‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’ | J. W. McCormack

Television’s best jokes turn hierarchies upside-down. In some cases ghoulish beauty standards are treated as ordinary, like when Morticia Addams clips the heads off roses to display the thorny stems, or when comely Marilyn Munster feels like the outcast in a family of vampires and Frankensteins. In others an authority figure gets taken for a perp or lowlife. Consider Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo, the disheveled detective who spent much of the 1970s as the tentpole of NBC’s prime-time mystery programming block. Throughout the series he finds himself mistaken for various riffraff. At a soup kitchen where he’s collecting testimony, an overzealous nun assumes he’s without a home and needs a meal; at a porno shop where he’s following up on a clue, a customer takes him for a fellow pervert; at a crime scene, a policeman dismisses him as a rubberneck until he bashfully admits to being the investigating officer.

It’s an easy mistake to make. Columbo expects to be underestimated. In fact he’s counting on it. He always wears an earth-tone, threadbare raincoat, unless it’s raining. (Falk requested that the detective’s costume be made to look more Italian: “Everything is brown there, including the buildings. The Italians really understand that color best.”) He treats murder scenes in a decidedly unhygienic way, dropping cigar ashes all over the premises and indelicately touching the corpse. He veils his intelligence in a fog of stagy absentmindedness: his famous catchphrase, before clinching the case, is “Just one more thing.” Columbo is, in the words of one criminal, “a sly little elf [who] should be sitting under your own private little toadstool.” Elaine May reportedly called him “an ass-backward Sherlock Holmes.”

Over the course of seven seasons on NBC, from 1971 to 1978—now remastered and collected on Blu-ray as Columbo: The 1970s—and three more on ABC beginning in 1989, Falk played the character with an ingratiating manner that was by turns adorable and annoying. (His twinkling squint came from the actor’s glass eye; at three, Falk lost his right one due to cancer.) His shambolic demeanor was the perfect cover, because although he remains the textbook definition of “nonthreatening,” Columbo is up to no good.

Conceived by the boy-genius writing duo William Levinson and Richard Link for an episode of The Chevy Mystery Show in 1960, Columbo began to take shape in their stage play Prescription: Murder, which apparently became a professional grudge match between its hammy stars Thomas Mitchell and Joseph Cotten. In 1968 Levinson and Link retooled the play as a made-for-TV movie for NBC; Falk landed the role after Lee J. Cobb and Bing Crosby turned it down. Three years later, NBC, then last in the ratings and in need of a hit to compete with the likes of Gunsmoke and The Mod Squad, commissioned a formal pilot. Falk soon made the character his own: ambling around for a missing pen, sharing digressive anecdotes about the unseen Mrs. Columbo, playing obsequious in the company of his social betters—all with an eye to coaxing his foes into incriminating themselves.

For a character whose private life remains offscreen and whose first name is never spoken (although his badge reads “Frank”), we know quite a bit about the lieutenant. His shoes cost $16 and his watch $30. His favorite dish is chili. He drives a 1959 Peugeot, doesn’t know modern art from an air vent, and claims the secret to an omelet is just milk, no eggs. His favorite movie stars are Alan Ladd and Paul Muni. His uncle played bagpipe in a Shriners band. His dog’s name is Dog. And his wife has “a proverb for every situation,” cries when she loses at bowling, and has a passion for Madame Butterfly and a thing for Johnny Cash. As early as the second pilot, “Ransom for a Dead Man,” the catsuit-wearing femme fatale has Columbo dead to rights:

You know, Columbo, you’re almost likable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it’s the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks…. The humility, the seeming absentmindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family…. Yeah, Lieutenant Columbo, fumbling and stumbling along. But it’s always the jugular that he’s after. And I imagine that, more often than not, he’s successful.

Levinson and Link have said that the germ of the character came from Porfiry Petrovich, the investigator in Crime and Punishment who likewise flattered Raskolnikov into revealing his fatal flaw. The show’s formula also seems indebted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). As in that film, each episode begins with a crime, after which the killer sweats it out under Columbo’s scrutiny for the rest of the runtime, until a subtle clue gives the game away. John Cassavetes plays an orchestra conductor who murders his mistress and leaves a suicide note in her typewriter, but also leaves his boutonnière behind; the Great Santini, a Nazi war criminal–turned–magician, shoots a nightclub owner and steals an incriminating letter while supposedly submerged in a tank onstage, but leaves the carbon ribbon in the typewriter, still bearing the telltale impressions; Donald Pleasance plays a winemaker who overheats the wine cellar where he leaves his hated brother to suffocate—a crime against enology which Columbo grasps when Pleasance shouts at a flustered restaurant sommelier about a wine gone bad. With its inverted mystery structure and its woozy technicolor photography of shag-carpeted, art-deco Los Angeles, the series brought the crime story out of the shadows of film noir and into rumpus-room realism.

