Publish or Perish

Welcome to the Shabby Detective, yet another Colombo podcast. I'm your host Mike White. Joining me, of course, is mister christ Eshue. What time is it, Mike? Is it twenty two hundred hours?

Oh boy? We are talking about Publish or Parish? Which is the fifth episode of the third season of Colombo, directed by Robert Butler, written by Peter S. Fisher, aired January thirteenth, nineteen seventy four. It is a seventy one minute episode, but gosh darn it, I think they could make this a ninety minute and we wouldn't have any sort of problem because this sucker moves fast.

Chris, what did you think about Publish or Perish? I was joking with you a couple times off recording that I've watched this episode a couple times. I have seen this episode I think six or seven times, maybe more. Cow Yeah, what's interesting has been using this episode as a starting place to watch a little bit past it. But for whatever reason, like this will start.

This will be the one I start on, and then I'll watch the next two and like mention you, I haven't gone any further than to you. We'll get to when we get to it. But what's funny is I think for me this episode, if it had been anyone other than Jack Cassidy, I might have enjoyed it more. But I think it's a lesser version of the Jack Cassidy episode that he was in the first time. And I don't think that the character that he plays in this episode, I don't like him as much as the person we're following throughout.

I think some of the other things are more interesting, like the John Chandler character, the Eddie Kane character. He's a lot more in interesting than Jack Cassidy. But I understand that the Jack Cassidy character has to exist for this to exist the way that it does, because he's the mastermind here. I like the setup and everything. I just think Jack Cassidy's character is just not that interesting.

And I would actually go as far as to say it's obvious from the moment Columbo starts talking to him who murdered who? And it's because Jack Cassidy is just so obvious. He doesn't do a very good job at covering up his tracks. He almost feels like a lesser villain to Colombo. That Colombo just outsmarted from the get go, is what it feels like I don't know that the finale climax where Colombo out jack Cassidy, it's it felt so obvious.

I don't know why you couldn't have just gotten him in the first five minutes of the episode when Colombo shows up, because Columba doesn't show up for a while on top of everything else, would have felt less obvious if Cassidy wasn't setting himself up as the murderer, which is an unusual at tact. He is doing everything he poss can to frame himself for the murder, but then at the same time building this air tight alibi to basically say, gosh, it looks like I did it. It's my gun, it's my fingerprints, it's my key, all of this stuff is laid out in this office. I had reason to kill this guy. I had a blow up beforehand.

Gosh, but I don't know where I was last night, Lieutenant. I'm so confused and helpless. It seems like such a put on. Colombo sees through it immediately, and I think, for me, this is also one of these episodes where the way Colombo catches him, I don't think this guy would have gone to jail for it. If you're using that singular piece of information.

The ending of the book. One of those episodes where there were many off ramps to get where we were going, and you waited about as long as you could, and you almost hit the median while getting over, but you didn't. But you didn't have have to. You didn't have to cut it this close, because it just it's a little hinky. And I've said that before and I'll say it again this sometimes it feels like they try to get too cute with the way Columbo catches him, and it's not this, but it's not this, but it's not this.

It would be like if in the Robert colp episode, the last one that we just watched, where he has the barrel of the gun, it would have been like if the barrel of the gun had been the fake out and it had been like the napkin had gunpowdered residue on it. It's what, I don't know. It just feels a little I don't know. I wasn't as taken by the way Columbo catches him in this episode as I have been with some of the other ones. It is interesting because I don't think that the story the end of the story.

So, just for folks that haven't watched this episode before, we talked about how Cassidy setting himself up, and then he seems to basically be undoing that through the rest of it. He takes this guy who is very into explosives. Man, oh man, that guy he's so interesting. He plays it character wow, oh my god. What those that grin and the way he talks through his teeth sometimes it's perfect.

This guy is just primo. And once he's out of the way, once Cassidy kills him, then tries to pin everything onto this guy. He just does a terrible job. He comes up with this outline that has the revised end of the story that he should not have known about. So there's to me, this isn't just the end of the story thing.

