Is it because he’s always nailing smug weirdo rich fuckbags? Is it the peter falk hard carry? Is it because despite being canonically a cop he does anything but act like a cop?
Is everything downstream of columbo an attempt to erase his legacy as the hound of wealthy sociopaths?
Is Columbo a demigod?
One reason it’s so good is it doesn’t rely on twists like other mystery type stories. You always see the crime happening in the first few minutes with full confirmation on who did it. So the audience has all the information already, you’re watching Columbo put it together and trap the criminal. So you’re not figuring out the mystery alongside Columbo, rather, it’s like he’s breaking down the whole story for you. It’s really formulaic, but it’s usually fun and varied.
He’s also just not a normal cop. He’s a weird small man who’s annoying and talks about eating chili. He’s usually only shown solving crimes committed by completely vile smug assholes. My favorite episode is the one where Leonard Nimoy plays a surgeon who wants to steal his colleague’s research out of a lust for fame. So Doctor Nimoy comes up with a plan to purposefully botch his colleague’s heart surgery, but a nurse finds evidence of the plan, so Doctor Nimoy kills her with a tire iron and makes it look like a random heroin addict killed her. I love this episode because multiple times Columbo drops the dopey goofy detective thing and lapses into anger. He tells the surgeon just how despicable the whole thing is. I guess that’s the good thing about Columbo, is that he has the outer vibe of an everyman. He’s just some gremlin man from New York who talks funny and has an invisible wife. But at his core he has a sense of justice and what he despises most are abuses of power.
He’s not a real cop is what’s good about it. He’s a heroic character who doesn’t have a real life analogue, so he’s a cop out of writing convenience. He’s more like a whimsical spirit of justice than an LAPD pig.
Another great character thing is that he loves his wife. Like, this shouldn’t be a huge thing, but look at every. single. cop. show. it’s wife hate and marital strife. Look at basically every comedic thing a boomer or gen xer ever touched, it’s a load bearing amount of “hate my wife” jokes.
Columbo out here just, clearly adoring his spouse and it’s just… i dunno i love it.
He’s completely wholesome, but a chameleon gremlin with the prescience of like, Paul Atreides and a disposition to ruining the untouchable class.
He fears his invisible wife’s power and her vast stores of relative-proferred knowledge. He knows better than to displease the Wife.
It’s definitely not just that the crooks are rich. Not that I watch a ton of cop shows, but I’ve seen many episodes of shows like Law and Order where rich people get taken down. The writers are smart enough to know that’s what people want to see, and it’s part of how copaganda works.
I think the thing that makes Columbo feel so different is that every episode is like an intellectual duel between Columbo and the murderer, and the tone is usually pretty light and sometimes comedic. Then there’s Columbo himself; I know he’s technically a cop but he feels more like he’s from the tradition of Holmes or Poirot. He’s a detective because he’s an eccentric. And the fact that he’s seemingly given such a wide berth by the other police makes him feel independent, like Poirot or Holmes, and not part of the police power structure.
Columbo is like sober-and-in-a-stable-marriage Harrier DuBois
OK, so he doesn’t take off his pants to make a 3-foot jump when he could have just as easily climbed down like a normal jagoff anywhere in the course of the show, but you know what I mean.
he goes after rich people who think they are untouchable, he doesn’t use violence or aggression (except in the first tv movie), he hates guns and doesn’t carry
I think it’s in large part because Columbo isn’t really trying to portray a “real” police officer, but instead a pleasant fantasy. Shows that try to emulate what’s real are also usually fantasies, but they don’t portray it like that, instead trying to portray abuses as “good” or “necessary”, and dealing with serious topics only on the surface level.
Columbo doesn’t wear the uniform most cops do, he doesn’t really do “beat cop” type activities, he’s the kind of cop most people will never interact with. He also has a very distinct and recognizable persona and style. If you take a look at the worse cop shows, the police officers tend to be very similar, less distinct.
Also, I think that “The Wire” is pretty good, despite being a cop show. It tries to be real, but it does a much better job than most cop shows. It’s not all black and white, and doesn’t hide a lot of the issues the way other shows do.
The wire was ACAB throughout. Every cop in that show was either a criminal themselves, corrupt, incompetent and almost always extremely racist. The one (arguably) good cop in the entire show gets forced out.
It did a great job of showing how the police and the gangs are two different criminal organisations with their own heirarchies filled with actual human beings.
Season 3 was the highlight of the entire show, watching the police become the “muscle” for the drug dealers.
I’d go as far as to say it was a crime show, not a cop show.
Even the “decent” cops in The Wire are terrible people outside of policing. They’re constantly cheating on their partners, drinking and driving, or looking the other way.
McNulty was a terrible person the entire series who committed a series of crimes being saved by his badge every time and whose only decent quality was being a passable detective willing to tackle big cases.
He even put himself on the level of the completely irredeemable fuck ups like
Major Spoilers
Herc when he gets Bodie killed in the final season because his illegal case building meant he had to pick him up in the middle of the street instead of doing any degree of witness protection
I was thinking more Bunk and Kima. They’re serious about solving homicides but outside of work they’re just more functional versions of McNutty. Daniels could also be considered decent, but he likely built his career on top of dirty money.
