Though he’s been retired 27 years, former homicide detective Joe Kenda still has nightmares. That’s part of the reason he agreed to host nine seasons of ID’s “Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda.” It was a series that outlined most of the 356 cases he solved while he served with the Colorado Springs Police Department.
Deep into his 21st year in homicide, Kenda says, “I wasn’t thinking about retiring but it jumped up and smacked me in the face. I was more concerned about my emotional state than I was about how I could fix it, but it finally dawned on me it’s time to do something else. ... I miss the people; I don’t miss the violence. I don’t miss the work. I’d reached my emotional limit. When I retired everything around me was white noise.”
He was able to still that white noise with “Homicide Hunter” and is narrating the investigations of other detectives on “American Detective with Lt. Joe Kenda,” airing now on ID. But it’s the cases that Kenda and his team didn't solve that still keep him up at night. And the first of three specials premiering Aug. 17 on ID outlines three of those cases that have been resolved through scientific advances in DNA. The series is aptly titled “Homicide Hunter: Never Give Up.”
“Ultimately DNA is the finest tool ever produced for law enforcement,” says Kenda. “It wasn’t designed for that. It was designed for medical purposes. But it became apparent it could be used to uniquely identify someone as opposed to any other person on the planet as a result of the analysis of the DNA found on the crime scene,” he says.
Initially, proper analysis required a large sample of body fluid, says Kenda. “But as that science advanced, we are at the point of ‘touch’ DNA. Touch a counter top with your finger, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
After retirement Kenda had no intention of becoming a TV “star.” “I wasn’t expecting any of this really. I was opposed to even doing this when this first came up,” he recalls.
“A producer wrote me a letter saying he thought I would work for something like this. I put it aside and my wife said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘It’s a letter from some guy who says he’s going to put me on television — like that’s gonna happen.’ She said, ‘You should call him.’ ‘I’m not going to call him. I don’t like TV people.’ This went on for four days,” he says.
But his wife, Kathy, was persistent. “Kathy has a PhD in nagging, so she understood that would just drive me crazy, and that’s precisely what she did. ‘You going to call this afternoon or this morning?’ ‘What are you going to say when you call them?’ ‘When will you call them?’ On and on. Stop. Peace in the family. I’ll call this guy.”
Kenda says he liked the fellow on the other end of the line. “And he offered me $100 to come to Denver for a screen test in front of a camera. I'm a retired policeman, 100 bucks is a lot of money. I said, ‘You bet.’ So I went to Denver. I sat in a chair. And the guy looks at me, and I look at him, and I haven’t a clue what’s happening. I'm looking at cameras and cables and sound equipment I’ve never seen before.”
Kenda asked the producer, “What do you want to talk about?” “Tell me about murder,” he replied. So Kenda began. “I did for about 30 minutes right off the top of my head and I stopped and I stood up and said, ‘Is that what you had in mind?’ Everybody’s standing there with their mouths open. I thought, ‘Well, this didn’t go well.’ I said, ‘Let me ask you again, is that what you had in mind?’ ‘Oh, God, yes.’ And here we go and here we are today.”
And for all his nightmares and headaches and white noise, Kenda says doing television has proved therapeutic for him. “I feel immensely better 10 years later than I did when I started this,” he says.
“I said more to that camera than I ever said to my wife. It helps. The first time she watched the show she’s looking at me and said, ‘I never knew you did that!’ I didn’t want to burden her with what I was doing. You bury it and think it’s going to go away. It didn’t work that way. It’s helpful because it helps me get some of the emotion out of me, which I’ve spent all my life containing — which just doesn’t work. The fact that it’s turned into what it has, and the fact that it’s turned into what it has, amounts to living proof of me being something that is rare — even a blind pig finds an acorn once in awhile.”
'The Gilded Age' arrives
Julian Fellowes, who wrote “Downton Abbey,” followed that coup with the series, “The Gilded Age,” about high society and how it got that way. The period from about 1870 to the 1900s was a time of enormous economic growth — with robber barons and tycoons littering the landscape. This opulent time-traveling series is streaming on HBO Max now and arrives on DVD Tuesday.
Fellowes describes the era this way: “You get to 1900 you’re looking at cars, you're beginning with flight, the movies are just arriving, you're half an hour away from radio — all the stuff we know was either in its inception or already happening. Yet when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the world was still essentially in the 18th century.”
The series boasts a cast as gilded as the show including Jeanne Tripplehorn, Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Cynthia Nixon, Christine Baranski. Baranski is currently starring as the feminist lawyer in the long running “The Good Fight,” which introduces its final season Sept. 8, via Paramount+. For the often brittle and liberated characters she plays, Baranski says her childhood was quite the opposite.
“I had a rather strict Catholic upbringing,” she says. “I went to Catholic schools and went to all-Catholic girls’ schools. I was always told to be modest, not to show off and to be ‘humble.’ That was a word I heard a lot growing up. Acting allows you to express yourself rather unabashedly, and as my career’s gone on, I find the characters I play are really unabashed. They have a lot of flair to them. That may be part of my personality. But it’s much more muted in my personal life than it is in my stage or my movie or my TV roles.”
Actress traces talent to Ukrainian background
Actress Vera Farmiga’s parents are Ukrainian. She thinks because of her heritage storytelling is imbedded in her DNA and part of what she does. “The thing is the Ukrainian culture is so rich in storytelling, and I was a folk dancer. I grew up on the stage as a musician, a folk dancer, as a pianist, and there was always music and performing and that’s part of the Ukrainian culture. It’s not far-fetched,” she says.
When she announced she wanted to be an actress, her parents were not surprised. “There had never been anybody in the family be an actress. I come from peasantry. At this point I’d already told my parents I was going to be a music therapist, or an ophthalmologist; they’d heard it all. I think they just rolled their eyes. I was always switching gears. I think just by nature of my personality nothing surprised them very much. I was pretty eccentric as a child and inventive and dramatic, I guess. I was always the camp counselor who would be in charge of the theater and the bonfire skits and there were little tells throughout my life that this was something (I might do).”
Farmiga stars in the Apple TV+ limited series, “Five Days at Memorial” which begins streaming on Friday. Based on true events and the novel by Sheri Fink, the eight-part series follows the devastating crush of Hurricane Katrina on a New Orleans hospital. Farmiga plays one of the doctors caught in the maelstrom.
Maslany weighs in as She-Hulk
Tatiana Maslany slips from her many alter-egos in “Orphan Black” to a Marvel Studios comedy for Disney+. She plays a 30-something lawyer who also happens to be supercharged green hulk in “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” premiering Aug. 17. She’s in good company with Mark Ruffalo as Smart Hulk, Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky/the Abomination, and Benedict Wong as Wong.
Maslany tells me that when she was a kid she enjoyed attention. “I was very studious, very nerdy, very tomboyish. I wanted to be a boy, I always thought that was more interesting than being a girl. I had a younger brother who I grew up with who was my best friend and a little, little brother who’s 12 years younger than me. So he was a baby that we raised,” she says.
“Our family was very close. We went on bike rides all the time. And my brothers and I would make movies in the backyard with a video camera and make claymations and sitcoms. We’d always be creating something — music or free styling. ... We were super nerdy in that way. We wanted to spend Saturday nights doing improv with friends in our basement. I wasn’t rebellious in any way, so I think I'm really drawn to characters who have that ‘other thing’ in them.”
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