Have you ever watched Columbo?

The fun is in watching Columbo work and the bad guy sweat. Plus, the guest stars.

If you enjoy Peter Falk, watch the original In-laws with Alan Arkin (who just died, sadly).

It's great just for the scenes of 70s Cali.

The original series from the 70s was very good. I especially enjoyed the episodes guest starring Ruth Gordon, Janet Leigh, and Johnny Cash. The movies from the 90s weren’t as good.

[quote]It's great just for the scenes of 70s Cali.

The guest stars are pretty good also. I just finished one with Kim Hunter. I love how Columbo annoys the bad guys.

Columbo is one of the greatest shows of all time, and one of the greatest television charaters of all time. I went on a major binge over the winter. You're making me want to get back into it again! I agree, the 90s stuff is awful. I love the episode with William Shatner playing the television detective who was being blackmailed. His chemistry with Columbo is amazing.

You must be new here, OP 😂

I have the entire series, including the later ones, on disc.

Columbo is a patron saint here.

1960-75 Peter Falk is a total piece of ass

The later seasons* (they're hard to get)

I'm still in the first season. My favorite so far has been the one with the guy from Green Acres and DL fave Suzanne Pleshette. She called Columbo an unmade bed.

Apparently, OP was just released from 60 years in a SuperMax prison.

There's a quite wonderful web site called, "Watch It For Days," which has deep dive analysis of many of the early episodes.

R11 Okay you got me! The pilot episode was the last thing I saw before I “went in”

If you wanted to reboot a Columbo discussion, all here are happy to oblige…but your opening salvo with the awkward “sense of discovery” should have been dropped.

The series was set in Los Angeles, not Colombia .

I don't like the backwards view...give me that Jessica Fletcher lightbulb moment 40 minutes into the show.

R14 = Jack Cassidy as a suave, crypto-gay Columbo villain.

Peter Falk was one in the long tradition of Jews playing Italians.

My dad loved Columbo and we watched all the time. I enjoyed it. Columbo was the total opposite of the kind of TV detectives we were accustomed to seeing.

The one with Blythe Danner features an in utero goop

Years ago I took one of those Hollywood bus tours. When we were at Peter Falk’s house he was there, taking out his trash. He waved. People on the bus were delighted.

An Italian mother is just a Jewish mother with rosary beads

He took out his own trash? How vulgar.

One of my favorites, r20. I believe Cassavetes also directed the episode. Another favorite is the one with Louis Jordan who plays a master chef with a taste for murder. Yeah, the audience learns who the victim is, who committed the murder, the motive for the murder, and if there are any accomplices all in the opening scenes. But there is always a twist at the end as to how Columbo solves the murder. Something the murderer always overlooks. And they never see it coming. Brill!

I watched it when it aired on Sunday nights. There were two other mystery shows which would alternate in that time slot, McCabe and Mrs Miller (Rock Hudson) and McCloud (Dennis Weaver). Although a lot of 70s tv was shit, there was some good stuff, too.

R19, it was big at our house, too. My father used to imitate Columbo all the time.

R25, McCloud was another favorite. I had such a crush on Dennis Weaver in that role. Looking back, I can see why. He was a handsome man with a quiet masculinity that's very hot if you like that sort of thing. I can hear him saying "there ye go" in that Southwestern drawl ... so sexy.

Not McCabe and Mrs. Miller, R25! That was a movie starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. You mean McMillan and Wife.

Colombo is terrific. Glad you've discovered it, op.

Have you never been mellow?

Columbo you say? Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I look forward to what other hidden treasures you may find for us.

Hey you guys—I found a comic gem. It’s about a woman news producer in Minneapolis of all places. Named after the star. Mary something.

Wait until OP discovers that there were two Darrins on Bewitched .

If you like Columbo, you should check out Poker Face on Peacock.

It follows a similar structure and Natasha Lyonne seems to be paying homage to Peter Falk with her performance. Great guests as well, much like Columbo.

I never said that I not heard of Columbo. I had just never watched it. It started in 1971, I was a baby. And like other old detective shows, I don't remember this one being in syndication. Each episode's running time is 75 minutes, which I would assume would be hard to cut down for syndication, plus - according to Wikipedia - and as others have mentioned it was part of some sort of Movie of the Week programming.

