The Columbo TV show is, in my humble opinion, a masterpiece in disguise.
The basic scheme of each episode is well known.
But the beauty is in the details.
The few minutes in each episode where the character is not in representation and you can grasp a few moments of his mental process.
That's where you discover that:
- he takes NOTHING as assumed
- 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)
- he always starts from the ground up, asks (what seem to be) stupid questions
- All of his actions are here to close the options. Conversations are done with no malice, but with that clear objective in mind.
I do a lot of the Columbo way at work, and it works surprisingly well.
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
Just started rewatching the JC catalog last week. The tech seems a bit dated (big cellphones, cars, etc) but the stories generally hold up well (so far, and FWIR). I do wish there was some effort to remaster/restore/polish up the video. What we have (and what I've seen rebroadcast) just looks a bit... washed out.
Also, I watch with headphones on, and it's amazing to me how much food people eat, and how loud they are, in many TV shows. Just went through Blue Murder (also with Caroline Quentin in it) and every episode there's one or two roundtable shots of the group eating... loudly.
But yeah, JC is good, and I'll be watching another one tonight :)
Early Jonathan Creek is a masterpiece. In particular, the "Black Canary" special is possibly the finest two hours of television ever constructed. I often think if they had released it as a movie it would have been a hit.
I agree with you about the picture quality. Black Canary from the DVD is really very noisy and grainy - to the point where I actually made my own "remastered" version by doing some basic color correction and digital noise reduction. It looks a lot better.
Some modern televisions have pretty good built-in modes for doing noise reduction and improving the color, try experimenting with those. (Just don't leave it on all the time.)
The overly loud eating you hear might have been overdubbed in post-production by foley artists (sound effects technicians).
Read the closing credits at the end of each show and you may find a foley artist was part of the production (and therefore the likely person who created recordings of simulated eating sound effects, to sync with the filmed visuals of the actors eating)
JC did something really cool in doing specials years after the original broadcasts that kind of jump back in with Jonathan and where he is in his life now.
The tech in those is a bit more modern (I think the most recent is in something like 2015)
Based on this thread I'm watching Columbo now. Law and Order Criminal Intent is directly derivative of this. I see a lot of Vincent D'Onofrio's character in Columbo, especially how he gets into the houses and offices and messes with their personal effects to disarm and disrupt them.
It's a generational thing yeah. Even in Holland Columbo was always on rerun. Everyone born in the 70s would know the format because it takes only one episode to know it :)
> 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.
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.
> - 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.
I could be mixing it up with another episode but I think that was the one where he needed to get a permit to excavate a concrete foundation under the pretense of looking for a body (to bait the murderer into subsequently depositing the body there after it had already been excavated and searched).
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.
It's also my favorite background noise while working. The only problem is I keep getting distracted as I see new things.
It's funny how much more character development shows had back then. For example Columbo talking to a parking attendant about something random that has absolutely nothing to do with the case. Or scenes of people walking down hallways, not saying anything, just strolling. I like the slow pace so much more than today's TV.
Also today's shows always feel so overblown. Crack investigative teams operating from luxury offices that could double as a nightclub, wisecracking all day. Earplug 'comms' with unlimited range. Explosions and gunshots in every episode.
Real police work is not like this. I feel like the shows of the 70s were a lot more realistic. Columbo, Hill Street blues etc.
Even though Columbo was not really a realistic depiction of detective work, it did make it feel like work and not just competence porn.
Then in the 80s the whizzbang started with Miami Vice and its blue night skies, cops driving Ferraris etc.
The good shows these days take a step back from this. Like The Wire. But must of them are just fluff IMO.
Possibly this is an American phenomenon? I can recommend the British show Happy Valley for a very realistic depiction of police work, that is no less tense and dramatic for it.
> 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.
There’s a great episode with Donald Pleasance that Falk even went on Johnny Carson to promote. I got the same feeling you describe. Falk was an actor’s actor and fun and satisfying to work with.
