PAUL ATTANASIO: I built Frank Pembleton out of the idea of a character who didn’t want a partner. And then Kyle’s character, Bayliss, was a more functional, more conventional television character who was the rookie, so you could use him as a guide to bring you into the show.

FONTANA: Our premiere was after the Super Bowl. NBC was very jazzed about that. I said to Barry: “After the Super Bowl, everybody’s drunk! This isn’t a show you can watch drunk.”

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ANDRE BRAUGHER: The first year, there was a sort of Jean-Luc Godard jump-cut sensibility that we enjoyed.

FONTANA: I said to Barry, “You know, I’d love to write an episode that basically only takes place in the interrogation room.” And he said: “Let’s just try it. Let’s try everything.”

KYLE SECOR: I went in and met them. Within a couple minutes, they said, “The sixth episode we’re going to do, it’s just going to be three guys in an interrogation room. It’ll be you, your partner and this other character.” And I went, “Oh, well, I’m in.”

FONTANA: The real girl who was murdered in Baltimore, that the Adena Watson story was based on, her murder was never solved. I made a decision that we would never solve the murder on the show because we felt like it would be disrespectful to the family and to the young girl’s memory.

SECOR: We had rehearsals before shooting, which was a comfort. Andre and I had spent a lot of time in that room, and it felt like that was our room. We had control of that room.

BRAUGHER: We performed it like a theatre piece. There’s nowhere to go. It’s a strangely shaped little room with a door and a window. So it’s just three men going around and around and around again.

FONTANA: We are asking the audience to watch this hour of intense interrogation and then not give them the solution they were hoping for. That was satisfying for me as well, because I didn’t want it to be all neat and tidy at the end.

‘By the time we were done, we’d used everything in the book, including the commas and question marks.’

Showrunner Tom Fontana

ATTANASIO: I think what’s really brilliant about that script is, it’s one thing to say you’re not to give the audience what they’re looking for. But then the question is, what are you going to give them? And what Tom gave them was heartbreak. And irresolution.

FONTANA: I knew the rhythms of Andre and Secor. And I knew that it had to have twists and turns, and that eventually, Tucker would start indicting them. I knew going in that was the way it would travel.

ATTANASIO: It’s not just good like bran cereal is good for you. It’s electrifying. You can’t take your eyes off it. And all it is, is three actors in a room.

BRAUGHER: It’s the most fun I’ve had filming an episode. It was physically hard, it was emotionally taxing, but it was very satisfying.

At the end of the episode, Bayliss takes the photograph of Adena from the interrogation room and places it on his desk, where it remains for multiple seasons.

SECOR: When I met Tom Pellegrini, who was the detective that I was based on, I got Bayliss immediately as someone where being unable to solve this case affected his entire life. Affected his marriage, affected relationships, affected his job, affected how he saw his work, everything.

FONTANA: If you’re going to track a character over the life of a series, you need to see the stuff that he or she accumulates. There was an episode where he puts the picture in a drawer. He was sort of like, “I have to get past this now.”

BRAUGHER: That’s one of the beautiful things about the episode. It doesn’t resolve in favour of our heroes. The moral frustration in the entire series is that Adena Watson’s murder is never solved.

FONTANA: My career has been an endless number of shows that I’m proud of that never were in the Top 10, starting with St. Elsewhere.

ATTANASIO: Don Ohlmeyer (then NBC’s West Coast president) loved the show, as long as they could make it for a reasonable amount of money.

BRAUGHER: When I think back to that initial group, that first- and second-year group, it was a wonderful cast and boy, were we quirky. Boy, were we misfits, and I loved it.

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LEVINSON: For the last four years, I’ve tried to get an answer for why we’re not on streaming. No one, I mean no one, has been able to give me an answer. There’s money to be made. You can’t figure out how to handle whatever rights issues that may come up? You’re talking over 120-some[thing] episodes. And somehow no one can figure out how to handle the rights? That doesn’t make sense!

SECOR: Who knows? Maybe we’ll start streaming on Netflix!

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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