This was the announcement that "Homicide" fans had come to fear each May. The series, about a squad of Baltimore homicide detectives, seemed to always be in danger of cancellation. It was never able to beat its Friday time slot competition; it has been coming in third behind CBS's "Nash Bridges" and ABC's "20/20" and ranks 60th in this season's Nielsen ratings. But since its January 1993 premiere, the show received almost unanimously glowing reviews for its gritty, uncompromised storytelling. Based on David Simon's nonfiction book, "Homicide" won three Peabody awards and a best actor Emmy (for Andre Braugher's performance as brooding Detective Frank Pembleton) during its six years on the air.

For much of its run, "Homicide" was the best written, best acted drama on television. The meaty dialogue, by turns cop-terse and poetic, became one of the show's trademarks. These cops, a wonderfully eclectic bunch that included Braugher's proud, God-respecting Pembleton, Kyle Secor's bisexual Buddhist Tim Bayliss, Richard Belzer's cynical, conspiracy-theorizing lapsed-Jew John Munch, Yaphet Kotto's workaholic, iconoclastic Lt. Al Giardello and Clark Johnson's rock-solid, yet commitment-phobic Meldrick Lewis, engaged in some of the best philosophical discussions ever seen on TV, debating everything from the existence of God to the comparative coolness of black and Italian entertainers. The show's jittery, pseudo-documentary look has influenced numerous other cop shows, but, as yet, no other show has attempted the signature "Homicide" move: Pivotal moments, repeated in threes, shot from three different angles.

Reruns of "Homicide" currently air nightly on cable's Court TV, and several episodes of the show are available on home video. There has been no word yet on whether NBC will continue its online version of the series, "Homicide: Second Shift," which features original story lines and a separate set of characters.

Recently, the series had lost some steam (and fans) with the departure of several of its more intriguing characters (Pembleton, Reed Diamond's rogue cop Mike Kellerman, Michelle Forbes' flinty medical examiner Julianna Cox) and the introduction of several less compelling reinforcements. But "Homicide" still looked and felt like no other show on TV. It carved its own niche, and it is irreplaceable.

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