Not sure if it is the correct english translation, but in French "being in representation" means that you are not yourself. Instead you behave with social constraints or with a hidden goal in mind.
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.
One thing might interest this community - the amusing amount of common actors between the Columbo and Star Trek series (and Quantum Leap, if you want to extend this).
Obviously Shatner and Nimoy, but also the lovable John Fiedler (of 12 Angry Men fame, as the possessed Mr. Hengist in TOS's "Wolf in the Fold" and a cardiologist in Columbo) and the fantastic Theodore Bikel (as the murderer in Columbo's "Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case", and as Worf's adoptive dad in TNG's "Family"). Ed Begley Jr, whose father was in 12 Angry Men, is in ST:VOY as Henry Starling, and in Columbo's "How to Dial a Murder" as Officer Stein. Laurence Luckinbill is Sybok (STrek V) and the victim in Columbo's "Make Me a Perfect Murder". Michael Strong: Columbo's "are you a witness to what he just did?" scene, and TOS's Dr Korby.
There are metric tons of links with minor characters, for example James Greene in the Columbo classic "Columbo Goes to the Guillotine" is also in TNG and DS9.
There are other amusing non-Star Trek but sci-fi-related coincidences too, like Robert Culp (IMO the best Columbo villain, a first-rate actor) voicing Dr. Breen in Half-Life 2.
Obviously you could do this with absolutely any TV show, since there aren't that many actors in America, but this is a fun exercise and fans of both shows have a lot to be happy about. And if you're a fan of one, and start watching the other (I started with Columbo, possibly unlike most people here), try spotting common actors as a fun exercise.
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!
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.
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.
It's almost always the 'biggest B-list actor' who did the murder (on Midsomer and others). And over the years I've learned to recognize these people across shows. Had to argue with my wife that the murder victim in a Jonathan Creek episode we saw the other night was Frank from Vicar Of Dibley. I won :)
Columbo shows the benefits of having reality bent around the assumption that you know the culprit instantly even if you don't know why. Is there a single Columbo episode where he asks "just one more thing" of someone who isn't the murderer?
> 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...).
> 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.
I've watched most Columbos multiple times and I think that's by design. Columbo plays dumb, and tries to make the suspect think that Columbo can easily be misdirected or manipulated; so suspects volunteer to "help" Columbo in order to protect themselves. This overconfidence on the part of suspects' is deliberately engineered by Columbo.
It also plays in the consistent "Columbo vs. the highly educated upper-class" motif, where the "dumb" cop who earns $11k a year asks for help from millionaires who are "much smarter and more worldly" than him.
(I don't think there are any major spoilers below that would ruin the show, but I do reveal some Columbo plot.)
Okay, fine, Last Salute to the Commodore is an exceptional case; it's widely regarded, along with the two later Ed McBain ones, as way out-of-character for the show.
Usually when he confronts a character who has something to hide but isn't the murderer, he's over-the-top friendly and apologetic, like with the affair in Columbo Goes to College or the victim's bride in Double Shock. There are probably some better examples.
Yeah, the usual formula is that the culprit tries to demonstrate innocence by helping with the investigation until Columbo gets too close, and then abruptly shuts up. I think that mostly speaks to Columbo's style, though; it's realistic that a murderer would do one or the other given how they're being questioned.
I'd still maintain that the biggest weakness of the show is that Columbo almost never has the wrong suspect, and sometimes he has the correct suspect far too early (why does he read the palm in Death Lends A Hand?).
Native English speaker, would give the same rough definitions for each phrase if asked[0], but for whatever reason I read the GP and didn't think it was out of place at all. Immediately got the intended meaning. Even after having it pointed out it seems fine to me, in fact I can't really see the "control" meaning even though I know it should be there.
[0]: Though I'd use "pulling the strings" and "pulling at threads".
