time, but now he is truly on the other side of the table and Campbell’s camera catches his recognition. Tucker sees Pembleton’s superiority and calls him not an Uncle Tom but a person who denies his Blackness, and Campbell cuts to Pembleton looking down at him with amused disdain. And then Tucker describes how he once took a trip to New York City — Pembleton’s hometown — with his girlfriend and was denied service at a restaurant that was happy to serve Black people with wealth who play the game, people like Pembleton, and how he spit in the face of the men who kept him down to elevate themselves. “You hate being who you really are,” Tucker says, and Campbell cuts back to Pembleton in the exact same shot as before, nothing changed in posture or position except for the confident light that has gone out of Pembleton’s eyes, replaced by a dim baleful glow.

But Tucker is not done. He has flayed the men trying to destroy him, and now scourges himself. He loved Adena, was enamored with her from when she was a baby. Watched her grow, was her friend. Gave her fruit from his cart, whatever she wanted. Ripe. Gave her work with him, time spent with him. His thoughts of her, constantly. He is a man in love with a child, wanting this child to return that love, and here is what Tucker — and Gunn playing him — has been hiding all this time, a yearning that is not any less powerful for being so appalling. Gunn’s desire is a black hole and there are no jump cuts within and no cuts to the men who are hearing this and their reactions, which could not be more agonized than Tucker admitting this to himself  Campbell does not even try to move his camera away, has spent the entire episode establishing the space of the Box and how there is no room now for he and these men and us to move away now. “You hate being who you really are,” Tucker told Pembleton; “You got your dark side and it terrifies you and it frightens you,” he told Bayliss. Each man has been confessing the whole time and Tucker’s confession is the most damning of all. But as Tucker acknowledges this abyss in himself, he says for the last time: I did not kill Adena Watson. And time is up. The interrogation is over.

***

Despite its focus, “Three Men And Adena” does not take place entirely in the interrogation room. It is true that a typical Homicide episode tracks multiple plots if not multiple cases among the detectives and this episode only covers this investigation and is largely confined to the Box. But there are brief glimpses of the rest of the squad going about their business, including a wonderful goof of a detective asking his partner for five ones for a fiver as he realizes his bathroom stall is out of toilet paper. The job goes on, and if the other detectives are not sticking their noses in this case they’re not acting with the performative indifference of ballplayers watching a no-hitter (one cheerfully passes along some sandwiches). This is something that Pembleton and Bayliss will accomplish or not, and in the meantime members of the squad occasionally step into the observation room behind that one-way glass to see what’s going on. To stand in front of a screen and watch what’s happening.

When the time for the interview expires, Tucker walks out to the break room and waits for a cab. The other detectives can see the failure and don’t acknowledge it. Their shift is over, the time allotted for this period of activity done. Time to go to the bar. Episodic TV is a routine that is in many ways like a workday — a set length, a few break periods, a difference in particulars but a similarity in structure, a resolution of little if any change in preparation for the next time, repeat until cancellation. Homicide would follow cases and storylines beyond the confines of an episode but as “Three Men And Adena” closes out the first multi-episode case it reifies the TV compact, that the viewer will always move on. This does not preclude building on the past, though — perhaps the most cliche aspect of “Three Men And Adena” is how Pembleton invites Bayliss to the bar after work, a sign of respect and acceptance for the new guy even as (maybe because) he failed. Even though Bayliss declines, the offer is not without value and he will be part of the squad as an equal going forward. But as he places a photo of Adena Watson on his desk, it is clear that she will be part of his life going forward too.

Does Bayliss remember that music video he was watching, 12 hours ago, before the interrogation? Probably not. TV is so often something you watch because it’s on or because you’re bored. Stories that play out on a screen, or in a box if you have a CRT, distractions from the real world. Something like “Three Men And Adena” is an outlier and perhaps it should be. Could Bayliss and Pembleton and Tucker live with the insights they discover in the Box thrown at their souls every minute of every day? Could we?

Out in the break room, waiting on that cab, an exhausted Tucker watches the same TV Bayliss did. It’s showing a cooking program, whisks in bowls and inscrutable ingredients. It seems innocuous enough, but Tucker asks a passing worker: can he change the channel? And watching Tucker watch this show, I flashed on something: Maybe this is bringing back memories. Maybe this is the show that was on the TV when Adena Watson came to his house, sat in his den, watched television with a man who wanted her more than anything in the world. Maybe this is the key that unlocks everything, if anyone is here to see it. But no one else is there, just us viewers at home, who have been shown television at its highest level of craft yet been denied its implied promise of resolution just as completely as Bayliss and Pembleton have been. 

And anyway, maybe what we are watching is just a person who wants to watch something else, something to stand apart from and provide escape from a world without structure and without answers. Tucker changes the channel. He stares at the screen, alone in the break room. Gazing at a story that he is not a part of, watching the men in the box.