As a portrait of a marriage, it’s bizarre. I’m talking about the dual portrait John Singer Sargent painted in 1885 of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Louis, whose first novel, Treasure Island, had been published two years earlier, is captured pacing in a darkened room. Tall and thin, Louis looks every inch like an “insane stork,” which is how fellow writer Henry Adams described him. Louis stares out beyond the confines of the portrait at us, the viewers, as if to share an idea he’s just had.

Fanny sits barefoot on a chair at the opposite end of the room, all but shrouded, like a piece of furniture, in a golden Indian sari. No fool, Fanny recognized Sargent’s depiction as yet another attempt by an admirer of her husband’s to diminish her. “I am but a cipher under the shadow,” she complained to Sargent.

Camille Peri’s lively and substantive dual biography of the Stevensons, called A Wilder Shore, whisks those obscuring draperies off Fanny and restores her to full personhood. But, Peri aims for something even more ambitious than a feminist recovery of a mostly forgotten wife of a famous writer. In her “Introduction,” Peri describes her book as: “an intimate window into how [the Stevensons] lived and loved — a story that is at once a travel adventure, a journey into the literary creative process, and, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life.”

“Inspiration” is something of a quaint term these days in lit crit circles and, yet, it’s always been an abiding draw of biographies. Speaking for myself, after reading A Wilder Shore, I’m inspired to do two things: I want to reread Robert Louis Stevenson’s three great works of fiction: Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And, I want to schedule a séance with Fanny to get some one-on-one instruction on how to live more fearlessly as a woman.

Peri opens A Wilder Shore with a scene that could have been written by Louis but, instead, was lived by Fanny: In the summer of 1875, she and her three children and their governess rushed aboard a train in San Francisco to cross the country and catch a ship in New York harbor that would carry them to Belgium.

This was no pleasure trip: To reach their destination the little band rode a wagon through floodwaters, but Fanny was desperate to escape her humiliating marriage to a prospector who lived openly with his mistress. With the little money she’d earned by sewing, Fanny planned to enroll herself and her teenaged daughter in art school.

Hurtling into the unknown put the 36-year-old, still-married mother of three in the orbit of Robert Louis Stevenson — a sickly Scottish writer who was 10 years her junior. It was love at first sight, at least for Louis. Peri says that:

Fanny likely saw their affair as something that could not last. For him, though, sexual intimacy with Fanny was not simply a romp with an older woman. It cemented his emotional commitment to her — a kind of role reversal that is striking for a Victorian man.

Peri details how the bohemian relationship that evolved between Fanny and Louis included other such gender role reversals: The frail “Louis was what the Scots call a “handless” man,” she writes. During the couple’s honeymoon spent squatting in an abandoned silver mine in California, it was Fanny who “out of scraps of wood and packing crates … nailed together furniture.” Of course, the Stevensons’ union caused dismay among Louis’ friends who disparaged Fanny for her age, her American-ness, her short hair and cigarette smoking, and, most virulently, her olive skin.

As convincing as she is about the progressive relationship between the Stevensons, Peri is also clear-eyed about the fact that Fanny still got the somewhat shorter end of the stick. While Louis respected Fanny as his best critic, he also assumed she would handle the mundane household routine and provide nursing care.

Louis’ undiagnosed illness — he chronically coughed up blood — did have the “upside” of broadening the couple’s life through travel in search of a healthier climate. They spent their final years together before Louis’ death in 1894 at the age of 44, in Samoa. Fanny lived on for 20 more years, writing, traveling and attracting male protégés. No doubt her contemporaries derided her for that, too; but, thanks to Peri’s vivid biography, Fanny has the last fearless laugh.

If you were too young to watch NBC’s groundbreaking police drama, Homicide: Life on the Street when it first debuted in 1993, you may wonder why there’s still so much fuss about the show more than three decades later.

That’s because so much of what Homicide presented was stuff you just didn’t see on network television back then: shaky, kinetic camera work; working stiff police detectives cracking jokes at gruesome murder scenes instead of solemnly vowing justice; serialized stories that arced over several episodes; heart-rending killings that never got solved. It was a cop show without gun battles or car chases, with a bracing shot of street-level realism, filmed mostly in Baltimore.