“Pulling on the strings” has a different meaning from “pulling strings”. That may not seem reasonable, but it’s an expression that is phrasal-verb adjacent, and a single preposition can alter the meaning.
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...
I really like Psych as well, but its formula is to always have them think they’ve solved the case quickly in act 2 only to find that person dead at the end of act 3. That being said, I don’t care. Just the chemistry and comedic timing of Sean and Gus is enough to keep me coming back for more.
Yes, I should have been more specific; I meant "you, the detective" and not "you, the viewer". I'm speaking as a huge Columbo fan, btw; I've seen most of the episodes multiple times, and last year I watched the entire box-set in order.
I too am a Columbo fan- since I was little and watched them on TV-- its been a few years since I last watched the box set... but I'm pretty certain there are a several episodes where Columbo does not know for sure who the murderer is right off. I also seem to recall one where he is unable to catch the murderer?
You might be thinking of Columbo Cries Wolf, or It's All In The Game. He does resolve both cases, but they're unconventional (and both from the 80s/90s revival of the series).
I think the episode 'now you see him' shows off what he does best. He basically breaks down each part of the murder and runs all of the permutations. In one segment he shows how the victim must have known the murderer because of the position of the body using that method. Only some make sense. Then finds the only suspects in the area that fit the profile of being able to do it. Motive, means, and opportunity. In that one he even had means and opportunity before motive.
I seem to recall one episode where Columbo kept bouncing between three equally motivated suspects. I wasn't a big fan of the show then, but it struck me as an interesting device.
I might be wrong and it is an exception that tests the rule.
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.
I don’t know if it is still on but I’m the US there was a show where they followed actual detectives.
The bad guy gets away because they don’t have enough evidence.
People confess when there is hardly any evidence (a lot).
The detectives realize they were wrong.
Lots of things happen.
Detectives being wrong isn’t a very dramatic like you might think. Many operate like scientist, gathering data, testing their theory along the way and adjusting.
One of the most interesting episodes was when they investigated a murder of a local girl in a park. Whole department assigned to work it because her ex and the main suspect was a guy who was a local criminal who had done time for murder before and was suspected in other cases.
Lots of misc evidence pointed at bad guy, but not enough to prosecute him, just lots of elements that pointed to him. Bad guy was smart enough not to talk to the police when they brought him in.
Near the end they got back some cell phone location info ... in the park that night wasn't the bad guy... but her current boyfriend (the local good college boy) phone was there. He claimed he was elsewhere / hadn't seen her that night...
You are probably thinking of the show First 48. I was thinking of this exact show when reading the comments here about how Columbo plots rely too heavily on the murderer trying to help out Columbo with his investigation in order to seem innocent. It may seem unrealistic or stupid of them to do so, but if you watch shows like First 48 which follow homicide detectives around and show these interrogations, it happens A TON. More than I expected to be sure. I don't think Columbo is unrealistic in that respect.
VERY surprising how many people talk to the cops and give them all sorts of information that the cops then disprove, stories that make no sense, or even hand them info / leads that leas right back to them so on.
I want to say maybe the folks in a Columbo episode wold be more likely to talk to a lawyer first / not talk but ... Martha Stewart talked herself into jail...
I had it happen to me directly - I get accused, have no idea what is going on, accuser get’s in court, makes more accusations that don’t make sense. We follow up to get enough details to try to figure out specifically what is being accused (date and times, for one) - and lo and behold, the evidence (911 call log) when provided + security video on my side (that they knew I had!!!) showed that not only was it completely impossible that it happened, but that the accuser was perjuring themselves and had committed the additional crime of filing a false police report.
I did jury duty and despite all the complexity of the legal system .... the cases were pretty straightforward and I think we're all very lucky criminals are pretty dumb.
Yup, though it’s just most criminals that are dumb in my experience. There are some that are quite smart and also find themselves committing crimes. They are a real bear to catch and prosecute.
