Playback

Welcome to the Shabby Detective. Yet another Colombo podcast, As if there needed to be another Colombo podcast. I'm your host Mike White, joined of course, by mister Chris Tashue. One might say, I'm a woman under the influence. Oh, we are talking tonight about the episode Playback.

It is the fifth episode of the fourth season. It aired originally on March second, nineteen seventy five. It's seventy minutes, Chris, I forgot that there's a seventy minute episode in here. But I'll tell you what. This one feels about two and a half hours to me.

This one really missed the mark for me. But I'm curious what you thought about Playback having been your first time seeing it, or so I suppose. Yeah, boy, so all of the nice things that we've been saying this season may stop here for a brief moment. Yeah. This episode feels like a mix of things that we've seen already.

But in a lot of ways it reminds me of the Robert Kulp episode from last season, where there was the camera aspect to it or the video camera aspect to it, and then there was also the thing with Chuck Connors. Oh the dude with the Projectionists that was also a closed circuit TV thing. Chuck McCann, Chuck McCann, And now this is how it's solved. Finally is the closed circuit TV. Like they've been edging us this whole time of close circuit TVs, We're gonna do it at some point.

Oh, it's finally here, and it's so not exciting. It's such a disappointing episode that this is the worst episode of this season. Without a doubt, this season has been I think every episode this season has been pretty good so far. Actually, this is the weakest one, and I think it stems from a couple things. I think it stems from Oscar Werner not really being of the same caliber of actor that we've seen up unto this point, especially this season in particular, and also again to get back to the how ketchum of it all, this is one of the lamest how ketchums because again it's we've seen this before, we've just never seen them take it this far with this singular idea, and now that they have, it's, oh, so this is why they haven't done this up until this point, because it's not particularly compelling.

It reminds me of the last Jack Cassidy when we saw where he was going around setting up his alibi like crazy. It is nine to fifty. Man, if I ever do that someone like the next day, someone would be like, Yo, he's trying to fucking murder somebody. What time is it, my good man? Would you like to inform me?

It's like, why are you saying this out loud? So obviously are you trying to establish that you were somewhere at a specific time? Yes, you were. And the other one it reminds me of is the one from the first season suitable for framing. Again, very purposeful in setting up the alibi.

When that one to forget, they use the electric blanket to get the body warm and throw off the time of death. And then what does our main bad guy do. He goes to an art gallery. So I'm just like, oh god, I've seen the art gallery thing. I like the little thing in here, which again probably could be cut.

And I know they said that Fulk actually rewrote the scene, but the scene where he's at the art gallery and he's going around looking at all the different art and then he's, oh, this one doesn't have a label on it. Well, sir, that's the ventilation, Chef Wan. I'm like, it took a long time to get there. Took her a while to build up to this. It did.

I thought it was funny though, but to your point, it definitely is. It's a joke that takes too long to get to the payoffs. And it's another one of, as we like to say, one of them goddamn falkisms that this show just has sometimes, and that's just the reality of this show. We've seen it before. I think that this scene is better than a lot of the scenes that we've seen, but that's not saying much because most of them don't even get a laugh.

It's just pedantic bullshit with Theeter Falk just doing whatever he wants for five minutes at least. There's a funny gag in this one, and I think the gag works rather well. I think that I agree with you that Oscar Verder is really not at the caliber of a lot of the other people we've seen, especially Comparabiltic Van Dyke or even last month when we talked about Robert Vaughn. Just so many good villains that we've seen, and Werner just doesn't hold water that well. And the biggest thing for me is I don't follow his motivation as closely as I do with other people.

It just doesn't seem okay, yeah, he's got the typical harpy mother in law that he wants to murder that he does murder the whole edition of his wife with Gina Rowlands, his wife Gena Rowland's playing Elizabeth. I don't really get the feel for all of the relationships. And they take a while with this murder to set it up and everything. This is not one of those oh we got to get Peter Falk on screen within the first five minutes. It's not like last week where we see him on the shore.

Sorry, it's not like last month where we see him on the deck of the ship and talking with the purser and the captain and all this stuff. Well, it takes a while before we get there. Tenty minutes of an hour and twenty minute episode essentially. And I'm like, Okay, I don't understand all of the relationships that are happening here. I don't feel like Martha Scott is nearly as shrewish as she should be.

