Andre Braugher: May His Memory Be a Blessing

All right, 2023 and I are officially fighting now. First it had the audacity to take away Tina Turner. Now I find out the sublime actor Andre Braugher of Homicide: Life on the Street and Brooklyn Nine Nine has passed away at the too-young age of 61. He had lung cancer.

March 14, 1998: Therese and I went to Scotsdale Mall [in South Bend, Indiana]...went to the Hacienda restaurant, ate fried ice cream, then went to the movie theater, where we saw The Man in the Iron Mask. Set in the 1660s and based on Alexandre Dumas’s 1850 novel, this is a good, old-fashioned story. Great ending, beautifully filmed, good score. My one complaint was that I had to see Gerard Depardieu’s bare ass. 

One of the movie trailers I saw was for a movie with Nicholas Cage and Andre Braugher. It looked like an American version of Faraway, So Close. [Wikipedia calls City of Angels a “loose remake” of Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire, of which Faraway, So Close is the sequel.]

From this point on, beware of spoilers for Homicide: Life on the Street.

April 26, 1998: I was looking at the listings from the Sunday paper and I saw this on the Friday listing for NBC: 

"Homicide: 'Fallen Heroes:' A suspect in a judge's death sprays the squad-room with gunfire (part 1 of 2)"

I heard that Andre Braugher is leaving the show, and I wonder if [Frank] Pembleton is going to be killed of. I seriously hope not. What would Bayliss be without Pembleton? Just a tall, sad queer guy.

May 1, 1998: "The Day We Prayed Would Never Come." I'll get right to the point. Ballard and Gherety got shot; they're off the show. Gang war with Georgia Rae Mahoney. Next week, part two: [Tim] Bayliss gets shot! That's not a guess; there were previews. Bayliss will get shot next week. He'll probably die too; they said something about "the final farewell." I hate season finales, I swear to God. When Kyle Secor gets written off Homicide, I'll cry as if someone I know died. No matter what happens next week, I'll cry. I'll especially cry if I have to wait until August to find out if he's dead.

I tell you, Homicide can hardly go on without the Pembleton-Bayliss partnership.

May 2, 1998: I went to my [parents'] house for awhile. I ate dinner and read next week's TV Guide. I've surmised this: next Friday [on the Homicide season finale], Kellerman will be fired, Pembleton will resign (thus removing Andre Braugher from the show, as I mentioned on the 26th) and Bayliss, though shot, will survive. It'll probably be like when Pembleton had a stroke--after three or four episodes, he'll be like new again. Now I just hope Ballard won't have to quit. She could be Bayliss's partner. They would have good conversations.

May 8, 1998: The event I've been waiting a week for: The 100th episode/season 6 finale of Homicide. As predicted, in the search for Georgia Rae Mahoney (high-ranking gang member), a Georgia Rae associate takes a shot at Frank, but Tim takes the bullet for him. G wants Frank to find someone to blame, so he chooses Kellerman (who shot Georgia Rae's brother/fellow gang member Luther Mahoney, but Lewis and other detective witnessed this and have said nothing). Kellerman gets fired but takes all the blame. 

Kellerman asks Pembleton, "If it were Bayliss, wouldn't you do that same?" Which leads Pembleton to wonder if he did the right thing by Kellerman, and then to resign. 

Meanwhile, Bayliss will live, and Ballard will be all right too. The last shot of the episode tracked from Tim's mom to the faces of all the detectives to Mary Pembleton*, who put her arms around Frank, who leaned forward and picked up Tim's hand [while Tim Bayliss was unconscious in the hospital]. The final frame of Pembleton's hand on Bayliss's looked like the ads from Jungle Fever. 

Friday, November 27, 1998, South Bend: ...I watched the PBS show Anatomy of a Homicide, about the filming of an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street with Vincent D’Onofrio as the guest star. D’Onofrio plays a man who’s been pushed off a subway platform and suffered the kind of horrible compression injury that means he’ll die as soon as paramedics try to move him. Andre Braugher, as Detective Frank Pembleton, stays with the dying man while his colleagues attempt (unsuccessfully) to find the man’s girlfriend so she can say goodbye while he’s still conscious. I hadn’t seen the episode, which aired in December 1997, but it looked intense.

*Mary Pembleton was played by Amy Brabson, who married Andre Braugher in real life. They have three sons.