There's a mountain of evidence. One of them is, yes, he shouldn't have known the end of the story, but he was getting all of those the transcripts, like he was cheating the whole time getting the transcripts. But then the real thing is there's this whole thing of my key for his office was left there, and then Colombo changes the locks on the door and says, oh gosh, those locks were changed like a week ago. That couldn't have been your key, and then Cassidy goes to all these great lengths to changed the lock, start to change the key, and leave that and he basically fucks himself. That's that, to me, is like the real gotcha moment.

But I think it's obscured by what you're talking about, which is that story, because that's a better story. It's a better story than the locksmith coming in and being like just the change of the locks a weeks ago. That for me is the way he gets caught is the locks were changed, and yet you have a key and you set the key there thinking that was going to be evidence enough, but it turns out that is like evidence piece smoking gun number one that someone else is in on this and they don't understand because they just didn't have the information of what was going on. And I get that's not as fun, like you said, it's not as thematic of a gotcha moment, But that's the real police work part, not the The ending was read to him by his secretary and that was like, yeah, I get it.

That works more within the framework of the narrati because oh, it's a story about authors, and it's the world of publishing and two rival publishing houses going at it. But sometimes it is the most innocuous thing. Ted Bundy left a fucking was a tire iron or a wrench at one of the scenes of the crime. It's the stupid shit like that gets you caught, not the super obvious thing. And yeah, to your point, Jack Cassid, he just paints a bullseye on his forehead and goes, shoot me here, I dare you, which is interesting, just don't think it's done very well.

I like how he laid it on in the first episode Murdered by the Book, where it was just like, oh, Lieutenant, you disappoint me. That whole thing, where he's the one coming up with all of the excuses and overthinking things and basically telling Columbo he's a dumb ass for not thinking of all these other things. In this one, he's playing a much more passive role, and he's a pretty good liar when he lies about stuff. I'm like, oh, okay, but yeah, like any normal human being would just see right through it, and Colombo is from a normal human being. He is not necessarily that space alien kind of a character.

But he's again guy seems to have no home. He just rolls in and is just, oh, I've had five hours of sleep over the last two nights. Does he say why he had such a little sleep. No, he just says, I got five hours sleep over the last two nights, which is, like, by the way, not good because I because theoretically the most he could have gotten any one night was four hours if he's slept two hours, so it's two and a half hours each night. Fuck, dude.

They're in enough coffee in the world to keep you up. But you know what there is that keeps him up? Chili? Chili, Folks, it's all about the chili, because we get another Columbo chili scene where he's eating chili. I don't know the restaurant.

I don't know what the actual restaurant is. I'm sure on IMDb they say where it was filmed. I think it's Chastens. This is not the kind of place that you're ordering chili. But that's what Colombo does because he's Colombo.

And like you said, Dietrich from Arnie Miller and Colombo have a lot in common in terms of they're just themselves to a fault, and there is nothing that anyone can say to them that will change who they are. To the point where Colombo is trying to and does pay for his chili and iced tea even though they have offered to pay for it, and he's no, I have to this is police business. It's just he's haggling with the guy over the iced tea, and it's just it's Colombo. What universe are you from? But that's why we love Columbo so much, is because he is such an idiosyncratic character.

And it's Peter Falk's performance again this episode. I think I like the things that take place in this episode that don't necessarily have to do with the murder and everything else going on. I would have liked to have spent a lot more time with the rival publisher. I would have liked to have spent a lot more time with Maryett Hartley. Are you familiar with her?

Not? Particularly in the nineteen sixties and seven, especially the seventies. She was everywhere. She was one of the spokespeople for Polaroid. I want to say it was her and Jim Garner and she had a very I can't say it was a public battle, but there was a very Oh wait, something's not right with Mary Att Hartley, and she just disappeared from the landscape, but went from this woman is everywhere to this woman is nowhere, And took me a long time to just realize, Oh, I can go to Wikipedia and look up why Mary had Hartley disappeared.

Apparently she had a very bad case of bipolar disorder, so can really knock you out of things and make you crazy and very difficult to work with. She went away for a while and I'm glad that she continued working on things and she's actually, I believe, a spokesperson for bipolar disorder, which is fantastic. But yeah, she's great. I want to say. She shows up in another Colombo, and she's such a great actress and such a great presence.