Like I don't hate her, and no, I don't. I don't like him. I don't hate him, I don't like him, He's just there. Also the spot on names too, with her being Margaret Midas, I'm like, Okay, I guess she's the person who has all the wealth here and he wants to get that wealth. And also just that the big reveal is that the guy had a fucking clapper.

Yeah it's yeah, oh god, yeah. The cloud in the chair, folks, a poltergeisted us. While not only is the way that the case is solved really just uninspired and so uninteresting, but all of the things that are introduced, all of the other avenues that end up just being culled to sex for Colombo to end up in are so uninteresting, including what you just alluded to with the clapper, like the door opened and then the thing it's like, oh my, I don't care, it's not enough, so we know this is not going to be enough. And on top of everything else, yet I already alluded to Oscar Warner not being able to really hold his own against Peter Falk. That motherfucker was guilty.

The moment Columbos season, this is one of the episodes where I'm like, this dude was hosed. The moment Columbo started talking to him. When he's talking to the officer, and Colombo kneezes. I've watched that scene a couple times now, it's not a sneeze. It's him like making like a That's the way I'm interpreting it now that I've seen it a couple of times.

Is him just like making like a raspberry noise, essentially saying bullshit, that's what happened. Oh, it's a sneeze. Okay, Yeah, when he comes in and it's just like, all right, yo, let's see these cameras. Oh, the murderer just happened to not be captured on camera? Whatsoever?

Is that about the most suspicious thing you've ever heard in your life? It is for me. That's the other thing. That's like the most obvious thing. The thing with the camera is so obvious.

I don't even understand why they need to do anything else than that he knew where to stand there you go. Only two people would have known, and he knew. That's all you need. Literally, there's nothing you don't need. An invitation to an art gallery or anything that should have been enough to hang that motherfucker by his neck.

Like, Oh, and Columbo just goes, shouldn't there be two cameras? And he doesn't go any further with that. It's I don't know. It's like this episode was written by someone who or two people Booker Bradshaw and David p Lewis, who don't have, in my opinion at least what it takes to write this kind of show. Well, and you know what, this is the first time they've written for the show.

And I'm not gonna go hunting down to see if this is the case, but I'm gonna go out on a lemons say that they probably don't write a whole lot for the show. If they write again. Yeah, I'm not sure if they do or not. I'll have to look that up. One would assume that when you have an episode like this, it's just not for me an episode that does anything.

Well, all it really does is it has some great Peter Faulk moments, but those aren't enough to carry an episode, and that's the problem. This is the only episode that was written at least by Booker T. Bradshaw was also an actor and an executive at Motown Live Show, and you can hear a little bit about that a few episodes ago when we spoke with Emily Hasty about her book and she talks a lot about tenaflying there. So he was one of the guys on there as well as Booker Bradshaw, and I guess that's how they got in touch with Levinson and Link for this one. And yeah, it just did not.

Work, even the thing with the whole Here's what was on camera before, and here's what's on camera after. We just saw that last season with the tutin black or season two sorry, where we saw Gena Rowlands's husband John Cassavetti's with the carnation versus not the Carnation, right, right, I've seen this all before. I just wanted to yell ats TV. By the way, Booker Bradshaw was in Coffee, which is like a blast from the past. Oh boy, he was the villain Coffee.

I'm looking at his picture. Yeah I remember him. Yeah, he's fantastic. Yeah. It's a shame because the writing of this episode fails the episode so much.

Bernard el Kowalski has directed at least one or two episodes of the show, Like I know he directed an Exercise in Fatality and at least one or two other ones. It's shocking to me, because the parts of this episode that are good. I think for me, the best part of this episode is Genie Rowlands. Like the shame about this episode is that Gina Rowlands is in this episode and this episode is not good, like really good. In this episode, she is one hundred percent the best part of this episode the only time she's in the show, the only time she's in Colombo, and her husband is in a much better episode than she is.

Not one of the best episodes we've seen, but in the top third. This is definitely in the bottom third of the episodes that we've seen. It would almost have been better if she was the one who had killed her mother, because then we would have at least had we can go to that well with her and see her kind of like being MANI fuelative, because that's the thing. Her character's played completely straight here. Her character is the sad woman in a wheelchair like that's I know.

It's such a fucking bummer. It's like a stereotype. I want to be able to do things for myself. Oh my god, yeah, we know. It's so yeah, it's so on the nose, like over and over again, they don't do anything interesting here.

