Columbo this week was one I've been waiting for, "Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo." It was the biggest formula-breaker yet of the revival series, and I remember it being very good, but I haven't seen it in ages. I guess it's inevitable, then, that I found it less impressive than it was in my memory. It's a clever idea, if a bit self-referential -- building a story around the never-seen Mrs. Columbo, teasing us with the prospect of meeting her as well as with the appearance of her death, only to fake us out on both. Having the murderer be deliberately targeting Columbo as revenge for him arresting her husband was an interesting idea, and Helen Shaver was very good as Vivian. She and Falk have an excellent interplay, and the more personal stakes give it an interesting tension.
Still, it's cornier in some ways than I remembered. The voiceovers in the funeral-scene frame are stilted -- and 1990 seems a little late to be using ripple-glass flashbacks unironically, though at least there wasn't a harp sound over them. And the first act is oddly sitcommy in its acting and directing, light and broad in a way that clashes with the ominous setup. It didn't help that they cast sitcom actors like Teresa Ganzel and Ed Winter -- who was uncannily Shatneresque in appearance and performance. Plus, it gave away too much of Columbo's side of the story. We knew he was onto Vivian and that he had advance warning of the threat to his wife. I don't recall how I perceived this the first time I saw it, before I knew how it ended, but I think it would've undermined the suspense to know that Columbo wasn't being fooled.
And speaking of fooling, it's hard to believe all those people would stage an entire funeral just to trick one person into a murder confession. I also wonder about the ethics of tricking someone into confessing like that. Columbo cautioned her about her rights, but it was a bit hypocritical, given that he'd set her up to believe she could ignore the warning.
One reason I always wanted to see this again was to see the bit at the end where they showed the photograph that we were supposed to think was Mrs. Columbo but turned out to be her sister. I was wondering if it might have been a photo of Kate Mulgrew, star of the short-lived and deeply ill-conceived Mrs. Columbo spinoff that the network attempted as a brazen money grab after the original show went off the air -- retconning Mrs. C into a far younger woman named Kate and making her a detective in her own right, with the "brilliant" conceit that this time it was the husband we'd never see. Which was such a horrible and roundly hated idea that they pulled the show after a few episodes, had Kate get an off-camera divorce (another inconceivable idea), and go back to her maiden name, along with a title change to Kate Loves a Mystery, which failed to save the show from an extremely early cancellation. Anyway, I've long wondered if the makers of this episode might've taken a dig at that show by using a picture of Mulgrew and then revealing that it was actually Mrs. Columbo's sister Kate. But no; it's a totally different woman and it's her sister Rita. So that answers that. No surprise that the producers preferred not to acknowledge Mrs. Columbo. It wasn't their idea, it was made over their objections, and they probably wanted everyone to forget it had ever existed.
