The directory «Plots»

«Columbo»

Columbo is an American crime fiction TV series, starring Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. It was created by William Link and Richard Levinson. The show popularized the inverted detective story format. With the exception of a couple of special episodes with added twists, almost every episode began by showing the commission of the crime and its perpetrator, sometimes in a sympathetic light. Thus there is no "whodunit" element. The plot mainly revolves around how the perpetrator, whose guilt is known, would finally be exposed and arrested. The show's creator once referred to it as a "howcatchem".

The character first appeared in a 1960 episode of the television-anthology series The Chevy Mystery Show, which was itself partly derived from a short story by Levinson and Link published in an issue of the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine as 'Dear Corpus Delecti'. Levinson and Link adapted the TV drama into the stage play Prescription: Murder, and a TV-movie based on the play was broadcast in 1968. The series began on a Sunday presentation of the "NBC Mystery Movie" rotation: Quincy, M.E., McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and other whodunits. The series spawned a similar format on Wednesday nights with fare such as The Snoop Sisters, Hec Ramsey, and Banacek. Columbo aired regularly from 1971 to 1978 on NBC, and then more infrequently on ABC beginning in 1989. The most recent episode was broadcast in 2003.

Columbo is a scruffy-looking cop who is often underestimated by his fellow officers and by the murderer du jour. Despite his appearance and superficial absentmindedness, he solves all of his cases and manages to come up with the evidence needed for indictment, thanks to his eye for detail and the meticulous and committed approach he brings to his work. The episodes are all movie-length, between 75 and 100 minutes long, excluding commercials.

Guinea, 2008, Television series