A lot of complexity in the legal system is so that at least most of the time even if someone is smart and can hire someone who has built their career on covering their ass, deflecting blame, understanding and using all the technicalities, obfuscating the facts as much as possible when not in their favor, calls to emotion when it helps them, calls to reason when it helps them, and all the other tricks (aka high end defense attorneys), we still end up with outcomes that aren’t clearly obviously wrong eventually.
And at least most of the time if someone is a real dumbass and can’t afford someone to at least help them pull their foot out of their mouth (aka low end defense attorneys), they don’t get railroaded and we end up with outcomes that are clearly obviously wrong either. Most of the time.
Tough to do a show on that considering the time span involved but it would be interesting if they ever covered an episode where that happened.
Of course the show is not a broad coverage of the detectives process. The detectives featured almost always are the most senior detectives and of course they cover situations on camera where ... maybe somethings won't happen.
The cases featured in the show they almost never actually end up prosecuting anyone without quite a bit of evidence. They're not really the kind of cases you hear about where someone is just prosecuted on hearsay and one bit of evidence and so on, that i'm sure is by design (for the tv show). Detectives show a lot of skepticism about what people too, that was interesting. They follow those leads but those featured seem highly flexible.
I wonder how much of the bad prosecutions / situations are about the prosecutor rather than detectives.
I am not sure now which series you have in mind here. But in many shows, actual evidence is super flimsy, if you think about it. Obvious issue is that such analysis tend to kill the fun, so we don't do it. This is supposed to be entertainment.
The prime example is Sherlock Holmes who points at murder based on bit of dust caught of hat or some such. Any show where capture is based on subtle clues or manipulative trics would likely lead to a lot of false convictions. Or the ones where detectives mistreat suspects until they admit guilt - false guilt of admission from mistreated prisoner is actually a thing (especially when they are also sleep deprived or mentally challenged).
I've entertained the idea of a series of farcical detective stories featuring a small-minded, bigoted detective who pursues wild, ungrounded-in-fact, grounded-in-stereotype leads only to stumble, by the books end and by a series of happy accidents, into actually solving the case.
> On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
I doubt that "Oh gee, it turns out the murderer was actually the black pedestrian in the suburban neighborhood this time" will get you published, though.
Yours might be the starting point for the "case" for our bigoted detective, but these leads invariably run cold but inadvertently reveal a piece of information or suspect that had not yet come to light (solved — maybe even simply by the process of elimination for our sad detective).
There's an old 70s Austrian TV series called "Kottan ermittelt"[1]. The first episode of that one is essentially exactly that with the titular character pursuing immigrants as suspects and the crime eventually being solved by his assistant.
The later episodes turn the show more into a parody.
"Law and Order" often had the police going after the wrong suspect or even arresting the wrong person and having them figure it out later, sometimes not until after the wrong person was put on trial.
I saw an anecdote where someone asked the actor who played Perry Mason, "Haven't you ever lost a case?" and his answer was "I don't try the hard ones on Saturday night."
/Perry Mason/ always struck me as a rather subversive inversion of the usual police procedural for this reason. Since the protagonist is a defense lawyer, every episode that I know about is one where the cops and DA accuse a totally innocent person of a capital crime. They are then exposed and humiliated when Perry gets the real guilty party to confess in open court, usually under oath on the witness stand.
In my household, we have a running gag that sometime in the 60s, Tragg was forced into retirement for harrassing too many innocent people and embarrassing the department, and they decided "Let's hire this Columbo fellow, he'll blend in and not make waves.". The LAPD had some issues.
From what I remember, "Elementary" follows the opposite formula from Colombo. The protagonists almost always spend the first half of an episode pursing a red herring.
> 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.
