‘Homicide’: Kyle Secor on Working With Andre Braugher, ‘L&O’ Crossovers, and More

Even before Peacock announced that Homicide: Life on the Street would make its streaming debut on August 19, Kyle Secor had been pondering the seven seasons he spent on the gritty, critically acclaimed NBC drama.

The deaths of costars Richard Belzer and Andre Braugher in 2023 rekindled his memories of playing Baltimore police detective Tim Bayliss, who began as a naive rookie and grew into a hardened veteran over the course of 122 episodes, from 1993 to 1999, and a final TV movie in 2000.

“It was an amazing experience for almost the entire seven years,” Secor tells TV Insider. “What stands out mostly is the freedom we were given as actors to lead the action rather than have to correspond to a camera setting, the way that you collaborated with the writers creating the character, and just working with all the different personalities and the amazing talents that were there on a daily basis, from Andre down to the day players who were just Baltimore locals.”

Secor, who went on to appear in Veronica Mars and play the first gentleman to Geena Davis’ president in Commander in Chief, has been publishing his reminiscences on Substack, and along with another former castmate, Reed Diamond, plans a “rewatch podcast” to take a deep dive into the show that TV Guide Magazine called “the best police series ever produced by American television” in a 1996 cover story.

Based on David Simon’s nonfiction tome Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, the series was never a Nielsen ratings hit, spending most of its life buried in the Friday 10/9c timeslot, although it won a few Emmys and the prestigious Peabody Award. Detectives arrested suspects and closed their share of cases — both dark and quirky ones — but Secor recalls that executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana didn’t consider the ensemble show a procedural, and he agrees.

“Our show was about a bunch of people talking about non-homicide things and then there’s a murder they’ve got to work on,” the actor says. “That of course brought out more about their character.”

Andre Braugher, Kyle Secor and the Season 5 cast (NBC Studios/Peacock)

Levinson, the Oscar-winning director of Rain Man, helmed the pilot, an auspicious start Secor remembers fondly. “Everyone was pretty excited to work with him,” he says. “He was able to look at what was going on in a scene, and oftentimes he threw out the dialogue and said, ‘Let’s just improvise this and see what happens.’ He would let the camera go after we had run out of dialogue to see what we would do. He was very intuitive.”

An unforgettable episode from the first season, “Three Men and Adena,” for which Fontana received a writing Emmy, took place almost entirely in the interrogation room as Bayliss and Braugher’s commanding character, Frank Pembleton, tried to get a suspect, played by Moses Gunn, to confess to the murder of a young girl. The case would haunt Bayliss throughout his tenure.

Secor remembers long but satisfying days of rehearsal and shooting with his castmates and director Martin Campbell, who went on to helm Bond films GoldenEye and Casino Royale. “Tom reminded me that Martin never put the camera in the same place twice,” he says. “He wanted to use the camera in a way that the audience never knew where it was going to be, which was really exciting. Because there’s no action scenes, he had to create that kind of vibrancy with the camera.”

Given Homicide’s freewheeling approach to filming, Secor recalls that it was a bit discombobulating to go to New York to shoot the first crossover episode with Law & Order during Season 4, and for L&O director Ed Sherin to corral the Homicide cast when he went behind the lens in Baltimore for the second installment.

“He really battled against what we did shooting-wise,” Secor says, adding with a laugh, “I think we felt we were mavericks, and I think we’d lost a certain kind of discipline for that classic way of shooting, of waiting around for setups. That rankled him sometimes, and I remember I took it personally.” But any ruffled feathers were eventually smoothed over. “We ended up having a wonderful relationship,” Secor affirms. “He was just a great guy.”

On TV Guide Magazine’s cover in 1996 (TV Guide/Courtesy Everett Collection)

As was Andre Braugher, whose character — the driving force of the show — was partnered with Secor’s for most of the series. The late actor and dryly funny Brooklyn Nine-Nine star, who won an Emmy for his work on Homicide, wowed Secor from the start. “Working with him was just a dream,” he says. “I learned a lot and he was the best kind of acting partner to work with — both of you want to be there and want to explore together.”

Secor and Braugher developed a friendship that continued for a while after the show ended. “He would come to L.A. and we would hang out,” Secor remembers. “He came over with his family for a barbecue at my place and then we just lost track of each other.”

Until a random encounter in Los Angeles about 10 years ago. “I’m two blocks away from my house driving home and there’s Andre walking near my house,” Secor relates. “I pull over and it’s like no time had ever passed. He had been renting a house maybe two blocks away from me. We said, ‘Let’s get together,’ but we never did. That was the last time we ever saw each other. It was, of course, a huge, huge shock for everyone to hear about his passing. That kicked off a lot of memories.”

Those memories include a Homicide set that was “basically chaos, it was like the Wild West.” Still, the end product was worth the disorderliness. “Tom Fontana and I have talked about this,” Secor says. “It wasn’t like you wished that had happened, but it was because of all that that we came up with what we came up with. If that hadn’t been there, it may not have been as good as it was.”

Homicide: Life on the Street, Seasons 1-7, and Homicide: The Movie, Monday, August 19, Peacock