Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Constant Off-By-One Errors (i.e., "One More Thing")
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Columbo is still amazing. My parents were right to love it! The sixth and seventh seasons (1978-1978) are great; "Old Fashioned Murder", "The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case", and "Make Me a Perfect Murder" have far better tension, characterization, performance, complexity, and general quality than I'd expect from a TV movie. "Make Me a Perfect Murder" specifically has cinematography that takes it up to the level of a classic noir.
Also, "Make Me a Perfect Murder" stars a frustrated female TV executive with a flighty singer/actress friend and a sorta-mentor, sorta-rival male boss, so Leonard kept reimagining the story with 30 Rock characters. Then "How to Dial a Murder" centered on a status-conscious pop psychologist, so we had fun pretending he was Frasier Crane. Perhaps for every NBC sitcom there exists a Columbo episode in which the premise's frustrated tensions come out as murder.