It's like they just every opportunity that they're given to take the most obvious out they take it. I mean, even to the fact of Tricia Noble playing a woman who may be having an affair with him. Like with Oscar Werner's character, it's not I mean, a couple glances is really all we get. But like again, there's a hint at there being even more going on, and I'm thankful that they didn't go down that route because I didn't need to see that, because that would not have added to anything, and if anything, it would have just given us ten more minutes of an episode that's already an hour and fifteen minutes, but like you said, feels like it's too and half hours. This is Yeah, this is one of the longest feeling episodes of the show that we've watched.

And it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the longest episode we've seen. It's one of the shorter ones at this point. I don't want to be mean to Oscar Werner, but it at this point in his career and he didn't live for very long to get dead when he was sixty one, but by this point he had been drinking pretty hard. And he looks like the contemporary of the Mother rather than the contemporary of Gina Rowlands. Yes, which also throws it off for me because thinking back to this episode, sometimes I forget that Gina Rowlands is even in this one, and then when I do remember, I'm like, but what did she have to do?

Nothing? She has nothing to do in this episode, and she's just basically, oh yeah, I'm the one that saw the door open. She's the lynchpin to get this going. And I'm like, Okay, why aren't you not like Leslie Nielsen in that Susan Clark episode where you suddenly figure out, oh, something might be going on here with my husband and I might have to cover for him, and I'll lie or do whatever I need to, and then I have to be broken. Give me a This is the same year that A Woman Under the Influence comes out.

We talked about that quite a few months ago. What an amazing performance. We know she can give these killer performances. Faul can give these killer performances. He does it every month here when we talk about him here on The Shabby Detective.

Where is that? Where are the chops? Here? Instead, it's just so milk toast and like I said, I don't give a shit about Werner one way or the other. I don't hate him, I don't love him.

It's not seeing Robert Vaughn screwed over or some of these guys where you just oh, oh, here it comes, Here comes the big moment. Oh he's gonna where's the moment for Tick van Dyke to go over and grab that camera. It's just such a wet fart. Yeah. And at the end, it's this is a yet at another one of these episodes where the circumstantial evidence is so circumstantial.

I genuinely don't think he would have been caught. I feel like he gets away with it, and he's so rich that he could Look. Is Gina Rowlands now never going to trust him? But I'm sure he could probably convince her that this didn't happen. There's enough circumstantial evidence.

Here is what this feels like. And that's on top of everything else. The best Columbo episodes are when he really gets him at the end, like he really gets him here, he doesn't really get him. He more or less admits that he did it, but not really. He's just take me to jail, which is fine, but Oscar Werner just Yeah, he doesn't play sad sack, which we've seen with the Donald Pleasants character.

And he doesn't play like raging asshole like we've seen with the Robert Kulp characters. He's just there and there. Yeah. I really feel like, again, it should have been Gena Rowlands as the murderer in this episode and getting to see this duplicitous nature of her where she is a woman in a wheelchair, but she's also conniving and kind of and able to make these things happen even if she is in a wheelchair. And again I'm not saying that as ablest or anything.

I'm talking about the way this is portrayed in Night in yone, nineteen seventy eight or whatever this is where or seventy five, where these kinds of characters are being played completely as stereotypes, which she is, like. It would have been much more interesting if she had been the murderer, but there's no universe in seventy five where they're doing that. Unfortunately, at least they didn't put her in peril like there's a fighter in peril, or she's gonna roll down a cliff or something like that, like the famous scene that Paul Rudd likes to shack in me. Yes, at least we don't get that. But yeah, it's like with Oscar Werner, you could with that accent that he has and just the gravitas of this guy as an actor, he could have been a war criminal that is hiding out or something.

I think he's a little too young for that. Maybe, but I don't know. Nineteen seventy five, the war was thirty years prior. Maybe he could have done stuff. Like I said, he's looking pretty long in the tooth into this episode.

I would have believed that he had done some shit in Nazi Germany and he knows about it, and eventually his mother knows about it and her mother in law, and she's going to blackmail them. And when Gena Rowlands finds out what a horrible person she was married too, she has to give him up or something. Anything would have been better than this, Anything would have been better than what we got here, which is just again for me, when you have an actress as talented as Gina Rowlands is, who every time she's on screen and look, she just passed away recently. This is she's just recently passed away. She's one of the few actors who when she's on screen with Peter Falk, she holds her own, if not upstages him.

