Browsing

For the past 6 or 7 years I've been a big fan of Tom Fontana, especially of his work on Homicide: Life on the Street. Today, I was browsing through some of his original scripts for the series, and came across this lovely exchange that never made it to the air:

BOLANDER: My bet, the skeleton's at least a hundred years old.
LEWIS: Why's that, Big Man?
BOLANDER: Every year or so someone digs up bones in a basement in Fell's Point. It usually turns out to be some poor sailor who got a night's leave off some nineteenth century schooner docked in the harbor. The sailor came into town for a drink or some poker, got rolled for his pay, got stuffed in the basement. Meanwhile, up in Maine or England or even China, some young bride walked the shore, peering out into the sea, waiting her whole life for him to return.
MUNCH: Jeez, Stanley, more and more I see the poet in you.
BOLANDER: That ain't poetry, Munch. Them's the hard, cold facts.
HOWARD: Life was simpler a hundred years ago.
BOLANDER: Death was simpler.