Falk was a famously difficult star. He feigned illness to shut down production when he didn’t get his way, negotiated frequent salary raises—he became the highest-paid actor in television—and rewrote scripts until the eleventh hour or chucked them altogether. (David Koenig’s behind-the-scenes book from 2021, Shooting Columbo, is juicy with sordid tales of Falk’s prima donna outbursts as well as could-have-beens: Brian De Palma planned to direct an episode in which Truman Capote kills Johnny Carson on live TV.) His onscreen persona, however, was extremely lovable. He was twice cast as an angel: in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) and in a trilogy of Christmas films made between 2001 and 2004. In 2014, three years after his death, a bronze statue of him went up in Budapest (Falk was Jewish-Hungarian on his mother’s side).

He played Columbo like Bogart by way of Kenny Loggins. This is a detective who doesn’t carry a gun, who isn’t a narc; who gets henpecked, underpaid, and condescended to. He’s after criminals not from the underclass but from the idle rich—art critics and television personalities—who usually commit their murders to cover up adultery, embezzlement, or army desertion. In “Murder by the Book,” directed by a young Steven Spielberg, a mystery novelist kills his writing partner and blames it on the mob, but Columbo knows the real villain wears a turtleneck and keeps a house in the country.

The best moments on Columbo play on his affinity with the common man, like when he palavers with an enterprising funeral parlor director offering him a deal (“The rate of police mortality is just shocking”), an irate housekeeper forced to dig his cigars out of antique dishes (“You must belong in some pigsty!”), a flustered driving instructor who regrets accepting a lift in Columbo’s rusty Peugeot (“It’s called defensive driving!”), and a young Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a surly waitress who makes him buy a donut. “I’m working,” he tells us in “The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case,” the best episode in the series. “In fact, I can’t remember a time I’m never working.”

The natural enemies of a man perpetually working are those perpetually at play, and the “Sky High” episode is built around Columbo’s investigation of a house full of Mensa members who sit around formulating riddles and sharing the definitions of obscure words. When he tells a precocious fourteen-year-old that she’s “a remarkably pretty girl,” she replies, “You know something, Lieutenant? That’s the very first time anyone ever told me they like me for my body instead of my mind.” But Columbo is really here to stand up to the bookworms on behalf of the working man, telling Theodore Bikel’s neurotic would-be master criminal:

You know, sir, it’s a funny thing. All my life I kept running into smart people. I don’t just mean smart like you and the people in this house. You know what I mean. In school, there were lots of smarter kids. And when I first joined the force, sir, they had some very clever people there. And I could tell right away that it wasn’t gonna be easy making detective as long as they were around. But I figured, if I worked harder than they did, put in more time, read the books, kept my eyes open, maybe I could make it happen. And I did. And I really love my work, sir.

Coming from a television cop, such talk is as dated now as leisure turbans and paisley lapels. Columbo lived on, after its maiden run, in a treacly revival series in the 1990s (too many pastels, business-casual ponytails, and jacuzzi bodies under forty). But soon Dick Wolf’s Law & Order began its three-decade colonization of the airwaves; its more than five hundred episodes, filmed in close collaboration with NYPD consultants, regularly depict hero cops roughing up their suspects, ridiculing defense lawyers, and disparaging civil rights.

As if in reaction to the brute force of this quintessential cop show, a pair of recent, cheeky throwbacks have sought to revive Columbo’s brand of surveillance-with-a-smile. First, last year, Poker Face premiered on Peacock. It centers on a scabrous cocktail waitress who knows a bluff when she sees one, but the criminals Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale unmasks tend to be desperate roadside mechanics, ex-hippies in a retirement community, or part of a one-hit-wonder metal band from the early 1990s. It takes a surprising amount of the fun out of Columbo’s premise when the desperado with a chiffon alibi is salt of the earth and not, say, smug senatorial candidate Jackie Cooper, boorish book publisher Jack Cassidy, sniffy heart surgeon Leonard Nimoy, or whoever else wasn’t doing The Muppet Show that week.

