There’s television before Homicide: Life on the Street, and there’s television after Homicide: Life on the Street.

That’s no exaggeration: The Baltimore-set cop drama, which aired on NBC for seven seasons and 122 episodes (plus the feature film Homicide: The Movie), is not only one of the best dramas ever to hit television, it also directly led to the “Golden Age of Television” of the decade that followed.

Not that you need to know all this. For all the awards and accolades Homicide has won over the years, it has had the ignominious distinction of being, as TV Guide once called it, “The Best Show You’re Not Watching.” It also hasn’t found an audience in the aftermath: Despite some basic and pay-cable syndication and a DVD release, it’s been a tough show to find. Until now: 25 years after it left air, Homicide: Life on the Street is finally streaming in its entirety in the U.S. on Peacock.

Homicide debuted in January 1993 and was part of a new wave of grittier, more grounded police procedural series that followed Hill Street Blues (including its sister series Law & Order, with which it crossed over several times). After the publication of his groundbreaking reportage book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets , author David Simon—then a reporter for the Baltimore Sun who had spent a year working on a Baltimore homicide unit—approached filmmaker and fellow Bawlmer resident Barry Levinson about adapting the story into a film. Levinson felt it was a better fit for television and hired Donnie Brasco scribe Paul Attanasio to film it.

Simon’s book gave the show’s writers plenty of characters and incidents to base episodes on, but it also gave them something else, something not really seen in cop shows up until then: a philosophy. This is immediately apparent in the very first episode, through two small but significant moments.

In the funnier of the two, Detectives Lewis (Clark Johnson), Crosetti (John Polito), and Munch (Richard Belzer, who would reprise the role on Law & Order SVU) are hanging out in a damp, rain-soaked alley, passing around a bottle of booze and lamenting their career choices when they see a would-be mugger approaching them. Instead of springing into action as you might expect of heroic TV cops, the chaotic Munch whips out his badge, holds it up for the mugger to see, and yells at him, “Hey, we’re cops! Go rob someone else!”

Even more revealing is the scene immediately preceding this one, in which the brilliant investigator Frank Pembleton (the late Andre Braugher, who was rightly awarded an Emmy for his leading actor work in 1998) recounts his interrogation process to his new rookie partner, Time Bayliss (Kyle Secor): “What you will have the privilege of witnessing will not be an interrogation. It will be an act of selling. As slick and thieving as ever used cars, Florida swampland or Bibles were sold. But what I am selling is a long prison sentence to a customer who has no real use for the product.”

Uber-cynical, darkly funny, hyper-literate: all qualities that made Homicide: Life on the Street stand out, but it wasn’t just an archetypal piece of genre deconstruction; they should have known that it was never better than when it was staring straight into the tragic heart of its premise. Ask any fan of the show to name their favorite episode, and nine times out of ten they’ll give the same answer: Three Men and Adena.

The culmination of a multi-episode story arc surrounding the sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old girl, Three Men and Adena sees Pembleton and Bayliss desperately racing against time to extract a confession from their prime suspect (Moses Gunn, making his final appearance). While it’s not a bottle episode, it certainly feels like one, so much so that by its end the viewer is left as emotionally drained as the characters. The acting (best performances of all), staging and direction (courtesy of future Bond director Martin Campbell) and writing (credited to showrunner Tom Fontana) are as powerful, engrossing and, without giving too much away, ultimately as devastatingly ambiguous as any modern drama to grace the American stage, let alone the idiot box.

It was that penchant for ambiguity—not just moral ambiguity, but a willingness to leave storylines unresolved—that drove away many potential viewers and consistently drove the network crazy, even when it did bring in serious performers, usually in the form of guest stars like Robin Williams, Vincent D’Onofrio, Steve Buscemi, Alfre Woodard, James Earl Jones and proud Baltimorean John Waters, who once described Homicide as “the grittiest, best-acted, coolest show on TV.”

The critical success of Homicide , combined with that of the equally complex (if more sensational) NYPD Blue , which had debuted that same year, laid the groundwork for everything that came after. As the series wrapped, Levinson and Fontana struck a deal with HBO—the premium pay channel that had primarily scheduled feature films, boxing, and erotica—to develop its first original hour-long series. The prison drama Oz borrowed much of its look and feel (and its cast) from Homicide , even as it pushed the boundaries of everything that had come before it. And while it never rose above cult favorite status, it proved to be a big enough success that HBO was convinced to try its hand at more original programming. Two years later, the network would air the first episode of The Sopranos , and the entire television landscape would change.

Meanwhile, Simon had transitioned from journalism to full-time television, landing a spot at HBO where he would create The Wire . That show, also about police work in Baltimore, would expand on the themes and ideas of his earlier show, and in a few cases even borrow plot lines. But lest anyone mistake Homicide for the beta version of The Wire , let me tell you that it’s a strange beast all its own. For while it consistently clashed with the constraints of network television, it also made the most of its particular sandbox. The classic episodic nature of the show—as opposed to the novelistic approach Simon would take with his later work—allows the series to go in stranger, more unexpected directions.

Like Homicide, The Wire was critically acclaimed but watched little during its initial run. However, thanks to the new cultural discourse surrounding TV shows that emerged with the advent of the internet and social media, and the seemingly overnight shift to streaming, the series found new life almost immediately after its conclusion. It’s unlikely that Homicide will be able to replicate that success, making its streaming debut a quarter century after its conclusion, in a market that has never been more crowded.

Homicide: Life on the Street will always be remembered as a revolutionary show, and rightly so. But to reduce it to that is a disservice. If it were merely ahead of its time, it would deserve to be remembered. But because it’s still as dramatically satisfying as ever—in ways that many other acclaimed shows of its time aren’t—it deserves something more. It deserves to be watched. It deserves another chance at life.