Just one last thing...
Columbo is on TV here at midday, which suits me very well. The new first draft is screaming along. I write in the mornings and never feel like reading at lunch, so Columbo is just about perfect. The show was always my favourite and I started to wonder why. A cynic would find a lot wrong with it. The scripts are shambling and front-heavy and the performances often feel improvised, the actors pedalling furiously like theater actors work-shopping a scene. But these are also the reasons why I find it so charming.
In a 1998 interview Peter Falk said of the character:
In a 1998 interview Peter Falk said of the character:
I think Columbo has become sucessfull thanks to his simplicity. He looks like everybody. Each televiewer can identify himself with him... He is the anti-Sherlock Holmes, even if they both solve the riddles with a lot of talent. Sherlock Holmes smokes a pipe with elegance, but Columbo prefers low-priced cigars.The character was created by William Link and Richard Levinson, who talked about the folly of the show in their book Stay Tuned: An Inside Look at the Making of Prime Time Television:
According to Ellery Queen in his study of detective fiction, Queen's Quorum, Freeman posed himself the following question: "Would it be possible to write a detective story in which, from the outset, the reader was taken entirely into the author's confidence, was made an actual witness of the crime and furnished with every fact that could possibly be used in its detection?"The interview is was excerpted in American Film magazine, March, 1981, and is reproduced in at this comprehensive Columbo fan site.
We had no idea that it would become an eventual trap for us and for all of the other writers who would bang their heads against the wall of the inviolate Columbo format...
We made other decisions those first weeks, the most basic of which was that the series would not be what is known as a "cop show." We had no intention of dealing with the realities of actual police procedures. Instead, we wanted to pay our respects to the classic mystery fiction of our youth, the works of the Carrs, the Queens, and the Christies. We knew that no police officer on earth would be permitted to dress as shabbily as Columbo, or drive a car as desperately in need of burial, but in the interest of flavorful characterization, we deliberately chose not to be realistic...
We would create a mythical Los Angeles and populate it with affluent men and women living in the stately homes of the British mystery novel; our stories would be much closer in spirit to Dorothy L. Sayers than to Joseph Wambaugh. Besides, our rumpled cop would be much more amusing if he were always out of his element, playing his games of cat and mouse in the mansions and watering holes of the rich. We even decided never to show him at police headquarters or at home; it seemed to us much more effective if he drifted into our stories from limbo.
Our final decision was to keep the series nonviolent. There would be a murder, of course, but it would be sanitized and barely seen. Columbo would never carry a gun. He would never be involved in a shooting or a car chase (he'd be lucky, in fact, if his car even started when he turned the key), nor would he ever have a fight. The show would be the American equivalent of the English drawing room murder mystery, dependent almost entirely on dialogue and ingenuity to keep it afloat.
Because of these elements -- and constraints -- Columbo was a difficult show to write for. The format was reasonably new, and many of the writers we approached either didn't understand it or else understood all too well and felt it wasn't worth the effort. We arranged a screening of the second "Columbo" pilot, "Ransom for a Dead Man," for sixty-odd free-lance writers. Such screenings are common; they are a way of introducing writers to a new show. In theory they will whet the appetites of those assembled, who will then hurry home, explode with ideas, and contact the producer with requests for meetings. In our case, only two out of the sixty expressed any interest.