One thing Homicide does extremely well is maintaining tension over very long stretches of a scene. I was thinking about it having just watched Have a Conscience and rewatching Three Men and Adena within a few days of each other and the thing you notice is that both of them have large stretches of time that take place in one room. In Three Men and Adena it's the Box, in Have a Conscience it's Mikey's boat. Both of them are very tight, claustrophobic settings, where the walls begin to close in on you. While Three Men and Adena condenses twelve hours into roughly 45 minutes, Have a Conscience is essentially in real time (give or take) but spends about 20 minutes entirely on the boat. Even though you're in this one setting, the plot in each of them is so well handled that it would feel wrong to leave that setting. With Three Men and Adena you know that there is a time limit for what they can do. They have to get a confession out of the Arabber in 12 hours or else he will walk free. Over the course of that time, Tim begins to crack. You feel his stress begin to rise, feel his desperation as Adena's killer slips further and further from his grasp. With Have a Conscience, there is no time limit but the clock is ticking. Meldrick knows that if he leaves this space, he will lose his partner. The blood of his partner, his friend, will be on his hands. He knows he has to keep talking because that's the only way he can stop it. He has to keep a level head no matter what, because Mikey needs him to. The stakes for Meldrick have never been higher. And with both of them, I'll be damned if that don't make for good TV.
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