‘Columbo’ shows the benefits of asking just one more thing

I watched Columbo for the first time in the past year and I *don't* think the format is well known (I was born in the 90s, so it may be a generational thing).

I want to expand on it because it's really unique and amazing.

For those who don't know, each episode opens with us seeing the crime being committed and covered up. We always know who it is, immediately.

Then in the 2nd act we're introduced to Columbo, and we observe him trying to figure out what we already know.

For all of the reasons stated in the parent article, Columbo is one of the most perfect representations of a "real smart person" in media. Another favourite of mine is Jonathan Creek

I rediscovered Columbo a number of years back and playing the original series is my way of having background noise while working. But every time I watch the same episode, I deepen my understanding of asking questions and how they lead to the next. Much of this is how I moved my thoughts into work postmortems, not just asking how this broke, but why did it break, how was it possible.

For added thoughts on Columbo, here's a short breakdown if the tactics used to find the guilty party was legal in court.

https://columbophile.com/2017/05/17/what-happens-when-columb...

> - he works A LOT (usually not shown on screen, but sometimes mentionned by him, and you can infer that a given piece of information took a lot of time to discover)

One episode where they actually showed some of that is the one where the murderer was the architect of a high-rise building. He needed the plans or some time with the building authority to have something explained to him, and he was shown waiting in line for a whole day with all the people applying for building permits, getting pushed from office to office, etc.

Also, he will mention how something he can't work out keeps on bothering him until he has worked it out.

> The Columbo TV show is, in my humble opinion, a masterpiece in disguise.

Why in disguise? It’s just simply a masterpiece, not just as a detective show but also as a vehicle for the actors to enjoy themselves. It made it so much better watching the stars of the time do something they clearly liked. Everyone is in on the gag, the writers, the star, the guests, and the audience. It was more of the next verse in a familiar song than it was a show every episode.

> Conversations are done with no malice, but with that clear objective in mind.

At first, but by the middle of most episodes, he knows all he needs to already and is just playing cat and mouse with the villain, and the audience.

This is only one half of the story, the deductive investigation. The other half is the psychological thriller: we can observe the murderers, who just committed an (almost) perfect crime, and who are strong and confident in the beginning, to slowly crack under the pressure put on them by Columbo, to make mistakes that finally lead to their arrest. This is not just great drama to watch, but also instrumental in Columbo's success, and you can't replicate that when you work on software (or anything other than humans). The points you listed are still useful, of course.

I once heard this described as "pruning the tree of possibilities".

It is a learned skill that is enormously effective. The great thing is you can practice a little at a time.

Could you elaborate on what this means please:

  the character is not in representation

There might have existed a moment where every broadcast television signal on Earth was showing John Fiedler (Mr. Peterson on the Bob Newhart Show, Piglet in Winnie-the-Pooh, a thousand other credits). He was everywhere in the same way people make fun of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

For Columbo side-roles, Vito Scotti is a fun one to spot. I think he was in four or five episodes.

I was once home sick from work and watching daytime TV between naps on the sofa. After I'd been watching an episode of Columbo for about three hours I realised it was actually an episode of Columbo, Diagnosis Murder, and Murder She Wrote (I think) consecutively with a few common bit-part actors and I'd nodded off between them :)

Edit: I remember it as being Dick van Dyck in all of them, but it was a long time ago and that seems unlikely!

Mystery shows are a great place for guest actors since outside of the detective and his sidekick most of the cast is new for each episode. Plus it is fun to see semi-famous actors playing soon-to-be-dead people on shows, or clever murderers.

My wife is a big fan of the British mystery shows like Midsomar Murders and has made comments about how the same actors keep showing up across the different shows.

Ricardo Montalban was also on Columbo before being KHAAAAAAANN

And Leslie Nielsen was in 2 Columbo episodes

I watched Columbo only recently and it seems like every famous person in the 70s guest starred at one point or another.

Ooh a cop show deconstruction where the protagonist has to confront the fact that 75% of his successes were incorrect would be great

Well, in the case of Columbo, you (the viewer) have the benefit of knowing the culprit, because the murder is shown at the beginning of the episode. That's why Columbo is less a "whodunnit" and more a "howcatchem". But yeah, this infallible instinct that leads him straight to the perpetrator is pretty unrealistic...

> Columbo shows the benefits of having reality bent around the assumption that you know the culprit instantly even if you don't know why.

The shows don't show everything, but what they do imply is that Columbo starts by pulling on all the strings and then doggedly chasing the inconsistencies and loose ends. Also, in a lot of cases there could only be a handful of suspects. The main thing they actually is the interplay between Colombo and the culprit, and the rest is (almost always) offscreen.

IMHO, the main weakness of the show are how over-eager the culprits sometimes are act like they're helping Columbo. Not just answer his questions, but play detective with him.

> Is there a single Columbo episode where he asks "just one more thing" of someone who isn't the murderer?

I haven't watched the whole series and don't recall a specific episode, but I'm pretty sure he's done that episodes where the murderer is trying to frame someone. There was also a not-great episode where the owner of a boat-builder was murdered and there were like 5 suspects (this one: https://columbophile.com/2019/08/11/trying-to-salvage-last-s...).

The closest that I can think of is "Columbo Cries Wolf", in that episode he keeps accusing someone (Sean) of murder when he hasn't really committed one (yet). Another huge columbo fan here :-).

Edit: Another one I can think of is "Murder in Malibu", it is really hard to tell who is the murderer in this one. And even Columbo seems unsure for a while.

