No greater honor will ever be bestowed upon an officer, than when they are entrusted with an investigation into the death of a human being.
City Homicide is a Australian Murder Mystery Police Procedural, which ran on Seven Network for 84 episodes between August 2007 and March 2011. The series focused on a Melbourne-based Homicide Squad, led by Detective Senior Sergeant Stanley Wolfe (Shane Bourne from Thank God You're Here).
City Homcide contains examples of:
- Asshole Victim: "Cut and Dried" has a convicted child molester murdered in prison, and few of the detectives are motivated to investigate too thoroughly. It's then subverted when it turns out he was genuinely repentant, was intending to give evidence against the pedophile ring he belonged to, and was in fact silenced by two of the prison guards.
- Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults: An amusing variant in the pilot "In the Hands of Giants": Detective Jen Mapplethorpe is reassigned to Homicide under a different superior, DSS Sparkes, who quickly reveals how much he respects her by assigning her to filing and getting him coffee. She walks into the bathroom complaining aloud about Sparkes, only to be overheard by his superior, Superintendant Waverley, in the bathroom stall. Waverley privately agrees with her, resulting in Jen returning to Stanley's squad.
- Bilingual Backfire: In the pilot Matt pulls this on an Italian hotel manager reminding him that he's in the middle of a murder investigation. He later reveals that his mother was Italian.
- Da Chief: Detective Superintendant Waverley, and arguably Detective Senior Sergeants Stanley Wolf and Terry Jarvis. Matt Ryan takes on this role after being promoted to Sergeant.
- Evil Parents Want Good Kids: In "Lie Down with Dogs", a bank robber stayed out of his illegitimate son Brett's life to avoid "tainting" him. Then he disappeared and Brett got involved in his father's gang, quickly proving himself to be a violent sociopath anyway.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: In the pilot, Simon, Duncan and Matt arrest Sean Macready, a serial arsonist and child-killer on his way out of his latest target. To force him to tell them where he locked the children, Duncan and Matt physically pull him back into the burning house while they search. Macready is killed when he attempts to throw himself and one of the children into the fire, and the cops escape any punishment.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Terry Jarvis is a condescending prick who is happy to undermine everyone around him if it benefits him. Buried deep beneath that, however, is an honest cop trying to close cases.
- Jurisdiction Friction: Wolfe's murder squad frequently comes into conflict with Jarvis' drugs squad and the clashes are made all the more complicated because Wolfe is too honest to play politics like Jarvis does.
- Rank Up:
- Matt passes the sergeant's exam and get duly promoted. This makes things tense for him and the rest of the murder squad, because he now has supervisory authority over his friends. He considers a move to a different squad but decides to stay and work through the awkwardness.
- Bernice Waverly starts the series as the murder squad superintendent before taking a temporary demotion to senior sergeant and then getting promoted up to Commander of Crime.
- Vomiting Cop:
- In the pilot, Duncan throws up after he pokes a rotting ceiling with a broom and the partially decomposed head of a woman falls out.
- In the first season finale, Matt throws up upon learning the corpse they dug up was his mother, who disappeared when he was a teenager.
- You, Get Me Coffee: Detective Senior Sergeant Sparkes does this to Jen in the first episode, revealing just how much he respects her abilities as a homicide detective. It's quite satisfying when he collapses from a heart attack by the end of the episode and she is reassigned to Stanley's team.
