Columbo [tv series]

Yep, I got sucked into watching all 16 seasons of this. Kind of a misnomer, though, as—I never knew this—”Columbo “wasn’t a TV series, but a series of TV movies shown in occasional rotation with a few other ongoing detective movie series, and so never had full” seasons”. I totally get why this was a fan favorite in the day. Aside from the very likable lead performance, it broke a lot of conventions—it rarely if ever showed violence, had no chase scenes, there was never wisecracking partner or ongoing romantic interest, no procedural scenes inside the police station, or, in fact, regularly seen coworkers for Columbo of any sort, other than frequent appearances of his basset hound. Generally the character of Columbo didn’t even appear until 20 minutes or so into the story, frumpily tying to solve a crime that the viewer had already fully seen committed and knew who the guilty party was. Peter Falk managed to imbue that character with a lot of affectations that might have been annoying in the hands of the wrong actor, and, in fact, is said to have so often improvised, such as suddenly shifting focus and fixating in the middle of dialogue on some inconsequential detail of the set, that the annoyance with him expressed by the suspects he was interrogating was often genuine on the part of the actors. I couldn’t binge the whole thing, but I did like it enough to watch it all in about 3 mini-binges with breaks in between for other stuff. (“‘Columbo’?”, my sister asked me. “I thought that was like ‘Murder, She Wrote’ or ‘Matlock’.” No, it’s good!)