> Is there a single Columbo episode where he asks "just one more thing" of someone who isn't the murderer

Yep, for example "Fade in to Murder," an episode with William Shatner. Also "Murder by the Book," "A Friend in Deed," etc. The writers played lots of little tricks on the audience with the show. But also sometimes the Lt. simply asked procedural questions to somebody who wasn't involved.

well yeah. the premise of the show is not to discover the perp or their method. i dare say, you’ve missed the point.

in real life, we know that crimes are often “solved” not by evidence at hand but by confession of accomplices. i mean that’s why “snitches get stitches” is a thing. columbo takes that to the next level, extracting the suspects own admission through his apparent bumbling. in every single episode, if the perp had only just kept their mouth shut …

Huh? It's just an article about a TV show the author liked, not business advice.

Also:

> This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Avenger in a raincoat"

The online article headline is just clickbait.

Most of Plato's dialogues are essentially a masterclass in this technique, and if you let it, it can absolutely change how you engage with ideas in a very powerful way.

The very real benefit that you, the ordinary human, can gain from these techniques is an awareness of many of the assumptions you have been making, and how little there actually is to justify them. It's been said that a fish will be the last to discover water. This will show you the proverbial ocean you've been oblivious to swimming in all your life.

It may not be for everyone, but few authors have changed the way I think quite as drastically as reading Plato has.

So you mean "Business Secrets Of The Pharaohs" isn't actually a good book to buy?

i am begging you to please shut up and relax

if you'll recall from that movie they evidently liked it so much they recommended the place to a couple of out of town acquaintances.

on edit: so what I'm saying, is like, word of mouth?

and then?

Derek Jacobi, also amazing in "I, Claudius".

My favorite mystery show of all time is A&E's "A Nero Wolfe Mystery", an incredibly faithful and visually perfect adaptation of some of the best of Rex Stout's many Nero Wolfe mysteries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Wolfe_(2001_TV_series)

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/ANeroWolfeMyst...

One of the best ones is "The Doorbell Rang":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang

>An hour later we were having a pleasant evening. The three guests and I were in the front room, in a tight game of pinochle, and Wolfe was in his one and only chair in the office, reading a book. The book was The FBI Nobody Knows. He was either gloating or doing research, I didn't know which. — Archie Goodwin writing in The Doorbell Rang, chapter 12

>Nero Wolfe is hired to force the FBI to stop wiretapping, tailing and otherwise harassing a woman who gave away 10,000 copies of a book that is critical of the Bureau and its director, J. Edgar Hoover.

>The Doorbell Rang generated controversy when it was published, due largely to its unflattering portrayal of the FBI, its director and agents. It was published at a time when the public's attitude toward the FBI was turning critical, not long after Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover clashed and the Bureau was coming under fire for its investigations of Martin Luther King Jr. Some dismissed the book: National Observer described it as "little more than an anti-FBI diatribe," and Nero Wolfe fan John Wayne wrote Rex Stout a terse note of goodbye after reading the condensed magazine version.: 461 But Clifton Fadiman, quoted in a Viking Press advertisement for The Doorbell Rang, thought it was "… the best of all Nero Wolfe stories."

[...]

>The FBI and The Doorbell Rang

>Researching his book Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors (1988), journalist Herbert Mitgang discovered that Stout had been under FBI surveillance since the beginning of his writing career. Most of the heavily censored pages he was allowed to obtain from Stout's FBI dossier concerned The Doorbell Rang:

>About one hundred pages in Stout's file are devoted to the novel, the FBI's panicky response to it and the attempt to retaliate against the author for writing it. The FBI's internal memorandum for its special agents told them that "the bureau desires to contribute in no manner to the sales of this book by helping to make it the topic of publicity." Orders came from headquarters in Washington that any questions concerning the book should be forwarded to the Crime Records Division, thereby putting book and author in a criminal category.

>An internal memorandum by Special Agent M.A. Jones (name surprisingly not censored) summarized the novel and went on to write a critique for the FBI's top command — a rare "literary" honor accorded to few books in its files ... Following the review came a series of recommendations — first, Stout was designated as a person "not to be contacted" without prior approval by FBI headquarters in Washington ...

>In April 1976, the Church Committee found that The Doorbell Rang is a reason Rex Stout's name was placed on the FBI's "not to contact list", which it cited as evidence of the FBI's political abuse of intelligence information.

To go a bit on a tangent: I love TV shows where it really is shot where it is set, and the location is a big part of the show.

Examples: Magnum P.I. (Hawaii); Miami Vice (Miami); The Equalizer (NYC). Where re(make)(boot)s exist, I'm talking about the originals.

On the other hand, it can be a little annoying when, e.g. in The Good Wife, NYC is standing in for Chicago.

On a third hand, I love how Murder, She Wrote represents many different places with the same backlot sets, throwing in bits of stock or second unit establishing shots.

That's ridiculous. I can't imagine tip toeing around people like that. There's a big difference between being rude and being to the point. What you're describing is manipulative, patronizing, and weird.

> You cannot reasonably pull life lessons from a scripted work of fiction.

I think I know what you are aiming at here, but this statement is way, way too strong. It flies in the face of, well, being human.

Most of we actually learn, for good or for ill, is from stories. Even most of the stuff we don't think of that way.

Of course you can, who is going to stop me, the life lesson police? In fact this is funnily enough a (meta?) lesson of Columbo. You can extract something out of anything. Whether it's true, a lie, fiction, non-fiction, if something is made with intent there's something to learn.

Columbo's acuity lies in his perception and his mind much more so than in the often mundane things he looks at. It's his lack of prejudice and child like curiosity that stands out and that is as true in the world of Columbo as it is in the real one.

And also maybe as a side note, most foundational texts concerning the big questions of life and underpinning most of human civilization are to large extent scripted and deliberately composed works of fiction, from the Vedas and Talmud to Shakespeare.

I take it you’ve never watched “The Wire”

You could use this show to teach people never to talk to the police. Someone pays for it in almost every single episode.