Finding the Plot: "Columbo"

A few weeks ago the actor James Caan asked a simple question on Twitter: "Is it possible to watch too much Columbo?"

It's a simple question, because it has a simple answer: No.

I believe this truly and deeply. However, I'm also aware that enthusiasms of this sort can tend to fall into that regrettable domain often instantiated by dogs and babies: their owners and parents seem able to do nothing but coo about their adorableness, thrusting them aggressively into the faces and laps and homes of their acquaintances and demanding that the amazingness of said small warm object be acknowledged, as if they've been rendered constitutionally incapable of remembering that not everyone's worldview has been captured by this little bag of cuddly cuteness.

So I'll spare you the insistence about how if you're not familiar with Columbo you absolutely must bring it into your life, because it will bring you a great deal of joy. I'll refrain from noting how starkly the level of excellence of the best episodes contrasts with so much of today's episodic fodder, which is so aptly (and often unironically) denoted as "content." And I will resist (for the most part) the temptation to wax eloquent about the astounding talents of Peter Falk, that one-eyed maestro who was first actor to be nominated for an Oscar and an Emmy in the same year, who could pull off everything from glorious comedic roles to Cassavetes' straight-line realism with the same aplomb, and in whom the fascinating disjunction between physical appearance and on-screen charisma was unparalleled this side of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Because maybe you're the type who just doesn't like acting, or television, or babies, or dogs, or the other joys that make life worth living.

But I simply can't refrain from noting, as long as I have you here, that, whatever your views on the aforementioned topics, if you are a fan of cinema, Columbo is worth being aware of and thinking about.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the show, here's the rundown. Falk plays a Los Angeles homicide detective named Columbo who solves a murder in every episode. He wears a beige raincoat, smokes cigars (or simply chews on them), and has a wife that he talks about a great deal but who is never seen. He also makes himself incredibly easy to underestimate.

This last quality is one of the reasons Columbo is such a lovable character. He's a modest man who seems continually and genuinely impressed by the intelligence and capabilities of the criminals he runs up against. And yet, time and time again, through nothing more than patient, steady thinking, he catches them.

The show has a kind of hypnotic quality to it. As Caan notes in his tweet, once one becomes a fan, it's easy to fall into wanting to watch and watch and watch. In part, this is because of Falk's fascinating magnetism; as I noted above, he is, despite (or perhaps because of) his lack of matinee-idol good looks, eminently watchable.

The show also offers a pleasing element rarely seen today: run times generally falling between 75 and 90 minutes. The episodes are slightly longer than a 60-minute "TV show," and because of that they feel a bit more substantial than those shows. And yet watching one doesn't quite feel like watching a full movie. One gets, in other words, more satisfaction than a single episode of some other show offers, without that feeling of commitment often entailed by sitting down to watch a film.

But the almost magical watchability of the show also comes from another source, which is what I've been ruminating on this week: the repeated structure of its plot.

I've written before about plotting in American crime stories, but recently, as my charming partner and I have been watching episodes of Columbo after dinner with a cup of coffee and a piece or two of chocolate (current rankings of chocolate available in supermarkets: 3: Lindt, Dark chocolate, caramel with a touch of sea salt; 2: Endangered Species, Caramel, sea salt, and dark chocolate; 1: Moonstruck, Salty almond dark chocolate) I've been thinking about what exactly makes us want to experience plots – what pulls us through the story, in the language Jim McPherson used all those years ago in graduate school – and how that's connected to the other elements of a story.

This has been brought on by the fact that Columbo, like many TV shows, always has the same plot structure. In the opening of each episode, we see a criminal setting up, and then committing, a murder. These are meticulously planned and precisely carried out. The murderer believes they will never be caught.

And then Columbo appears on the scene, works through the clues (or lack of clues), and catches them. Fascinatingly, these criminals never try to make a break for it in the end. There is no chase scene, and they do not resist their apprehension. Instead, Columbo simply explains to them how he figured out what they did, and his explanation is so convincing, so entirely accurate, that they admit their guilt on the spot.

Like my seven-month-old puppy, it's terrifically entertaining. But why? This is where things get interesting.

The first thing to note is that, unlike many other forms of detective story, there’s no real plot-driven suspense at all. There’s no mystery about what happened – was it Professor Philpot McGillicuddy with a ball-peen hammer, or Ms. Angela Barrister with a poisoned broach? – because we know what happened. We have watched the murder being planned and executed. Similarly, there is no real mystery about the outcome of the story. We know that Columbo will deduce what happened and that justice will be served.

So Columbo is a mystery story, but it is a mystery without a mystery. Or, more precisely, it's a mystery story in which there is no mystery for the viewer. The mystery is entirely Columbo's.

