The second season of Homicide New York, produced by Dick Wolf and Alfred Street Industries, presents more notorious homicide cases in the Big Apple, with interviews from the NYPD detectives and officers from either the Manhattan North or Manhattan South bureaus that investigated and solved these crimes. Four of the five second season episodes are about individual cases, while the fifth episode examines the reaction to and aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Opening Shot: “DECEMBER 12, 2016.” A camera zooms in on a bar on New York’s Upper East Side.
The Gist: The first episode of Homicide New York examines the 2016 death of Joey Comunale, who was killed by two men in a luxury high-rise apartment by two men he met at an afterparty there. Interviews with Joey’s parents, Pat and Lisa, as well as groups of his friends, punctuate how Joey was a good friend and a family-oriented man, and his absence 16 hours after last being seen at the late-night party was unusual.
Detectives that were involved in the case detail how they went through hours of security video at Sutton Place, the luxury building where Joey was last seen, and found inconsistencies with how two other men in the apartment, Jimmy Rackover and Larry Dilione, reported the sequence of events.
Rackover, supposed son of “jeweler to the stars” Jeffrey Rackover, ended up having a criminal past before the jeweler took him under his wing and had him change his last name. A third man, Max Gemma, was also considered a person of interest but ended up not being implicated. Dillone eventually was the one who came clean and told police where he and Rackover buried Joey, behind a garden center in New Jersey.
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Homicide New York has a cousin series in Homicide: Los Angeles. It does feel like a docuseries version of Law & Order at times.
Our Take: When you look up the cases that are in each of the first four episodes of Homicide New York‘s second season, you see that just about all of them have been already told, whether it was in print or on other true-crime series. So what makes the perspective on Homicide different? It’s the concentration on the detectives that solved the case, and how they were able to crack it.
Yes, the same detectives likely talked to other shows. But what director Adam Kassen was looking to do in the first episode is go into details about the detective’s process and how they took the Comunale’s concerns about Joey’s whereabouts seriously.
In the first episode, we hear all about how dedicated the detectives were, going from floor to floor in the high-rise, looking for Joey, then poring over hours of CCTV footage. We hear about the reactions the detectives had when Rackover walks into the lobby of the building, where the cops are looking at the security footage, and being cocky right to their faces. We hear about how they narrowed things down to Rackover, Dilione and Gemma.
In other words, this isn’t a series about how the police were dismissive, or how they jumped to conclusions about the victim, or how there was inaction while the trail grew cold. We suspect that the show’s producers cherry pick cases where the police’s moves were decisive and quickly executed and arrests happened in a reasonable amount of time.
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Performance Worth Watching: Detective Martin Chen talked about being afraid of heights as he went to the roof of Sutton Place to start looking for Joey
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Pat Comunale shows the tattoo of his son Joey that he put on his arm. Then we see coming attractions of the second episode.
Sleeper Star: Pat Comunale talked about his gut instinct that Joey didn’t make it out of the Sutton Place building alive. He says it very matter-of-factly before he starts tearing up from the memory of it.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the fact that Homicide New York is going to be very pro-police, it’s still informative because of the details the detectives that are interviewed go into as they detail how they brought the cases featured in the second season to their conclusions.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.