DE-ZONKING "COLUMBO"

'Columbo' is one of the shows which I always wanted to "de-Zonk", to splain away all of those references to the show in other shows even though they should all be sharing the same TV dimension.

I plan to do a more exhaustive reference hunt someday - being such a popular, recognizable show, 'Columbo' has a lot of such references listed at the IMDb.  But my 'Columbo'-lovin' friend Debbie Greenfield tracked down one in particular for me:

'CAGNEY & LACEY'
"MATINEE"

O'Bservation:
Detectives Chris Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey needed to interrogate a murder suspect.

CHRISTINE: 
Personally I don't think it's gonna work.

MARY BETH: 
Why not?  It always worked for Columbo.

CHRISTINE: 
We're not Columbo.

MARY BETH: 
Watch me.
[She pulls up the collar of her raincoat.]

[A few minutes later in the conference room]

MARY BETH: 
He's kept us waiting thirteen minutes.

CHRISTINE: 
Columbo would never have stood for this.

[Mary Beth pulls up her collar again]

RICHARD WHITE: 
Cagney. Lacey.

MARY BETH: 
Oh, sir, we are so sorry to take up your time like this, sir.

RICHARD WHITE: 
Something come up?

CHRISTINE: 
Well, we just came by, Mr. White, to tell you the DA dropped the charges against our suspect.

RICHARD WHITE: 
Some little technicality?

CHRISTINE: 
Oh, no, Mr. White. We just had the wrong guy. It seems that the man we had had been set up.

MARY BETH: 
Yes sir, but we weren't turned off from it, were we? I mean, sometimes, you get a hold of a piece of evidence (looking through the file) and then you look at all the wrong things. Do you happen to have one of those videotape recorder things, sir?

RICHARD WHITE: 
I don't see what this has to do...

MARY BETH: 
Well, the prices on them are really going down. Anyway, this fella that we work with, he got one for Christmas. You see, because when he was working nights, he got hooked on this soap opera, er, "Beyond the Horizon". And now that he's working days he can record it and then he can look at it on weekends.

RICHARD WHITE: 
Detective Lacey, please, I'm rather busy!

MARY BETH: 
Oh, sir, wait...

RICHARD WHITE: 
I cannot look at those photographs again. Please!

MARY BETH: 
Oh, I'm sorry, sir, I really am, sir. I wished you'd look. It's very interesting. See sir, look at the TV set here, sir.

RICHARD WHITE: 
What does this have to do with it? Get to the point!

MARY BETH: 
Just look at the woman who's on the TV set.

RICHARD WHITE: 
What?!

MARY BETH: 
Liz.

RICHARD WHITE: 
Liz?

MARY BETH: 
Please, because I would never have known myself but this fella we work with, he tells me that this woman, Liz, did not come back from vacation until Wednesday.

RICHARD WHITE: 
I'm afraid I don't really understand what you ladies are talking about.

CHRISTINE: 
You're right to be confused, Mr. White. You see that the envelope you gave us was post-marked five days before your wife's death.

RICHARD WHITE: 
So?

CHRISTINE: 
So, the pictures couldn't have been in it because the pictures were taken five days later, Wednesday, the day of your wife's murder. So what you did was mail this envelope to yourself and then you dropped the pictures in later.

MARY BETH: 
On Wednesday the nineteenth, you waited on the fire escape at the Manchester Hotel and you took those pictures, and after her boyfriend left, you let yourself in the room and murdered your wife, didn't you, Mr. White?

CHRISTINE: 
What we're saying, Mr. White, is that you have the right to remain silent. If you choose to give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney and have the attorney present during the questioning.

As I read Mary Beth's exchange of dialogue with Mr. White, I could feel how she was channeling Peter Falk's performance through her interrogation.

Try reading it again, but with Peter Falk's voice....

"Please, because I would never have known myself but this fella we work with, he tells me that this woman, Liz, did not come back from vacation until Wednesday."

It's "a fella we work with" for Mary Beth; it's "my brother-in-law George" for Columbo.

We know Falk has a televersion in Earth Prime-Time; we saw him in an episode of 'The Larry Sanders Show'.  And we know that televersion played Lt. Columbo in the Toobworld version of 'Columbo', which may have significant differences from the one we know here in the Real World.

How do we know he played the role?  Because Laura Holt used the 'Columbo' episode "Playback" as her solution to a case.

'REMINGTON STEELE'
"STRONGER THAN STEELE"

Laura Holt:
"Columbo... Peter Falk... Universal Studios... 1975!

In an episode entitled 'Playback', Oscar Werner kills his mother-in-law. He seems to have the perfect alibi until Columbo discovers he used a video tape to alter the apparent time of the murder.

Now all we need to do is find that tape. If Columbo can do it so can we!"

Another example that Columbo had his life dramatized for television was when a New York police detective came to see a bus company employee for his help in a drug case.  Stanley Belmont managed the company's lost and found department and he and his brother-in-law thought Lt. Milford looked like Lt. Columbo.

Take a look at Milford - the only thing that ruins the illusion is that his raincoat looks so much cleaner.

But not all the references had to come from the Toobworld version of the TV show.  It's my belief that Frank Columbo finally did get around to writing a book about the cases he investigated.  These would be the cases we saw on the television here in the Trueniverse.  Those in the televersion of 'Columbo' could mostly be fictional with dramatizations of actual cases mixed in - as we saw with Laura Holt's reference to "Playback".

There were times though where I think it's the book which brought the Lieutenant to a TV character's attention.  And with most of my examples of this, 'Columbo' isn't even mentioned!

This has happened in episodes of 'Death In Paradise' and 'The Mentalist', in which the murder is very similar to those depicted on the real TV show decades earlier (and thus had actually happened in Toobworld.)

O'Bservation - Interestingly, both of those murders took their inspiration from the same case investigated by Lt. Columbo: the Norris murder committed by Dr. Bart Kepple.  (The title for that chapter in Columbo's book was "Double Exposure".)

"THE MENTALIST"

"DEATH IN PARADISE"
(I never wrote this one up, but if you want to seek it out, the episode was "The Secret Of The Flame Tree".  Season 6, episode 2 - you can amaze your friends when you solve the murder before the opening credits roll.)

But definitely, Mary Beth Lacey was basing her interrogation on they way Peter Falk did it as Columbo on TV.

So any show that Zonks 'Columbo' is either referring to the TV show based on the Lieutenant's life or the book written by Frank Columbo.

BCnU!