(Again, no blockbuster spoilers that I know of, but be aware)
I guess in Murder By The Book he sits down and asks the victim's wife if she can come up with anything. Fade Into Murder had the whole blackmail thing going on in the background. Where did Columbo hound someone who wasn't Robert Culp in A Friend In Deed? He was a little squirrely getting the private-spy's info at the water fountain (and the whole ice-cream/swing encounter) but that's all I can think of.
Good q, I might be remembering a different episode which is always possible with actors like Culp. Will look into this issue, your ticket ID is @ny01dp0r7
Ticket update: He uses "just one more thing" on Mrs. Halperin, but she was not the murderer.
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 …
The use of a fictional character deprives this of value. Of course Columbo gets a lot of benefit from his "Oh, just one more thing..." schtick. Columbo is the hero of a detective mystery series. If Columbo didn't solve the mystery in an hour (less commercials!), or if Columbo used the same methods as other contemporary TV detectives, the show wouldn't have been successful.
The question is, can you, an ordinary human, in ordinary circumstances where almost everything is beyond your control, gain benefit from this technique?
There's a similar problem with "$N business lessons of ${HISTORICAL_FIGURE}" - you're not going to invade Russia, or lay siege to Vienna, or conquer the Gauls. Your situation is entirely different. What Napoleon or Saladin or Boudicca are reputed to have done is almost certainly beyond you, and instead is being used to puff up an article containing entirely mundane and well-worn advice.
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.
Publications often change the headline for clickbait reasons, but they also try to make it clearer to searchers what the article is about. "Avenger in a Raincoat" works fine for a print magazine -- the end user is someone sitting captive on a flight or on their couch. In the crowded world of search results or social-media posts, you need to be clearer about what the article contains. I haven't read this article (for it is paywalled), so I can't tell where this falls on the clickbait scale. (I think of "clickbait" as a pejorative.)
As an equally valid counterpoint, I submit data from the classic film "Dude, where's my car?" where the simple question "and then?" so greatly exacerbates the customer that there's a strong chance they will never return.
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.
>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.
The Inspector Morse series[0] based on Colin Dexter's[1] novels is shot in and around Oxford, UK and is pretty darn good.
The follow-ons (Lewis[2] and Endeavour[3]) are also pretty good too.
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries[4] is also pretty good and is shot mostly on location, although the protagonist is something of a whiny little bitch. The same can be said for DCI Banks[5].
That said, Vera[6] and Y Gwyll[7] (Hinterland) are both good too, although the police force in Vera is a fictional fictional organization and is shot in various places in the north of England.
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.
>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.
I too watched Columbo, together with my mom, when I was younger, and later watched some older episodes on my own. At some point at my job I found myself "debugging" people's requests for help/support using his "one last thing" technique.
Especially if they are the type of enthusiastic, semi-sophisticated users, who try to second-guess how the application is written or why it crashed, without actually knowing anything about the code, and often make silly guesses and make suggestions which have little to do with reality.
Before I started doing that, I would often be quite rude to people and cut them off, saying things like "no, that's not how the code works, I know that for a fact because I wrote it, the bug is somewhere else entirely".
Then when I started using it instead, I would stare at them and say something like "oh, well, that's a very interesting option! Why didn't I think of that!" Then shut up for a few seconds like I'm deep in thought, then say "Oh, wait, I just thought of something. Do you mind showing me what you did on that screen again? I apologize but I have just this awful short term memory, can't remember what you wrote on that bug ticket ". Then they would indulge me, and I would say "Oh, wait, stop right there, that gave me a great idea what could have gone wrong, thank you".
And then explain them in some details what caused the bug and how to work around it.
Or I would say "thank you", get up and go after they showed me, and then pause at the door and say "oh, wait, there's this one thing I just thought about, do you mind if we try just one more thing? Sorry for taking your time" and then try the workaround, show them that it works, and explain it.
All this when I actually understood what was the problem a few seconds after they showed me the problem.
So I wasted a few more minutes being nice to this person and pretending I'm kind of dumb, but I know now they will won't be afraid to report future bugs to me or to suggest features, without fearing they will look dumb themselves.
