Homicide Adjacent: Oh, The Traumedy Of It All!

Plus Danny's visit to HLOR, and what's the future hold?

Cast nearly enjoying themselves

This is a Paid Subscriber article. I’d like to say, “Every Thursday is Paid Subscriber Thursday,” but if you’ve been around as long as some of you have, sometimes these come in bunches and sometimes a it’s a little more sporadic.

Traumedy: n. 1.) The art of making one’s trauma into comedic material. 2.) A reminder to take a quiet moment and consider the overwhelming nature of our times.

I’ve been thinking about the decades-long emotional toll that I experienced from Homicide. Not only me but many in the cast and crew.

Prior to writing on Substack or the podcast, when I talked about it in public, it was usually in guarded terms. In private, those stories were more of “That crazy shit that happened back then,” without much introspection. Often, they were like industry story-toppers aired out at coffee shops. “Oh, I can beat that! One time, Yaphet….”

Like party tricks or, sometimes, cautionary tales for younger actors, or, “Ya gotta remember this was all before #MeToo, before BLM, before we knew better - even before intimacy coordinators!”

My personal favorite? “It was the Wild West,” a curse, shorthand explainer of the entire, glorious catastrophe.

I’ve blithely called it Trauma, or PTSD, or Toxicity. Yet this article came across my inbox and got me thinking about those kinds of undiagnosed pronouncements.