Again and again, our bedraggled detective, he of the ratty old 1959 Peugeot convertible, of the half-gnawed cigar, of the pet basset hound and the continual self-deprecation, is confronted with a seemingly unsolvable death – a man torn apart by his own guard dogs, or drowned after overturning a rowboat in which he was alone, or dead because he seemingly locked himself inside a walk-in safe, or killed in a kidnapping gone bad – commissioned by someone who has, in the parlance of these shows, an airtight alibi: they were downstairs at a dinner party when the murder was committed upstairs, or they were in a different country at the time, or in the middle of performing a magic act in front of an audience.

Again and again, in other words, Columbo is confronted with a perfect murder.

This is a verbal pairing – the perfect murder – that we often see, and it has at least two connotations that apply here. The first, as I noted above, is that this murder will be perfect because there will be no way that the killer can be caught. The goal of all of these killers is to not only kill someone, but also to get away with it. Thus, a murder that can be so perfectly planned as to be impregnable to deduction, gotten away with, is perfect because it fulfills both goals: dead victim and un-imprisoned perpetrator.

The second connotation of a so-called perfect murder is that it bears a certain aesthetic quality. Blowing up a bus full of people in order to kill one person might be effective, and might have (from the perspective of the murderer) the benefit of clouding the issue of motive, but it would lack, as these things go, a certain panache. Murdering someone, instead, by building a Rube Goldberg-style contraption involving a Tchaikovsky record, a pair of squibs, and an umbrella – as the killer does in "The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case," one of the most delicious episodes in the series – now that has panache. That the killer is a member of a Mensa-like society, who is in a room with his fellow geniuses when the murder occurs (or seems to occur), only heightens the achievement. (Columbo, with his typical dry wit, lays bare the group's combination of IQ and ridiculousness when he exclaims "Here I've been talking with the most intelligent people in the world, and I never even noticed!")

All of which is to say that the plotting in Columbo functions not through suspense, but through pleasure. What pulls us through the episodes is not the question-answer structure of a mystery. It is, instead, the joy of watching a kind of dance. A seemingly perfect labyrinth is laid out by the killer; it has an entrance and clues and a dead body, but all of this leads nowhere. It's a puzzle with no solution. Inescapable. And not only does the killer lay out this labyrinth, they stay on stage to gloat about its existence, gladly talking to the police, triumphantly proffering up their bulletproof alibi.

And then frumpy old Columbo waltzes in to work his way through their maze, solve their puzzle.

To really understand this, to really appreciate the joy beneath the joy, as it were, requires us to get technical for just a moment. What is plot? It's usually defined as the series of events that make up the story. Google "What is plot?" and you'll find a number of explanations along these lines, as well as numerous how-to guides in case you're interested in trying to build a plot – aka tell a story – yourself.

But Columbo shows us just how insufficient – to the point of being misleading – this definition is.

Yes, the "plot" of each episode is what happens in it. But what is happening is a great deal greater than simply a series of events. Put differently, the events of an episode are not limited to a series of things that happen one after another.

Instead, what's happening is closer to a dance, or a relationship, or the building and un-building of a fantastic edifice or maze; the metaphors are difficult to articulate, because the concept is a slippery one. But metaphors are essential here, for it is exactly through the process of metaphor that we try to approach the answer to the question of what something like a plot is.

So yes, the plot of something like an episode of Columbo is indeed, a sequential, causal kind of thing: one scene, or event, follows another on the screen. But the thing we're tracking, the thing holding our attention because it pulls that attention inexorably forward, the thing that makes us want to see in every moment what's coming next – this thing cannot be reduced to something so simple as a sequence of events.

It is also built out of our relationship with repetition (one is tempted to sneak in a Freudian "Fort! Da!" reference), our sense of aesthetic harmony, our sense of human struggle (stirred by the way this blue-collar, dogged detective overcomes perfection, again and again), our sense of justice (here finding an outlet as outrage against those folks who always seem to be able to get away with whatever they would like to, with no fear of repercussion; it's not a coincidence that the perpetrators of murder in Columbo are often smugly well-off), etc. etc.

Because of this, describing a plot is a series of events is similar to describing a baby as an undeveloped human being.

There is a certain technical truth at play in these descriptions, and perhaps even a certain shorthand usefulness. A plot does happen one step after another, and a baby is a small, undeveloped homo sapiens. But opining about the plot of a story without taking into account all of the things it is in addition to a series of events is precisely akin to visiting a friend's house and commenting about the interesting qualities of the undeveloped human being they happen to be holding.

Talking this way, in other words, misses what's really at play. A plot is a stretching, amorphous thing built of reference and repetition, aesthetic beauty and joyful execution; it is a thing inextricably connected to the people who traverse it. Trying to reduce a plot to a series of events thing misses virtually all of the details that let us really understand it. And it's in these details, as dear old Columbo would certainly recognize, that the truth really lies.

Enjoy this piece? If you’d like to read more of my work, my dystopic noir novel “The Committers” is now available in paperback and e-book format here. Read the first chapter for free here.

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