Unfortunately I have to be in the right frame of mind to do this, and lately I've found myself slipping more and more often back to the "that's not how the code works" retorts.
It's good that this came up on NH today, it's a good reminder to try and go back to being a little more Columbo and a little less rude to people who try to be useful to me.
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.
Sometimes people just want to be heard. Even if they are wrong. Sometimes you will find they are even right and your assumptions are wrong. Stop and listen first then speak. It lets people get the wrong impression of you. Think I got that from Men in Black.
Yeah, it does look like as me being patronizing and creepy, I suppose. My inept social skills showing.
But I have no idea how else to deal with those people who genuinely want to help me help them, but keep making suggestions and developing weird theories that aren't connected to reality and which aren't helpful. Everything else I tried just seems to insult them more.
In normal day-to-day conversations with most other people (including the same people when we're not in a professional setting) I'm not like that. At least I hope not.
Just stop worrying about it. At the end of the day, they just want their shit fixed. I just explain why their idea isn't the solution. "We could monitor calls before we switched to Bluetooth headsets, I think that might be the problem." Me "Nope, the audio is going through and monitoring is handled on the back end, it's something else."
You don't need to explain exactly why, just give em a reasonable answer. It helps them learn (maybe) at the same time. If you're not being a jerk, and their feelings are hurt for some reason, that's on them.
I suppose that the parent poster has some difficulties not coming off patronizing and rude, there can be lots of reasons for this, for example your 'nope...' is very dependent on tone of voice, some people might sound like they think someone else is an idiot without meaning to. So, it seems like their way of doing it works to put the user at ease and also themselves at ease. I suggest they keep on doing it the way they are doing it despite it not being the most optimal way possible, optimizing for things can break processes.
In a support setting, sometimes subtle manipulation is practically the only way. See also the stories of tech support people suggesting that cables might be plugged in the "wrong way around". Lots of support tricks work, even when they shouldn't.
I work in tech support as well. I just give them a one sentence answer why that's not the problem and move on. Granted, I'm a director so I can be frank if I need to, but my support team wont take any bullshit. If people want to whine, send them my way and I'll ask whether they want to save my team the time and troubleshoot themselves, or let the people trained on our systems handle it.
Got a box set of Columbo a few years ago and I'd never watched it before and like many people here are saying, each episode is almost movie length and brilliant in its own right, and the format of 'you the viewer know who did it, how can Columbo figure it out' is fantastic.
One striking thing is that technology often plays a part - technology that would have been 'clever' at the time. e.g. "The Most Crucial Game" the bad guy uses a radio to pretend he's still in a private box at a football statium. In "Fade in to Murder" the bad guy provides an alibi for himself by drugging a friend, changing the time on his watch and then watching a VCR recorded football match with him, pretending that its live. There are lots of things like that, I suppose the never ending quest for clever twists led the writers to lots of gizmos and gadgets of the time.
There is one Columbo episode "Forgotten Lady" that is somewhat unique in that his questioning technique doesn't exactly work out as usual, and even when he figures out the truth, it doesn't lead to justice. And he even wears a tuxedo! It is considered one of the better episodes of the original series, at least according to reviews at IMDB, and my own recent serendipitous viewing.
Columbo also was unlike many other crime shows of the time in that it showed the viewer the crime in opening minutes. Through the show, you knew who the murderer was, even if you didn't know all the whys or twists. Watching with that knowledge changes the story, as you see how the detective weaves together threads to get to where you know he needs to be by the end of the (somewhat overly drawn out) episodes.
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.
That's where you discover that:
- he takes NOTHING as assumed
- 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)
- he always starts from the ground up, asks (what seem to be) stupid questions
- All of his actions are here to close the options. Conversations are done with no malice, but with that clear objective in mind.
I do a lot of the Columbo way at work, and it works surprisingly well.