Huge fan here, OP, and surprised no threads (IIRC) until yours. Love the sets and 70s nostalgia kick, and it's always a blast to see old Hollywood greats like Anne Baxter, Donald Pleasance, Suzanne Pleshette, and Lee Grant in guest starring roles. And of course, there's Peter Falk and his basset hound dog to round out the fun.

In short, I can't get enough of Columbo.

R34, of course there have been Columbo threads. Here’s a good one.

R35. Thank you! I was too lazy to do a search.

I’ve been watching a bit of McMillan & Wife — it’s a lot more charming and comedic than I would have guessed.

No Columbo threads? Pffft!

R37- I really liked the show, it was very entertaining and Rock was charming and still very handsome to me. I did not like the actress who played his wife very much , but that is because I had read about how egotistical she was. It made me sad to read that RH hated doing the show and was miserable.

The only oldie type shows I’ll watch include McMillan & Wife, the Rockford Files.

R39 is Jane Curtin.

Where is McMillan & Wife streaming?

R42 I watch it every Saturday on Cozi TV

I remember the one about the evil owner of a fat farm who is blackmailed by her chain-smoking niece. She finishes the niece off by handing her some dope laden cigarettes that blur her vision causing her to drive off a cliff and fall to her death. So evil. I’m pretty sure the murderous fat farm owner was played by some aging Hollywood star.

^ The evil owner of the fat farm was Vera Miles.

The younger woman - who was not the niece of Vera Miles' character but the employee of a rival design house - was played by Sian Barbara Allen, who was everywhere in the early to mid 1970s but didn't seem to have much of career after that.

They had wonderful chemistry. And this episode also has Vincent Price, who plays the owner of the rival design house.

Sian Barbara Allen, smoking her last fatal ciggy, on a wonderful episode* of Columbus.

* Vera Miles wears a really bad wig through most of the episode but it doesn't diminish the overall story.

I think Sian Barbara Allen played John-Boy's girl friend on an episode of "The Waltons".

But she didn't fool Grandma Walton...

She did, and I believe she and Richard Thomas dated in real life at the same time.

I never got her supposed appeal.

Sian Barbara Allen was sort of cute-beautiful and had that quirky-girl thing going that was big in the 70s (Kay Lenz, Diane Keaton, et al.). Her hair was completely gorgeous.

Back to Columbo!

In 1979, after several years of hearing Lt. Columbo mention his unseen wife, Mrs Columbo, NBC decided to foist upon us tv audiences a spin-off series, "Mrs Columbo," starring Kate Mulgrew, who was nearly 30 years Peter Falk's junior, and not exactly who we envisioned as his wife.

Falk never publicly endorsed the series and thought it was a bad idea. Audiences agreed. After dismal ratings, producers revamped the series, turning Kate Columbo to Kate Callahan, and renaming it "Kate the Detective," then "Kate Loves a Mystery," before finally getting canceled in 1980.

With one eye closed.

I could not stand Dennis Weaver.Ugh.

R52. I find your post rather limp.

"The movies from the 90s weren’t as good."

I did like the one with Faye Dunaway though

A friend from a long time ago (rich lady) drove a Peugot. Not a convertible, but I remember it being manual shift with the gear shift on the steering column.

Of course, LOVED “Columbo”, and, one that never reached the heights of popularity, but was very entertaining in a similar off-beat manner was “Burke’s Law” starring Gene Barry.

The episode with Anne Baxter is fun, plus there’s an Edith Head cameo.

This Leonard Nimoy one is pretty good! "A Stitch In Crime" - lol.

Always was so fun to see a big name cast against type in Columbo (Or Fantasy Island, or Love Boat, or, or..)

R10 which guy from Green Acres?

Eddie Albert

McMillan & wife - the wife was Susan St. James

I loved Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife. My lifetime partner hated them, especially Columbo.🤣

NBC Sunday Mystery Movie “wheel TV”

The Faye episode was good. I enjoyed Rue in an episode as well, also with Edie McClurg,

Mix-a-lot: crossing threads between Columbo & Rock Hudson

One had one good eye. The other one had a good one-eyed trouser snake.

R65 = Former Congressman Mark Foley

I loved McMillan and Wife. I thought they had a glamorous life. SStJ wanted to leave the show eventually so they killed her off.