And that is something that they really pissed away, is what it feels like. Did no one see a woman under the influence? Did you motherfuckers not see that? And you were like Oscar Werner, is that we know you do female villains in this show. You've done it already several times.

So it's not that I just I don't get putting Gina Rowlands in a wheelchair and going this is good, this is enough, and then not even having her factor into the climax of the episode, really just having her sit there and kind of act the act surprised like it's such it is such an immense disappointment of an episode because Gina Rowlands is in the episode. That's really what this feels like. And we talked about this before on this show and other shows, especially on something like Midnight Viewing, which we do with Father Malone. Oh, this is the only time Xyz actor is on this show and this is a less than stunning episode. What a shame.

This is one of those times because again, like we've also already alluded to Peter Falk and Gina Rowlands have a history together and A Woman under the Influence was a movie I have no interest in rewatching because of how good the two of them are in the movie, and every time they're on screen here you can see that. It's just the context of their characters should have been a little better thought out. Yeah, last month when we talked about an episode directed by Ben Gazzara bringing in all the friends, you get Timody Carey, Ben Gazara, all these guys I can't remember Freddy last name, Cassavetti's. Of course, you get all these guys, and yeah, this one is just, yeah, we'll just we'll have Gina here, not give her a whole lot of stuff to do, make her fucking murder victim, do something to give her more ash.

When even when it comes to this idea of the gadgets, Okay, you got the cameras, you got the dimmer switches, you've got the clapper, there's not a whole lot else and the watch, Yeah, this should have been like a whole fetish thing of his because we've already seen most of this stuff in these episodes. Literally, we've seen this all before. Exactly. The clapper is the only new thing. But I'm just like, yeah, no, if this guy's obsessed with gadgets, make him be obsessed with gadget.

Give them a fucking robot arm to play chess again, and then we can talk about Lawrence Harvey again. Yeah. It's genuinely shocking to me that they go as hard into some of the things in this episode that they do with the technology, and then they just leave it hanging, like you've already alluded to when we haven't really talked about it. But the house that they live in is like the fucking smart house. It is the kind of house that would have been at like the World's Fair, where look at the House of the future, Like trick doors and like a safe room that you can control the entire house from, and it's all wired up with cameras in every room.

It's like, this is literally what people have in their houses now in twenty twenty four. And yeah, they do very little with that. On top of everything else, there's like a literal room from a James Bond movie in this house. It looks like a Ken Adams designed room, it really does, and they do nothing with it. They do nothing with it comparatively to the amount of time that they spend looking at the CCTV footage in the security guards room, which is where we spend a lot of How catch him of this episode and them going nine thirteen or nine forty two?

You know what? Hearing them repeat times on a fucking clock is not interesting episode. I don't care how many times you say it. There isn't a lot of colorful characters in this episode either. Like we've talked before about the Vito Skoti when he's trying to sell him the funeral plots or the grave sites and things.

It's like, okay, that can be all cut out. That's okay, But it's nice to see Vito Scoti in that. It's just color. Yeah, in this one, there's not a lot of color like I was expecting. Even Just tell me more about the security guard, what's his background?

Tell me more about the people at the art museum, what's their back. I'm getting nothing. I'm getting no victy back. I'm getting no no. Does this painting?

Can you make this match my bathroom? Like missus krabit's in there that those kind of things like where are the colorful characters? Yeah, it's and that's the thing, even Oscar Werner's character, and this is the thing I want to really put out there. And again, like it's not Oscar Werner's fault. I don't think his character is like such a fucking nothing.

It's such a nothing character. He's almost like impish, and he paints a target on himself immediately, and he's pathetic the moment we see him. He's just pathetic. That's the word I would use. He's a pathetic character.

And it doesn't really work because he makes himself look guilty the moment Columbo comes in there. There's nothing about this character that is remotely intimidating or you think this guy's gonna get away with it. Like he literally looks a sack of shit the moment he's on screen, Like he's just it's obvious that he's this pathetic, sad sag the moment he's on screen, and then you see, oh, the mom's taking the business, the mother in law's taking the business away from him, and so he just pulls out a gun and shoots her, like on top of everything else, Like it's not even a creator Like we've seen so many creative ways for people to get murdered on this show, and this is just bang, I'm gonna shoot her.