TV fans can step back in time Monday, when NBCUniversal rights a longtime injustice and makes all seven seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street available on its streaming service, Peacock – along with 2000’s Homicide: the Movie. There’s a total 122 episodes, plus the TV movie.

One person glad to see these episodes finally arrive on streaming is Tom Fontana, who served as executive producer and showrunner for Homicide, helping develop its singular storytelling style.

He wasn’t directly involved with bringing the series to Peacock, though Fontana says he and fellow Homicide producers Barry Levinson and Gail Mutrux had been bugging the company to put the show online for years.

“We could never understand why they [didn’t do it sooner],” adds the producer, who created the prison drama Oz, HBO’s first original drama series, and most recently co-created the AMC drama Monsieur Spade. “We kept getting different reasons from different NBC executives.”

In a tweet in June, Homicide producer and writer David Simon – a former Baltimore Sun cops reporter who wrote the book the show was based on, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets – hinted that music rights were central to the delay.

In an emailed statement to NPR, NBCUniversal noted that it took “many years” for NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution and Universal TV to secure the rights and clearances needed and to remaster the series for HD and 4K, noting the HD versions will be available Monday with the 4K version to follow. The show’s crossover episodes with another classic NBC police drama, Law & Order, will not be included on Peacock. But the episodes on streaming will include “most” of the original music.

Resurfacing groundbreaking 1990s TV

Watching Homicide episodes reveals a series seriously ahead of its time, created by Paul Attanasio and focused on recreating Simon’s incisive look at the city’s murder police.

Here, viewers were introduced to The Box, the interrogation room where detectives often solved cases by cajoling confessions from suspects, like canny used car dealers pushing wary customers to sign on the dotted line.

Or The Board, a large, dry-erase display with every detective’s name, followed by the case number and last names of the murder victims in the crimes they were working – solved cases written in black, open cases in red. “You look up there, you know exactly where you stand,” says Yaphet Kotto’s world weary, Italian African American squad leader, Al Giardello. “About how many things in life can you say that?”

The Homicide series was where Simon learned to write TV scripts before creating his own groundbreaking shows for HBO, including The Wire. Fontana recalls, “I remember saying to [Simon], on the first day, ‘You know how in a newspaper article, you have to answer who, what, when, where in the first paragraph? TV writing is the opposite; you put off answering those questions as long as you possibly can.’…I think that was probably the only really good advice I gave him.”

Fontana’s notes to Simon may also explain why the structure of Homicide’s episodes were so unusual for network TV. Characters didn’t directly say what was happening every moment, unlike so many police procedurals back then, which seemed to fear confusing audiences. Fontana says they would stick little “easter egg” style moments in episodes – with little regard for whether the audience understood them or not. In one story, for example, a man accused of racism seems to perceive color differently watching a TV set.

Given that viewers couldn’t watch the episodes on demand, or stop and rewind to catch things they might have missed, it was a bold choice. It also meant Homicide emerged as a series perfect for streaming, made long before streaming platforms actually existed.

The cast of Homicide: Life on the Street.

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‘A community of detectives’

The new episodes retain the show’s signature look in screeners provided by Peacock; songs by Miles Davis and the band Bleach seem to appear intact. Still, there is one longtime fan of the show who won’t be watching the new episodes on streaming: Fontana himself.

“I’m told the show holds up really well, but I’m not brave enough to watch it again,” he says. “I think the show feels real because we were talking about a community of detectives. And we didn’t want them all to sound like Dick Tracy or whatever. ”

Everyone from Oscar winner Melissa Leo to legendary indie film director and Baltimore institution John Waters appeared on the show. Robin Williams guested in a landmark episode called “Bop Gun,” playing the husband of a woman killed while they were visiting the city, horrified to overhear detectives joking about her murder with the easy familiarity of those who work close to death. (Williams’ appearance, Simon later wrote on his website, likely saved the show and cemented his TV writing career).

