"Night of the Dead Living" is the ninth episode and first season finale of the American police drama television series Homicide: Life on the Street.
The broadcast schedule change led to some consistency and time-line errors, which Homicide producers addressed by adding the words "One hot night, last September..." to the beginning of the episode.
Felton (Daniel Baldwin) and Lewis (Clark Johnson) try to find out who secretly lights a candle in the squad room every night; they blow it out a number of times, but it always ends up lit again without anyone noticing.
Bayliss (Kyle Secor), who acts uncooperative with Pembleton, says he has found the fingerprints of a man named James Hill, who he believes is the killer in the Adena Watson case.
[1] The programmers also preferred to end the series on the upbeat note of the final scenes in "Night of the Dead Living", which includes the detectives happily smiling and laughing on the roof of the police department building as Gee sprays them with a hose to relieve the summer heat.
Additionally, Officer Thormann is seen onscreen working and healthy, although he was blinded in the earlier episode "Son of a Gun" as a result of a gunshot wound to the head that forced him to leave the police department.
[5] While discussing the mysterious candle with Lewis in the episode, Felton said he generally solves cases with physical evidence, witnesses and confessions, not by investigating motives.
[5] N'Bushe Wright, best known to this point for playing the student activist Claudia Bishop in the NBC drama series I'll Fly Away, made a guest appearance in "Night of the Dead Living" as the cleaning woman Loretta Kenyatta.
In response, NBC announced to fans that a decision about whether Homicide would be renewed or canceled would depend on how the last four episodes of the season fared in the ratings, including "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes".
The episode received generally positive reviews from commentators, although David P. Kalat, author of Homicide: Life on the Street: The Unofficial Companion, said mainstream television audiences were "somewhat turned off by the minimalist approach".
[5] USA Today writer Matt Roush gave the episode four out of four stars, comparing it to David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and calling it "minimalist drama (with) maximum impact".
He wrote, "If Life on the Street winds up dead after tonight's episode – the victim of low Nielsen ratings – at least the nine superb actors in the squad will know they made a grand exit.
"[6] The Salt Lake Tribune writer Harold Schindler praised the episode, particularly the "excellent writing, great acting [and] super atmosphere".
[14] Rocky Mountain News writer Dusty Saunders called the series "superb" and described Night of the Dead Living as "fascinating character studies of police officers in the squad room".
[18] In a 2007 article, Star Tribune writer Neal Justin included "Night of the Dead Living" in a list of 10 excellent network television episodes dating back 40 years.
"[19] Frank Pugliese and Tom Fontana won a Writers Guild of America award for Outstanding Achievement in Television Writing for Episodic Drama for the "Night of the Dead Living" teleplay.
The "Night of the Dead Living" teleplay also defeated scripts for the shows I'll Fly Away, Life Goes On, Picket Fences, TriBeCa and Reasonable Doubts.