I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna I'm gonna use the close circuit TV to air the air false footage, Like wow, is that trope? Is that a trope? In things? It's gotta be right looping the CCTV footage?

What is this? Toys? What is this immabs? Yeah? Yeah, any other of these like multitudinous things where we've seen that a million times.

I'm sure they've done it in at least one Marvel movie at this point, if not several. And here we are in Colombo seeing it and they don't do it very well. It's it's not compelling. It's not a compelling position to put your episode in to have to resolve itself. Even when it comes to the security Guard's a guy who's watching the CCTV.

Shure, he's watching it so avidly, And I'm like, do you do this every night? Sir? Are you actually watching this footage every single night? Just staring at these monitors? By this time, you would think he would have I don't know, jigsaw puzzles or a newspaper or something else, and then that could cast some doubt on the guard was doing this, or the guard had to go and see, yeah, he had a bladder infection and he had to keep using the bathroom or something.

But there's nothing interesting. There's no like we've talked so much just in this season about the layering of the clues one after another, and Colombo has to come in and just knock this one down, knock this one down. The way he gives people excuses and like, oh, what do you think about this? And then the person has to come up with their bullshit answer, and Werner does that a few times. It could have been this, Oh yeah, I didn't think about that.

But it's so low key compared to some of the other people. Maybe it's just I don't know. It's like the register it's played in is like a minor key. Yeah again, I don't I have not seen Oscar Werner in anything else, So maybe that's just the the acting stylings of him as an actor. But the character as he's written in this episode is so low key and so just I don't know.

Again, Like I said, impish because the moment Columbo season, but that this is the guy who did it. It's so painfully obvious that this is the guy who did it. That's what I would say. This is one of the best examples of a bad episode because it's I'm not I'm saying we as the audience, don't know that Colombo knows immediately. But the best episodes are the ones where we see Colombo come to that realization.

He's not just walking in from Dayu's X right and going this is the guy, right, And that's this episode, Like in a nutshell, he's like the moment Colombo locks eyes with this guy, like you're fucking toast pal, He's got your number and there is nothing you can do about it. And yeah, I'm trying to remember the last time we saw one of these episodes where it's like, I guess the Robert Vaughan episode was like that, where it's like Colombo runs into him initially on the boat in the boat, but at least in that episode, Robert Vaughan does a lot to put himself in a position for it to be like Colombo really has to nail him to the fucking wall in that episode. In this episode, this guy nails himself to the wall and Colombo just has to look at him and be like, you did this to yourself, pal, Sorry.

And I think for Werner the big titles for him are Jewels and Jim Height four fifty one, and then oddly Voyage of the Damned. Those seemed to. Be every Yeah. I was looking at his filmography and he was doing stuff back in the forties and looking at a picture of him from at Roika in nineteen forty nine. Had he been a Nazi in the war, I could have bought it.

It could have been something more interesting. We're going to see an episode I think maybe next season where there is a war criminal and it plays so much better when it's okay. So you keep bringing it up because I was like, is this a thing that the show's gonna do well? So yeah, okay, I'm excited now because that's interesting. Yeah.

It just makes more sense for somebody with that accent to have this going the accent. Yeah, And that. Would have made him more interesting, because, like I said, he's just so dull as a character, and I feel so bad that he's just that. Again, it's not Oscar Werner that we're picking at. It is the character that he's playing.

It just how poorly written it is and just how uninteresting the character is, and. On top of everything else, the motivation for why he's doing what he's doing is I don't know how to put this but generic. We've seen it before. We've not just seen it before, we've seen it plenty of times in this show. It might be the trope that they've gone to the most at this point of I'm taking the business away from you donald pleasance.

We saw it there, robbing it here. With the reculpe with the football team. And that's probably we're probably forgetting a couple on top of everything else. It's the most generic place to go with this kind of character, because again, we're dealing with rich people, and rich people having businesses taken away from them that make them a lot of money, I guess is reason enough to murder someone. And we've seen that over and over and over and over again on this show, and I don't need to see it again.

I'm sure we're going to see it plenty of times before the end of the series again. But if they're going to do it, do something with it. Don't just do this. Aust McDonald going all the way back or mentioned suitable for framing before Os McDonald thought that his uncle was going to give all of those painting to somebody else, and that really made him mad and tries to set up the ants. She has nothing to do with it, like again trying to pin the murder onto somebody else, Like where's that aspect of it that would have made this again more interesting, like setting up like Jack Cassid, he's setting up like forces that are out there trying to murder people and oh they tried to murder me or the Requiem for a Falling Star.

