Columbo

I'm not going to review every episode of every TV show I watch, because that would be ridiculous. (Unfortunately, I watch way too much TV...) [Also, yes, for all you grammar geeks out there, I do know you're not supposed to put a comma before "because," but I feel like the sentence needs the comma to have the desired rhythm. I'm sometimes loose with punctuation that way. In the future, I will not be apologizing for this.] However, I think I'll review a show as a whole after it's over.

I recently finished "Columbo." It was a pretty good little show. I call it "little" not to, well, belittle it, but because the world it created was very small. I like (or, rather, I think I like) shows that are big--I love the world-building. Complicated mythologies, intricate storylines, complex characters, the works. The problem is that I demand perfection of such shows. An unhealthy amount of my memory space is devoted to remembering the details of fantasy universes, so a big show sure as heck better not break their own rules at any point. Also, I don't like the feeling that the showrunners are making things up as they go. Of course we the viewers, and possibly the characters, are exploring the world of the show one episode at a time, but the world itself should feel self-existent. If you introduce later something that would have changed a previous episode had it existed then without giving a convincing reason for why it is only now showing up, I am going to be disappointed. This is a real problem, since showrunners are always making things up as they go. That's how TV works. Therefore, big shows are hit-and-miss. When they're good, they're great, but it takes a lot to be good.

That's where small shows come in. The world of "Columbo" consists entirely of the titular character, his dog, his car, and his perpetually off-screen wife. That's it. In later seasons, there were one or two semi-recurring policemen in bit parts, but they were little more than extras. The plot of basically every single episode can be summarized as, "Columbo catches murderer." (Off the top of my head, I can think of only one exception, and the plot of that one was "Columbo catches would-be murderer moments before the murder occurs.") The only thing the show needed to do to maintain a consistent mythology was to keep the character of Columbo himself consistent.

They did a pretty good job of that, though I will complain that in later seasons, he seemed less "Sherlock Holmes playing Jacques Clouseau" and more just "Jacques Clouseau." The later seasons generally seemed inferior to the earlier seasons. The plots weren't quite as tight, the plans not quite as clever, the pacing sometimes a bit slow, but there were some good moments. The would-be murderer case was a particularly effective deviation from the usual formula.

The earlier episodes were often quite clever, and I think, more than anything, this is what I liked about the show. I am now convinced that I could never get away with murder, or probably any other crime. I would never actually think of everything. At first, I didn't like the "opening with the murder" format the show employs because it takes the mystery out of it. You know from the start whodunit. The more I watched, though, the more I became sold on the style. Starting with the crime gives the viewer a chance to catch the perpetrator's mistakes before Columbo does--to say, "Don't leave those fingerprints on the door!" (Not that you're rooting for the murderer, but you know what I mean.) Usually, I didn't see many. For the most part, the murderers were pretty wily. Then Columbo gets to the scene and within five minutes finds some crucial clue that's lying out in the open that you never thought of.

My conclusion is that if I ever wanted to commit murder, I would have to either a) Think of an incredibly intricate, complicated, Rube-Goldberg mess of a plan that would account for absolutely everything, which I would be so proud of that I would just have to brag about it to someone, which of course would blow the whole thing b) Actually cause an accident. Not make it look like an accident, but actually cause a legitimate accident and hope the jury forgives me or c) Straight-up just shoot the guy in broad daylight and then immediately get on a plane to some country without an extradition treaty and never come back. Those are the only possibilities.

Why am I thinking about how to get away with murder?? And is doing so better or worse than spending a lot of time thinking about what life would be like as a starship captain? And if I were a starship captain, how would that change the murder plot? And has this entire post suddenly devolved into an argument against watching TV, period?

Anyway, it was fun to match wits with Columbo, even if I usually lost. In fact, it was probably fun to match wits with Columbo precisely because I usually lost. If I had usually won, the predictability of the form would have made the show go stale very quickly. As it was, the form provided a certain comforting steadiness, especially now that the show is over.

Lt. Columbo isn't gone. He'll be back in a moment to ask just one more thing. There is always one more thing, one more murder, one more case, even if I don't get to see it.