A more alarming facsimile is CBS’s Elsbeth, a spin-off of The Good Wife and The Good Fight in which the attorney of the title (played by Carrie Preston) arrives in New York under the consent decree to investigate trumped-up charges of police corruption on behalf of the Department of Justice. Meanwhile she kills an hour every week solving crimes perpetrated by influencers and e-girls while dressed like a combination of Miss Marple and the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Columbo’s drab couture is replaced by polka dots, furry hats, and green tennis skirts; scruffy elan becomes whimsical perk. Elsbeth wins the respect of the stolid NYPD precinct by taking down a startup girlboss who claims to be triggered, a professor terrified of getting canceled for sleeping with his students, and a lesbian power couple. The enemies are again the insiders—now they just prevaricate on cocktail ingredients, smell of skin lotion, and wear Covid masks in the workplace.

Poker Face and Elsbeth are not the only indication that we’re living in a Columbo revival. A new fanbase discovered the series on streaming platforms over the course of quarantine, and there has been a spate of books in the last few years, including, most recently, Amelie Hastie’s Columbo: Make Me a Perfect Murder. Hastie stresses the show’s intertextuality: when we watch Columbo we’re unwatching his predecessors on the page, the popinjay detectives made famous by Ellery Queen. She also suggests that the show is an explicit document of changing media technologies—as when the solution to “Make Me a Perfect Murder” hinges on the “cue blip” that signals the end of a reel of film, or when, in “Playback,” the killer gives himself an alibi by cutting prerecorded CCTV footage into what is supposed to be a live security feed.

“The beauty of television,” Hastie writes, is that “it forever promises the possibility of the return of the familiar.” “Comfort viewing” is how the Columbophile, host of an encyclopedic blog and author of The Columbo Companion (2022), puts it. The rumpled detective—one tough cookie of an eyewitness compares him to “an unmade bed”—offers not the violence and sensationalism of other crime programming but bloodless, soft-boiled spectacle. Writing for the BBC, Shaun Curran notes that the show privileges viewers, putting them firmly in control of the chase by revealing just where the murder weapon lies and laying out the detective’s approach. Stephen Fry tells Curran that “it’s the pleasure of watching a cat go after a mouse.”

But when we think we’re watching the detectives, it means they already have our measure. Columbo is omnipresent, always in the way, scrutinizing the killer’s throwaway utterances and Freudian slips, returning to the room with “just one more thing.” Nearly every episode is built around entrapment. No detail is so insignificant that it can’t be leveraged against the guilty—or, in the case of the junior scientist he falsely arrests by wielding a heady mélange of coincidental car rental records and circumstantial pipe tobacco in “Mind Over Mayhem,” the innocent.

In his book Columbo: Paying Attention 24/7 (2021), David Martin-Jones suggests that the detective’s paranoid style offers a kind of “false reassurance.” Columbo’s association, unlike his militarized counterparts on Law & Order, is forever with peace; “I’d like to see everyone die of old age,” he says in an early episode. But, as Martin-Jones points out, he too is playing the bad cop. Over the course of the series, he

deliberately produces a fake witness (“A Deadly State of Mind” [1975])…falsifies official police records (“A Friend in Deed” [1974]), pre-prepares a confession for a suspect to sign (“A Case of Immunity” [1975])…sanctions physical violence against a suspect to trick him into a confession (“Strange Bedfellows” [1995])…and even plants evidence (“Dagger of the Mind” [1972]).

Columbo is in this sense a sugary apéritif for the hard lessons cop TV asks us to swallow. No wonder we come away from every episode without feeling we’ve really reached him, beyond the odd reminiscence about the time his father worked as tail gunner for a beer truck or hesitation in a fancy restaurant over whether to ask for the red-wine steward or the white-wine steward. But what were we expecting? Meanwhile, he told Mrs. Columbo he’d get her a movie star’s autograph, he needs to get Dog to the vet, and, oh, is that a real Jaguar XK-E? What a beautiful piece of machinery. All my life, I wanted a car like this. Of course, on my salary, forget about it. “Murder’s always depressin’,” he mumbles in “Candidate for Crime,” “but you get over it.”