Mrs. Columbo

When it comes to Mrs. Columbo, we can play Good Idea/Bad Idea (you Animaniacs fans will understand the reference)...

BAD IDEA: The series in the first place! Columbo's wife should've stayed an imaginary character. Mrs. Columbo running around all over the place uncovering murders in her charming suburban neighborhood? She was better arguing with her hubby over the phone over what he should pick up at the supermarket on the way home or whatever, not getting in over her head as an amateur sleuth.

BAD IDEA: The casting of Kate Mulgrew. No disrespect to her as an actress, but she was too young and glamorous for the role. The producers wanted someone like Maureen Stapleton. One critic thought Brenda Vaccaro would have been better. Either one would have been a much better fit than Mulgrew.

GOOD IDEA: Pitting her against two of the better Columbo villains to start the series. In the first episode (pilot), it's Robert Culp, who hires Frederic Forrest to kill his wife. Unfortunately, Forrest also winds up killing Culp, which takes him out of the rest of the film, and now Kate has to deal with a maniacal killer who has no choice but to silence her. It goes from being a serviceable mystery to Panic Room at the drop of a hat.

The second episode features one of the better 'one-shot' killers from Columbo, Donald Pleasance, playing a very proper Englishman, an English police officer who turns out to be a killer on both sides of the ocean (albeit an unintentional killer in the crime in the Mrs. Columbo episode). Kate Mulgrew at least got decent guest actors to play off in those episodes.

GOOD IDEA: When the series returned for a second season, they dropped the Columbo angle and made her a divorcee, reverting to her maiden name of Callahan.

BAD IDEA: Bringing it back for a second season! Why couldn't they have just given up the ghost after the first five episodes?

It should be noted that this series was produced under the watch of the infamous Fred Silverman...the same guy who almost put the kibosh on Cannon when he was the head of CBS programming (fortunately, William Paley overruled him on that one) and the same guy who canceled the brilliant Harry O when he ran ABC. When he ran NBC, he green lighted a boat load of crap, not just this show, but Supertrain, to name another of his follies at NBC.

If you must torture yourself, the Mrs. Columbo episodes have turned up as extras on the individual season Columbo sets. After seeing the Lieutenant in action in his episodes, why would you want to bother with his wife's exploits?

Sorry, but this show didn't work at all, and a '2' is a generous vote. If you watch enough "Columbo", any time he is on the phone with her, she is given as a homemaker, not a reporter, and on top of that, she's not very bright. On "An Exercise in Fatality", she calls him at the office of the killer, and they discuss what to cook for the family guests for dinner. He then tells her what to do, i.e. call the Chinese restaurant, make the order and he would get it after work on the way home. Does that honestly sound like she has the wherewithal to find the answer to some caper? Not in my opinion, and I'm sure a majority of the readers of this would have to agree. She's just not that intelligent!

Although I am not going to spend the whole review comparing, I have to say Mrs Columbo is a real disappointment of a spin-off series. And this is coming from a big fan of the classic Columbo series with Peter Falk. As much as I did like the idea, it was one that didn't work out. I liked how the episodes looked, they are well shot and the production values are lovely, the music is often delightful and I like the quickly edited opening sequences. Against all this, I find Mrs Columbo herself annoying and not very easy to relate to. Also Kate Mulgrew does have a charming appearance, perhaps too charming, but she does overdo it a lot. It doesn't help that the writing is so forced, the pace often dull and the stories in general thin and formulaic. And while there are some great actors and decent guest stars, the stories, with a lack of realism in abundance one too many times, and writing let them down. All in all, a series I wanted to like but it doesn't work. 3/10 Bethany Cox

"Mrs. Columbo" tries to make connections with the famous Peter Falk series in its opening titles, but it's unlikely the star if this series is the unseen wife Lt. Columbo always talks about (though the Lieutenant's chatter may be mere persiflage).

While sharing the "Columbo" backward way of telling the story by showing the murder first, it lacks the original series' splendid writing and sense of irony.

Furthermore, it lacks that endearing annoyance in Columbo that makes the viewer want to see the culprit punch him out. In a nice way.

I like to see detective stories where there is some reason for the detective to be there (as in Columbo being a policeman). Or in a sister show, "Ellery Queen," where Queen's father is a police inspector. The "Murder She Wrote" sort of show where amateur sleuths run into murders wherever they go interest me less.

"Mrs. Columbo" being a newspaper reporter (remember newspapers?) running into crime is a good idea for a series but not this one. I wonder how it would play with an internet troll in this day when newspapers and TV news both are so unreliable? It might be an international show.

In real life, a Lt. Columbo would have to be married to a shrewd woman, able to solve mysteries on her own, if lacking the gumption to join the cops herself. But Kate Mulgrew is an annoying actress, not a likeable Peter Falk type who plays a character with annoying qualities. As with Angela Lansbury, her very voice sets my teeth on edge. Like chalk on a blackboard. But that's a personal observation.

BTW, the cast list includes Henry Jones. He was a great supporting actor, if a little long in the tooth by the time this series came along.

Normally I think it's very tough to introduce a character that is never shown on screen. But Bochco's writing (among others) was brilliant. It wasn't about the actual character of Mrs Columbo, it was a trait of Falk that went along with his cigar, trench coat and crappy car. Talking about Mrs Columbo wasn't about how she really was. It was a mechanism for him to work his observations about clues to the crime into a conversation that seemed to be innocent chit chat. He fooled people all the time setting up traps, maybe nothing he ever said about her was true. In the words of Hitchcock it was a type of Maguffin.

I think she appealed to everyone because everyone was free to see her in their minds eye, based on their own life's experiences. Nailing her down was a mistake, an insult to the original creation of her real purpose in the show. The many comments about "that's not how I saw her" speaks to that. This show has a better chance with people who are unfamiliar with the original Columbo.

As a side note, when Columbo was popular I was a police detective. I naively tried to say in interviews a few times: "you know when my wife..." It always fell flat.