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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> we observe him trying to figure out what we already know

Except that that's not really what happens. Somehow, Columbo seems to know immediately who the perpetrator is, and spends the rest of the episode just trying to figure out how to prove it.

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I haven't watched my old DVDs in a while, but my recollection is that (in most episodes, at least) Columbo would explain what detail from early in the investigation made him suspicious of the perpetrator and what evidence and/or reasoning he used to rule out the other suspects along the way.

Yes, that's true. But I always found it a little annoying that based on some pretty scant initial evidence he focused on a single suspect to the exclusion of all other possibilities. In the real world that would be considered pretty bad police work, notwithstanding that it turned out that his initial hunch was always right. That starts to push up pretty hard against my willing suspension of disbelief after a few dozen episodes.

Sherlock Holmes has many flaws, but one thing it does get right is that the titular character repeatedly emphasizes how much of our worldview is defined by assumption, the danger of favoring a preferred hypothesis too early in the investigation, and the importance of systematically eliminating all possibilities until one remains.

We only ever see him question a single suspect, but he's constantly alluding to things he's done offscreen

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