His tie is askew. His third-day shirt
has ring-around-the-collar. His thick, wavy clump of dark hair
overhangs eyes screwed tight in a lopsided squint, a brow that is
permanently furrowed and a leathery puss smudged with unshavable
stubble. With stocky shoulders hunched forward at a 45 angle, he looks
like an ambulatory cypress stump in baggy brown pants. And the
raincoat. The raincoat is an oversized, unhung affair in the last stages of
decomposition, scarred and seasoned with the grease of a thousand
fingers, its hems frayed and stringy, its pockets attached more by
habit than by thread. This one-man disaster area hardly resembles a detective lieutenant of
police, much less the hero of a successful television series. But he is
both. He is Peter Falk as Columbo, on the NBC series of the same name.
Every fourth week, some 37 million viewers tune in avidly to watch him
shamble, sniffle, fidget, mutter and gesticulate his way through a
case. The fans may be slower to pounce on a clue than he is. But
usually they anticipate their favorite Columbo routines—deceptively
plodding, cunningly naive—and see them coming a mile off, which is
half the fun. Columbo treats his invariably rich and stylish suspects with politeness,
even deference. He apologizes for taking up their valuable time. He
prattles incessantly in a New York accent that seems to be coming down
with a sore throat. He gee-whizzes over their luxury houses, stopping
in mid-sentence to ask ingenuously what the property taxes might be on
such a splendid estate, pausing to work them out in terms of his
$11,000-a-year salary. His darting, jabbing gestures carve lexicons in
the air. He interrupts interrogations to rummage in pockets crammed
with scrappaper reminders of marketing chores as well as murder clues. He always just happens to be in the neighborhood, hounding his prey
relentlessly, unnerving them, distracting them. Then he walks away. But
wait. He turns and takes a few steps back into the room. Here it comes.
The zinger. “Oh, excuse me, sir, but just one more question. I been
thinkin', and you know it strikes me kinda funny that…” Such antics have made Columbo conceivably the most influential, probably
the best and certainly the most endearing cop on TV. Which is saying
something, since prime-time TV this year is a parlor game of
dial-a-cop, a badlands preserve patrolled by a superfluity of sleuths. A crowded police-court docket, said Mark Twain, is the surest sign that
trade is brisk and money plenty. The current season would seem to bear
him out, with a slight twist. There is brisk betting and plentiful
money riding on a schedule that is up to its antenna in crooks and
crime, cops and private eyes, crusading attorneys and special
investigators. In all, there are 29 crime shows on the network schedules, plus a few in
syndication, accounting for roughly 21 of the 63 prime-time hours each
week . When this fall's program
lineup was unveiled, 13 of the 24 new offerings were crime shows .
