All right. This will have no value at all except to me, the aged Ps, and those among you who have been lucky enough to watch Homicide in its entirety. But what I have here is a publication house that requires no content and no editing so here goes: the Tim Bayliss haircut post.

The Many Haircuts of the Soulful Tim Bayliss

"Fair-Haired Choir Boy," Seasons 1-3

For three seasons of the Barry Levinson-produced NBC series Homicide, Detective Timothy Bayliss's nineties heartthrob haircut was a wonder to behold. Even when it became apparent that his heartthrob status was confined to the haircut (even his undoubted good looks marked him as "handsome" rather than "hot"), its shape helped Bayliss maintain the "fair-haired choir boy" image his partner Frank Pembleton imagines him to have created for himself. The image is maintained even after Bayliss is seen holding a suspect's head to a steam pipe, cruising the Block in Baltimore, and having sex in a coffin with the girl one of his colleagues likes. (Not to mention calling the colonel a "butthead," but in my opinion that reinforces the choirboy image rather than detracts from it.)
In any case, the haircut Tim Bayliss has in any given season reflects his state of mind, his inner turmoil or lack thereof, the condition of his soul. For the first three seasons, despite the defeat of the unsolved Adena Watson case (which would haunt Bayliss from the second episode to the end of the series), Bayliss was a young and optimistic detective, perky and clearly in awe of the master detective Frank Pembleton. That his hair more closely resembled that of one of the child actors in Honey I Shrunk the Kids than the no-nonsense cuts of the other detectives in the squad room only underlines my point. It may have been the nineties, but everyone else managed.


Young Man About Town, Season Four
Without Beard

Bayliss began the fourth season with a new, shorter haircut. He attempts to remain unaffected by the horrors he sees every day. (He also spends the majority of the fourth season with back trouble, which carries over into subsequent seasons. on of his colleagues theorizes that it's all in his head; I couldn't agree more.) He looks handsome and carefree and, above all, mature.

With Beard

Before the season is three quarters of the way done, Bayliss grows a beard to go with his new do. With it, he looks more tired and definitely older. His attempts to keep his job at arm's length have failed and he has decided to make do with what he has, which at this point seems to be a bottomless capacity for internalizing others' pain.
The beard also takes away any remaining hints of the fresh-faced-ness from his rookie days. There is the sense that he knows what he's doing on the job.
He also knows what he's doing while flirting with Kay Howard's sister at a weddings, whereas with Emma Zoole in the coffin it was clear that he was clueless.

Back to the Bare Facts, Season Five
Buzzcut

One of the more shocking moments of the fifth season comes when Bayliss, now clean shaven and sporting a buzzcut, tells Frank about the childhood abuse he suffered at the hands of his uncle. Frank reaches out to touch Tim and he pulls away, ending their partnership (albeit, thankfully, temporarily). Buzzcut Bayliss is not warm, he is not self-pitying, he is not approachable. Buzzcut Bayliss is making one last attempt to jettison everything that might hurt. Ditching the extra inches of hair apparently goes hand-in-hand with ditching excess emotions.

Little Boy Haircut

Like most of Bayliss's preventative emotional forays into self-reliance, this one doesn't work very well. His hair grows out without much attention paid to it, giving him the rumpled look of a little boy who has just gotten out of bed. Backtracking, he reconnects with Frank. Backtracking even further, he goes to confront his abusive uncle only to find him an old and sick man, diminished. Bayliss brings him food and helps him out, despite everything. Frank doesn't understand, but whoever chose Tim's hair for those episodes clearly did.

Seasoned Hand Part One, Season Six

Along with the addition of a pair of glasses, the sixth season marks the return of Bayliss's confident fourth season haircut, with modifications. Instead of well-defined edges, this version of the haircut hangs more softly. Sixth Season Bayliss is doing pretty well. He and Frank's partnership is relatively solid, he begins to successfully navigate his sexuality, and he strikes up a friendship with fellow detective Laura Ballard (whose hair is as steady and reliable and pretty as she is). Things are good.
That is, until Bayliss gets shot and Frank quits, which brings us to:

Seasoned Hand Part Two, Season Seven
Season Seven Bayliss takes a back seat for the most part, as does his hair until the last episode when, slightly un-groomed and definitely in need of a haircut, Bayliss hunts down a serial murderer of women and kills him. Bayliss's hair at this point most closely resembles his first season haircut, a little long in the back, but he is so far from being a heartthrob that the haircut serves to harshly illuminate the ways the character's work in Homicide has changed him.

The Count of Monte Cristo, The Movie
In the first sight we get of Bayliss in Homicide" The Movie, he is standing in a creek wearing fishing gear. The setting is idyllic but even if we had not seen the last episode of the seventh season, we would only have to take one look at his hair to see all is not well. Hair shaggier than ever, plus the return of the season four Angst Beard (this time flecked with grey) signal that this is not a happy Bayliss. And sure enough, the movie proves us right. His final rooftop confrontation with Frank made me cry for half an hour, so I won't go over it again here, but his hair just makes it worse. By which I mean it makes it better.



So. What at first seem arbitrary and sometimes downright unfortunate decisions on the part of the folks in hair and makeup do in fact point us down a character's mental path. Relatively few of the other characters go through as many haircuts (in the series, Kay Howard and John Munch have some coloring done, Mike Kellerman loses his poufy initial haircut in favor of something harder, and Falsone attempts to rectify the grease mullet he is first saddled with), indicating that, as if this weren't obvious enough, Bayliss has as least as many life changes as he has haircuts and only about half of them are good.