Colombo. Couldn’t watch it because the cat and mouse set-up was too unnerving.

I am now on Season 2 and I'm watching the episode with Valerie Harper. I had no idea how hot Dean Stockwell was. I was only familiar with him from Quantum Leap. Beautiful, beautiful man.

Dean Stockwell started out as the male Shirley Temple - an utterly adorable child actor. His career was vast. He was so beautiful, R68! (You might want to mute the accompanying music to this youtube video but it shows his range.)

I prefer subreddits “Do you ever watch Columbo nude?” and “Do you ever jerk hard to early Columbos?”

I'm up to episode with Anne Baxter as actress Nora Chandler. Anne looks amazing and is dressed beautifully. I love her voice.

I loved this show as a kid. About 10 years ago I bought all the seasons one by one ended I had the entire collection.

r71 - Edie, let me see the ombre chiffon.

The one with Vera Miles and Vincent Price is pretty campy, too

^ Vera Miles beauty mark and wig are signs that this episode is going to be huge campfest!

And that's before Vera's character and Vincent's character start trading bitchy insults...

"And Edie darling, if you'd like massage my pussy while you fit me with this beautiful chiffon, I'm fine with that, darling."

Robert Culp got to play a lot of different parts in a lot of different episodes.

[quote] Was He Sleeping on the Casting Couch?

I spy with my little eye…

Robert Culp’s cock!

One of my favorite of all Columbo bits was call girl Valerie Harper mistaking him for her scheduled john

Actually, Columbo didn't usually "make them sweat". Almost always the murderer, who always thought he/she was too clever by half, mistook Columbo for a bumbling fool for most of the episode. There was always a wonderfully nasty moment when he/she realised the awful truth. The exception was the episode with Lee Grant, who uniquely respected him from the start, and who had to be caught a different way from everyone else as a result.

In the first season, we not only saw the murder and knew who did it, but the kicker was that we also saw the clue that would let Columbo pin the murderer--often as early as during the murder. Only it was always well disguised, so the fun was trying to spot the solution to the case before he did. Evidently this was too difficult for the writers to keep up, because after a while they stopped doing it.

I always remember Columbo's words of wisdom in the episode where there was a murder at MENSA: "Always tell a beautiful woman she's smart, and a clever woman she's beautiful."

Jack Cassidy played the villain in a few of them

Apparently, Jack rolled around on the casting couch too

R82, He shouldn’t have lit that last cigarette.

Yeah, sometimes it's not the sex that gets you...

it's that last post-coital ciggy

Peter Falk's second wife made him cast her in multiple episodes as different characters. When his health crashed there was some funny business going on.

[quote] Danese was Falk's conservator, and, allegedly, according to his daughter Catherine, prevented some of his family members from visiting him, did not notify them of major changes in his condition, and did not notify them of his death and funeral arrangements. Catherine later encouraged the passage of legislation, called Peter Falk's Law, that provides guidelines that guardians and conservators for an incapacitated person must comply with regarding visitation rights and notice of death. As of 2016 more than ten states had enacted such laws.[

Miss Clark looking *ever* so stylish!

^ That's a good episode

I love that episode

Susan Clark goes through a Sybil-like transformation from mousy frau to 1970s street 'ho...

after she's liberated by murdering her brother

Did anyone mention one of the better early 90s episodes with none other than Dee Dee Halls as the major shareholder of a Playboy-like dirty magazine empire?

SPOILER OP: It's one of the very few times Columbia is fooled, but he gets there in the end!

Falk's wife was awful when given any substantial part to play. Tbh Falk's performance in the later episodes is pretty crappy and just running off nostalgia. His lazy line delivery, buffoonery and general overacting really do a disservice to the show and the character.

I do like the only episode he actually wrote though, starring Miss Faye Dunaway, who won an Outstanding Guest Performance Emmy.

[quote]starring Miss Faye Dunaway, who won an Outstanding Guest Performance Emmy.

Which she deserved for actually giving a charming performance.

I liked the one with Patrick McGoohan and Rue McClanahan although I wish they'd given Rue an episode where she was the killer, in this one she's killed off near the start.