I really wanted more of her, just because I really like her. This episode doesn't feel like it's spending its time with the right people, and that is for me, the kind of the big shame is there are so many people in this episode that are interesting, and Jack Cassidy's just not one of them. I actually I find his lawyer to be interesting too, because his lawyer is this like weird bulldog but seems also but also does seemingly understand that he's convinced that Columbus trying to pin it on his client, but then at some point he realizes maybe he's not actually trying to pin it, because he goes, you need to stop bothering my client and go figure out the facts. And he's going to figure out the facts here pretty quick, and it's going to turn out that it's Jack Cassidy with his hilarious gloves on, with that cigarette hanging out of his mouth, blowing up Eddie Kane like that.

That, Yeah, I I don't know like Jack Cassidy for me, Like you mentioned that first episode that he's in and he's so good, And what's funny is not only is he so good in that episode, it's the same fucking whirl of the rich. It's just, oh, in that one he's a writer and in this one he's the publisher. Is it not too close? Like I found it also to be a little too close thematically to that episode, because again, it would be like if they brought John Cassavetdi's back and they had him play a musician as opposed to the director of the orchestra, and it's I don't know if you needed to do it twice. I don't know what you missed out saying the first time.

I guess is what I'm getting at. I'll be frank this episode when we came to it, I was like, publisher Parish, what is that one? And I could not think of what this episode was. It is a blind spot for me because I can tell you the next time Jack Assi he shows up, he's a magician. Oh oh, I'm excited for the plastic.

Yes, he's great in that episode and he was great and murdered by the book. But yeah, this one, I was like, oh, yeah, I guess he is in this one. And really I remembered Eddie Kane way more than I remembered him. And Eddie Kane. There's another episode with Dick Van Dyke where there's a very similar character to Eddie Kane.

I don't think he blows stuff up, but he's I think he's also like a non vet or something. I mean, yeah, like, give me more of this Eddie Kayane character. And I really wish that he had gotten angry and realized that Jackassidy wasn't going to publish his book and then started like one man war against Jack Cassidy. And maybe eventually Columbo figures this out, like figures like, oh, there's all this other stuff going on with this guy, what is that story? And maybe he finally gets to Eddie Kane and Kane's this guy promises he was going to publish my book, and Clemb's something's not right here.

Just dig into that a little bit more. The Eddie Kane character is painted as such a dumb ass, like a complete moron. He's so trusting of him, and it's it feels antithetical to what that character is. That he's a disgruntled Vietnam vet who's sitting and making what is effectively the anarchist cookbook. It seems like the anarchist cook book.

But then he does say a couple times this stuff is all out there, so I'm just aggregating it is what he essentially says, which I get it. He says as much in the episodes. The manuals are all there. I'm just providing the information that is such a much more interesting character. I actually would have found it more interesting if he had killed Jack Cassidy and Colombo had to.

Then Columbo's investigating Jack Cassidy, he's investing in and then Jack Cassidy dies and he's wait a second, My initial person I thought who was doing all of this is now dead, So is there somebody else? Because he never Columbo never gets to Eddie Kane, he never even meets him. Eddie Kane's character is existing, removed from the rest of the story, and Jack Cassidy kills him, and Colombo has to connect those two crimes. And I think it would have been more interesting if they were all if they were done in a different way where Jack Cassidy is at times the murderer and then becomes the victim himself, because we haven't seen that even if Eddie started to blackmail him. That again goes back to murder by the book, right, that's that woman that sees Cassidy and it's just like, Oh, we're going to be best of friends.

There should have been something, because the murder of Eddie is just basically, Oh, I need to get the attention off of me, and I'm going to pin it on this guy. And I don't even know if Cassidy had that in his head initially, or if you just saw an opportunity it was like, oh, I'm going to do this now. It didn't feel like he had it all planned out. It felt like it was more of a It wasn't a crime of opportunity, because I think he obviously went there with the intention of killing Eddie, but then everything else on top of his Oh here, I'll just luckily there's carbons here and I can just make this carbon copy of this proposal that I'm writing out, And I guess he must have had the whole story written.