Really ACAB. Bodie killed one of his best friends, sold heroin, and still was less of a shit than the entire Baltimore PD lmao
Bodie was so conflicting because he showed zero remorse and the little bits of humanity we saw died when he killed his friend who was also still a CHILD at the time and just went on business as usual.
But he still didn’t deserve what happened to him,
ᅟsp
Death by cop in the dumbest way possible
And then McNulty tries to do the exact same shit the day after.
This is the face of the show and the cops in general for most of the seasons too, the reference point for cop behaviour, he’s even portrayed as one of the “better cops” when Omar gets arrested.
Kima was the most human of them all and Bunk was just sad. It felt like as long as he kept being one of the more / only competent detectives noone would ever try get him to avoid liver failure in the next few years.
If we start Prez discourse we could get a 200+ comment hexbear thread going.
Kima was the most human of them all
Det. Greggs beats down a physically restrained “suspect” not once but twice
My first time through the Wire I knew very little about copaganda. Mildly embarrassed about that now, although the show presents plenty of ACAB counternarrative.
David Simon comes off pretty penitent in We Own This City when spilling the tea on cop brutality and lawlessness so that’s a plus
Det. Greggs beats down a physically restrained “suspect” not once but twice
Hey ACAB applies to them all. I was referring to Kima’s personal story being about commitment and compromise in relationships and eventual parenthood instead of what all the other cops were up to. Still a bastard but we see some personal growth and a welcome break from the self-destructive behavior of the other characters.
Probably all those factors, Columbo would still work as a character (or would be even improved), if he’s was a police officer/people’s militia under dictatorship of the proletariat.
There’s a Chinese show that’s basically this. It’s called In the Name of the People
Is it available subtitled in english? If so it might make for an interesting regular feature on the hextube.
Yes, I believe the whole thing is on YouTube with subtitles
Oh awesome! I’m certain there will be cultural references and contexts that I’ll be missing but it sounds like a good time.
Because Columbo would have solved the Kira case
My favorite thing about the show is that while often times maybe you’re not gonna catch everything columbo catches, and some stuff can be contrived, the show is still begging you to pay attention. If you were impressionable and going to model whatever came on your TV, being observant and thoughtful would be the outcome for watching this. Columbo always notices details that are amiss - the idea that if something like a murder has taken place, but has been staged to seem accidental or otherwise non-criminal, there are tells. there are signs. there are disturbances. inconsistencies between people, alibies, and the truth of an event - and i think i love that. It’s a good moral to try and impart, but i think it might be lost on decades of boomers, gen xers, millenials, and zoomers memeing too hard, but i also think it’s right there to pick up on if you’re willing
Columbo is a cop but Columbo isn’t a cop show. It’s a twist on the classico murder mystery but otherwise falls into the same Holmesian lineage of poirot and Jessica Fletcher. It’s a vibe thing
Probably helps that Peter Falk is like a real big-screen cinema actor and an absolutely fantastic one at that and that a lot of the early episodes are also directed by actual movie directors and not TV directors.
besides him going after rich people, he also goes after a police commissioner or something like that, and a CIA agent I think.
one of the best episodes is one where he goes after a guy who runs a private intelligence outfit and even tries to buy him out with a gigantic ass salary
oh yea, that is a good one. I also forgot but there also one where he also goes after like some leader of a military academy? I think it just nice watching him pretty much taking down people, who normally would be untouchable or just given a slap on the wrist and just getting away with it. Also with him toying with them as well at times.
I want to see Colombo versus Malory Archer.
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I’ve got a real soft spot for Poirot. I think he’s in Columbo’s level
I love Poirot! Just finished watching the entire series recently. There’s some really great British murder mysteries series out there–some of my more modern favorites that I’d recommend to just about anyone are Endeavour, Vera, and Foyle’s War. The mysteries in Foyle’s War tend to be less complex than the other two, but it’s more than made up for by Michael Kitchen being perfect in the lead role and the fact that the period setting (WWII in a coastal English town) isn’t just an aesthetic choice but is integral to the plot of both individual episodes and the series as a whole. For all of them, the production values are just on another level compared to the slop churned out week after week, year after year for American police procedurals.
I have tried watching Poirot. He’s nowhere near as charismatic as Columbo, and him caring about the law rather than about justice makes him rather unlikeable.
I suppose, I will give Poirot one more try after I finish 17 Moments of Spring.
We need a modernized anime Columbo
please dont troll this most serious of threads
I’m sorry! :( I was actually being serious though.
well i was! I would at least raise my eyebrows and watch an episode if it was a thing. I think columbo without an extant peter falk to play him is a dead end road, but there are guys and gals out there that probably have what it takes to step into the role, and i’d watch it at least once
There’s a Columbo’s son which is the antagonist of the week in one of part 2 Lupin III episodes (1977-1981), funnily enough.
Apparently that’s episode 72, “The Skateboard Murder Mystery” or “You’re Sapphired!”, and the kid’s name is Bolonco also spelled Boronco. So I guess I still have 30 episodes left of Part 2 before it gets to the good* part!
*Lupin III is good throughout, this is just a joke.
I gotta watch columbo
you really do
It aired before the American TV industry got in bed with the FBI to demonize unions by portraying union lawyers as a pack of murderous criminals.