Vincent D’Onofrio also pops up in an episode Fontana cites as one of his favorites, called “Subway,” playing a man pushed onto a subway platform and pinned between the platform and the train. As the episode progresses, he slowly realizes he will die the moment they move the train car away.

Catching up on the work of departed acting legends

Perhaps best of all, fans can now see a long line of powerful actors who have since died – performers who delivered some of their best work on Homicide – including Kotto, Ned Beatty, Jon Polito, Richard Belzer and Andre Braugher.

Braugher shone as Det. Frank Pembleton, a hotshot known for closing cases by pushing suspects to confess in The Box. “What you will be privileged to witness is not an interrogation, but an act of salesmanship – as silver-tongued and thieving as ever moved used cars, Florida swampland or Bibles,” he tells a rookie observer in Homicide’s first episode. “But what I am selling is a long prison term. To a client who has no genuine use for the product. ”

NBCUniversal says fan reaction over the deaths last year of Belzer and Braugher – beloved actors whose later work included Law & Order: SVU and Brooklyn Nine-Nine – “was just another indicator that we should continue on our path” to bring Homicide to streaming now. Fontana notes it doesn’t hurt that Netflix also recently saw success with episodes of older series such as USA Network’s Suits and Showtime’s Your Honor, hinting that NBC’s Peacock might also benefit from elevating a classic series the company already owns.

But ask him why people are still interested in the show, about 25 years after the series ended, and the notoriously modest Fontana comes up short. “I’ve been trying to figure it out,” he says. “It’s unfortunate that the stories we told are still relevant. But it might engage a younger audience, because they can say, ‘Hey, prejudice, and misogyny and inequality are still part of day to day life.’”

Not everyone may want to encounter a Virgo, but everyone will need to do so at one point or another. No matter how much you might resist their tutelage, or how stubbornly you might deride the sixth sign for the nagging demon of perfectionism that seems to curse their every move with a certain shadow of misery, there will, eventually, be a moment when you’ll wish they were there. Will it be the time your tire goes flat on the 101 in 90-degree heat in the middle of rush hour and your Virgoan passenger swaps it out for the spare with their bare hands and books an appointment with your mechanic for you in under 20 minutes? Or the time you’re blubbering about a breakup and your Virgo friend calmly and rationally reminds you that your ex’s finances were hardly in a state of IRS compliance worthy of long-term partnership, and by the way, it was egregiously apparent that they never flossed? And then there’s that hallowed, holy grail of Los Angeles friendship duties — helping you move — and guess who will be there five minutes early with baked goods from Gjusta for everyone?

In an age and culture where someone’s word is only as air- (or earth-) tight as their integrity allows, the presence of a Virgo can be a blessed reprieve from the flakes and snakes. It’s the attention to detail, of course, the practicality, the methodical way in which they dutifully tackle the most dreaded task with none of the melodrama and all of the levelheadedness — so that they can move on to more important tasks, why else?

Every sign has its needs, and for Virgos, that need is to be useful, to allow the many acts of service to amount to enough (a Virgo is never enough for themselves). Their commitment to the delusion of an unattainable perfection is not only what drives them to succeed, but what actually allows them to do so — which, in the process, shrouds them in gloom, misunderstanding or both. A Virgo is, in this way, just as sensitive as its sister sign, Pisces.

And so we are led to the Ferm Living brown Pebble Grinder as a sturdy yet delicate talisman of fragile Virgoan vigor. A smooth, fluid silhouette in ash wood represents the intentional, sculptural quality of our virgin constellation. The Pebble Grinder, like many Virgos, is a tool — designed to dutifully break down salt and pepper to add the finishing, functional touch to a culinary work of art. For the Virgo may not be the flavor, but they are the instrument that facilitates the flavor, which might render them just as important (if not more so) than the flavor itself. There is no sensual enjoyment, no time to watch birds play in clouds, no meaningful gaze exchanged between lovers, without the tasks completed and arrangements made to arrive at that point in the first place. Virgos help us with life, so that we can do the things that make us feel alive. Should we not love them for that?

Goth Shakira is a digital conjurer based in Los Angeles.