Oh yeah, they went after they killed my secretary, but they're really after this guy, and where is that? Like, where's the intelligence of switching things around and pinning things on other people or casting aspersions onto other folks. So he's muddying the waters to make it a lot harder to catch him. Any other detective would have gone off on these wild tangents, whereas Colombo can just cut through those things. He has nothing to cut through in this episode.

No Oscar Werner literally just shows up and pretty much paint a target on his forehead and says it's me. I did it. Yes, I am the one. But I assume might think it is another person, but it is obviously k me. Yeah, I will say, though, in the scene where him and Columbus are standing outside of the window and he has those sunglasses on by the Lord in Heaven, I used to have a pair of sunglasses like those.

I found him. I forget where I found them, but I found him somewhere, and either are clearly women's sunglasses, and I kept them, and I don't know where they are anymore. But I wish I still had them, because they are a spit and image of those sunglasses he's wearing. And those are some wild sunglasses. They are, without a doubt, the most asshole sunglasses one could have had.

You looked like Willy Wonka from Tim Burton's Will He Wanka movie. That's the energy of those sunglasses there, really is. I can see that. Even just like his suit where he wears the light shoes that go with the suit. It's like, all right, this guy's kind of a dandy.

But again he doesn't carry it nearly as far as he should. No, And boy, if they had gone in that direction, that show would never do that. Not in nineteen seventy five. Yeah, that would have been way more interesting had he been having some sort of a gay affair at the time, like something that would uh man. That's not Colombo though, that's poker Face twenty twenty three.

Yeah, and his fellow cops. There's no real good interplay with the other officers. There's no like Officer Wilson here to question him. There's even Bruce Kirby two months ago when we talked about the military episode. There's not him going, oh, look at what I have to deal with this guy.

Look at this weirdo out here comb and the grass looking for stuff? What is this? None of that. These guys are just like, yeah, lieutenant, oh you're getting a cold. I'm so sorry to hear that.

And where's that? Give me more of the cold stuff? He gets worse throughout the whole episode or something. You got dog here? Dog barely has anything to do.

Come on, guys. They added a lot of stuff, but they didn't do anything with him. It's like that meme of the little figure with the stick poking at something, going come on, do the thing. This whole episode it just felt like I was poking it with a stick, going come on, be good. Be better than you are, which is not great.

Yeah, and it's a real shame that it's coming in the fourth season because pretty much every episode this season has been really good. Yeah, and this feels like a season two episode. You know, the show hasn't gotten its feet underneath it yet, like it's still figuring out where it wants to go with things. I think there were some more solid episodes in season two than there were with this one. This att twod in Black kicked off the first season or second season.

That's true other than this. That's true. Yeah, is this one of the worst episodes of the show. It might be. It's in a lower third, which would make it, Yeah, which would make it one of the worst episodes.

I don't think it's the worst episode. No, I don't know. Gina Rowland's being in this episode and not being used very well is that is almost like an affront to It would be one thing if she hadn't been in Woman under the Influence Price year, if she wasn't already Gina Rowlands in a lot of ways, like if she was just I don't know, Gena Davis Cerca nineteen eighty two or something of Okay, fine, she's early enough in her career, whatever, But there's none of that. This is Gena Rowlands as Gina Rowlands in a lot of ways. Yeah, that would put this in the lower quorder of the episodes we've seen, not even third lower quarter, because I think that is a real big problem and I think that is a genuine issue that this episode has.

Yeah, well, we talked next month, we'll go through the whole season, which is pretty easy because it's just six fucking episodes. You'll remember then and you'll say, oh, play back was probably the worst episode of the season. But when we talk in four, five, six, seven years and look back at Klumbo overall, you're gonna forget that this episode even exists. Really, it's that much of a meth So, so are your so is it that much of a met or does the show really get that? Is it also the show starts evolving?

No, I'm saying that there are going to be much higher highs than these lower lows. Of course, there are some low ones, like when we start talking about the ABC years, it's going to be like a race to the bottom, and it's going to be a real rarity that we see a good episode, and there's probably always going to be like this could have been better, Yeah, but overall was okay. And then if you think back to something like negative Reaction or Troubled Waters or by Dawn's Early Light. You'll be like, oh, yeah, those were great episodes, and there's going to be some of those coming up in seasons five, six, seven, eight. Well, and that's more what I meant.

