‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’
August 29, 2024 at 07:30PMOver seven seasons on NBC, Columbo put a charming, shambolic gloss on the crime show. Now we’re living in a Columbo-ssaince populated by imitators—Poker Face, for example, and Elsbeth. J.W. McCormack turns a critical eye on the show, explaining why it worked so well but also why the beloved titular character isn’t a hero:
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.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/29/an-ass-backward-sherlock-holmes/
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