R92 completely agree, she stole the show and looked terrific. Only downside is the too frequent exposition-heavy scenes with Columbia and his pal at the chilli house

R90, I like that one. It also features out gay actor Ian Buchanan as the Hugh Hefner clone!

We knew the killers from the start of each episode. Sometimes we knew the specifics of the method of the murder and sometimes we did not. It was a good idea to have Detective Colombo play the cat and mouse game as he uncovered the evidence.

Peter Falk wasn't the first Columbo. He was the third.

Columbo--then known as Fisher--was featured in the short story "Dear Corpus Delicti," which was published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1960. That same year, Levinson and Link adapated their short story into "Enough Rope," an episode of the live drama anthology Chevy Mystery Show. Bert Freed played Columbo, who was a secondary character to the villainous Dr. Flemming (played by Richard Carlson).

A year later, Levinson and Link expanded "Enough Rope" into a stage play called Prescription: Murder. It starred Joseph Cotten as Flemming, Agnes Moorehead as his wife, and Thomas Mitchell as Columbo. Sadly, the play never made it to Broadway, in part because Thomas Mitchell died of cancer in 1962.

Sometimes they had Columbo onto the culprit a bit too quickly to be believable but there are very few stinkers for the original run.

Mrs Colombo was A MAN 👱‍♂️

as was Mrs Columbo

There might not even have been a Mrs. Columbo, with her activities and eccentricities and rotating cast of quirky relatives. All that could have been a ploy that Columbo used to get the suspect to lower his or her guard while also distracting them. Notice he usually tells those anecdotes while he's grilling the suspect, which he refers to as "just clearing up one or two things."

There was a Mrs Columbo, she was on that cruise with him and all the staff saw her. That woman who stalked him to kill his wife also saw him with his wife.

He may or may not have had kids but he definitely had a Mrs Columbo

[quote]There was a Mrs Columbo

Or she was merely a delusion...

Oh, you're right; I forgot about the cruise. That's deflating! I think they should have kept it ambiguous.

Thank to this thread, I’ve been watching Season 2. It’s free on Amazon, although unfortunately with ads. The re-mastering, or restoration or whatever they did, is beautiful. The show looks better than it did on TV in 1972.

I love it! Especially the scenes filmed on the streets of LA. This is the Los Angeles we in the rest of the country saw nightly on various TV shows that came to feel so familiar that, the first time I visited, it felt home even though I’d never been there before. I want to move to that LA, purplish brown haze of smog and all.

I miss shows like this – shows about rich families in big mansions with various intrigues, aristocratic matriarchs who act like Margaret Dumont, playboy sons and gold-digging wives, everyone very well dressed and generally living as though it were 1940, not 1972.

^^^^ "... so many waiters' eyes ...."

Sorry, wrong thread.

Okay, I've just started the Vera Miles/Vincent Price episode. OMG this is great. 😁🤣😂🥰💖💝

Update, I'm on season 5. The show is still somewhat fun, but not as good as the earlier seasons. I think what I'm most annoyed with is that they kept casting the same people over and over again. How many times can Jack Cassidy or Robert Culp murder someone? At least the one I'm about to start has Diane Baker in it.

I just watched Columbo Goes on a Cruise aka "the Robert Vaughn episode" from Season 4. Sadly, it was 2.5 years too early to be a crossover with The Love Boat (not to mention being the wrong network), but I kept wanting to see Capt. Steubing, not to mention Bernie Kopell as the ship's doctor, a character with a prominent role in the story.

I can't stand Jack Cassidy. I've never understood his appeal. Robert Culp, on the other hand, was a sexy man well into middle age. Lean, fit and handsome, he's one of my favorite villains.

Have you never been mellow?

R110 I like Patrick Vaughn

Wasn't Bing Crosby the network's first choice to play Lt. Columbo?

And Peter Falk was to sing “White Christmas” 🎄

Peter Falk was a great crooner

I’ve watched it out of my fetish for 70s tv shows. It sucked.

I have one unseen episode saved for a very bad day. I think it's the one with Valerie Harper. Its an in case of emergency episode. Upon the death of a pet or loved one.

Colombo, Sri Lanka.

[quote] “Columbo”, and, one that never reached the heights of popularity, but was very entertaining in a similar off-beat manner was “Burke’s Law” starring Gene Barry.

Gene Barry coincidentally being the very first Columbo murderer