I figured, I'm sure that the highs will be high, but I was more alluding to the fact that the lows are going to be I think, much lower. Oh yeah than this. As much of a low as this is, I know because I've just heard you allude to it and talk about it that similarly to when Perry Mason came back. It's like, some of those episodes are just not good, and I look, I don't know what to think about the show yet when it gets to like old man Peter Falk running around veh Glumbo, because I've never seen it, but I can imagine how bad this will get. Let's put it that way, because we've seen it with these kinds of shows, especially with the show that has a different writing team week to week and even different director and even different actors in terms of the main cast other than Peter Falk.

But yeah, I have no preconceived notions that this episode's probably really not that bad. In the grand scheme of things, and I probably will forget how middle of the road it ultimately is, because I'm sure it is ultimately just kind of middle of the road in comparison to the whole show. And what is that, like season five or six, six, where we get to the ABC years? I mean, we still have one more season of the show, I think, right, No, we. Still have quite a few those seasons.

Six is only three episodes. I want to say that the universal NBC stuff was all the way to season seven, and then season eight is when we start the ABC mystery movies all those years later. That's eighty nine when he comes back. Wow. Season seven ends in seventy eight.

Okay, so we have three more seasons of good Colombo before it becomes old Daddy Colombo. Yeah. I won't say they're all good. We're gonna have our highs, no, Yeah, but there are some really high highs. Even with the first episode of season six, that one is one of my faves.

Hopefully you like it as much. Even with season five, there's a couple in here I'm just like, oh, yeah, that's a good one, and then there are a couple where I'm. Like, yeah, yeah, that was all right, Like I said, this season I think, for the most part, has been pretty solid. This is the one episode that's sticking out. I don't know if the next episode is that way.

I know the next episode is George Hamilton and Leslie and warrens some pretty big names, some pretty big people. I hope that they're used compared to the way Gina Rowlands is used here. But George Hamilton's not exactly the same caliber of an actor as Gena Rowlands is. That's very true. And I don't think that Leslie and Warren's on screen for too long.

And I don't know why I. Thought every single episode this season was in the ninety minute mark, because that's another one that's at seventy minutes. So if people were yelling at their podcast listening device that you know, hey, these aren't all ninety minutes, I apologize. I don't know where I got that idea from. Well, and like you've already said some of this, we are very lucky that there is not more of this episode because this episode felt long enough as it was.

You didn't need to see another twenty five minutes of this. Really, Yeah, until we come back next month, Chris and talk about a deadly state of mind? What are you working on these days? Everything that I'm working on, including all of our shows that are just being bombarded with ads, Thanks Spreaker, can be found over at weirdingwaymedia dot com, where the stuff that I work on, the stuff that you work on, and the stuff that we all work on is kicking around over at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Other than this one little thing that you and I work on with our friend mister rich HadAM, which is ranking on Bond, which can be found over at mine and your respective patreons patreon dot com, slash culture cast or patreon dot com slash Projection booth.

That that's us talking about James Bond once a month, and if that's the thing you're into, you should totally check it out. What about you, Mike? Where can people find the things that you're working on? It's really weird, but it's the same place, Weirdingwaymedia dot com. That's where you can find just about everything other than that Patreon exclusive at the ten dollars and up level, you can hear us talking about mister James Bond, the Secret Agent and mister Kisskissbang Bang, who's doing way too much kiss for Patrick mcgoin to handle.

But it's not the last time we'll hear from about Patrick McGowin. Trust me on that one, folks. But yeah, maybe Before we head out, I want to thank John Walker for our open theme and Colin Gallagher for our closing theme. Collen's got more music over at Modern Silent Cinema. I think you can pick up almost everything that he's done on band camp highly recommended, and I'm not sure if John puts out his music, but he's always good with the score.

So thank you very much to those guys. Thanks so much to you Chris for continuing this journey of shabbiness with me, and thanks to everybody for listening. I always appreciate the feedback. Thanks so much for taking the time. If you could leave us some rating and review over on iTunes, that really helps us out.

And hey, now you can actually listen to this on iTunes if you're on an Android device. How crazy is that? Pretty crazy? As the mo