But then for me, that seems like Columbus should have gone through the typewriter ribbon and saw when that proposal was written, or is it just not on the ribbon? And he goes, oh, wait a second, there's a problem here with the timeline. He would have had to have written this. He said it, he wrote it six months ago. How often do you go through a typewriter ribbent?

That would have been fascinating. Today we come to another issue that I have with this episode. And again it's not that I need the victims to be given more characterization, but Mickey Splane not great in this episode, and look not an actor either. Mickey Splaine much more known for being an author of pulp novels, so don't expect him to be a great actor. But this is stunt casting if I've ever seen it, the definition of stunt casting.

This guy is an actual author, and he is now the author who gets murdered in Colombo. Kuck Kuck. That's great because he's not a great actor. We spend zero time with him because I think they realize that he is not. It's not that he is of a great screen presence, got a great look to him.

He's just not an actor and everybody else in this episode is. And he stands out even when it's just him reading the transfer gripped, it stands out. But that scene at the kind of the garden party at the beginning of the episode is anytime he interacts with Jack Cassidy, it's hard to watch. Spoleayne actually carried two films. He was the lead and ring of Fear and The Girl Hunters.

But I agree with you, he's not an actor. Yeah, and he might. He might be great in those, but he's just not great here. Like, he's definitely not great here. I mostly know him from when he would show up in the I think it was bud Light commercials he would show up in and he was all over the place as this spokesperson for bud Light, but it was also I want to say it was bud Light, it might have been Miller Lite.

It was one that it was during that golden era of TV commercials for beer where there was like, hey, I want to light and then the guy hands him a torch, no bud light or like the whole taste great versus less filling thing. And they had different celebs that would be on either side of that debate and stuff, and yeah, Spolene would come in and the trench coat and the hat, and you were supposed to be like, oh, yeah, here's this guy, and I'm like, who the hell is this guy? It took me years to figure out who the else this guy was. Started out as a party but turned into the case of the missing case. You're really sing it's okay, Oh it's not.

There's a case of mellow light missing somebody in this room? Right, God, why don't you do it? Rodney calls light taste great cause lifeless film. I didn't do it. Well, I'm not even a running duke.

I thought it was a costume party, great mask. But if he didn't do it, who did. I'll never figure out who took that case? Did you not exactly gotch I'm dance. There's no mystery that there's only one light here, Miller light.

My camera was still on TV. Stacy Keach was doing this my camera thing. But I didn't know Mickey Splaine from anybody. I didn't even know Bob Yuker for the longest time when he was like a pitch man for this stuff. But his role in here, I wish that they had put somebody in here that had wore pizazz because he just can't handle it.

And again, show me more of his stuff. This is some sort of superstar author make him gregarious, make him this big personality such that, oh my god, they killed this guy and he's he's our golden calf here the other publisher. Again, it's like he has no reason to kill Mickey Splaine because he's the golden goose. He's going to come over to this other house. Who else had any sort of motivation, Nobody but Jack Cassidy.

And that's the thing. It's like he's painting a target on himself, but there is also no one else it could be. I just don't understand, like what fucked up logic, because that's the thing, like the Colombo villains, but ostensibly they're not the villains. Columbo's the villain of this show. In a lot of ways.

They're often so much more well thought out. They often get caught because Colombo is galaxy brain smarter than them. There will be episodes coming up where Colombo knows literally within five minutes of meeting the person that they are the murderer. And this what's funny is like this episode could have been that it could have been Colombo like a cat's tolling with his ball of yarn, and it's not that Colombo just just floats through the episode. And again by the end of the episode when he's going toe to toe with Jack Cassidy, it's like Jack Cassidy is just out of sorts.

This guy's hosed. Because again, the ones that you think can get away with it are the ones who have actually spent the time and effort to come up with multiple ways to give themselves an alibi. And in this one, I feel like the conceit is the problem at the heart of it, the conceit that this guy is making himself look guilty intentionally. I don't know if that works with a character like Colombo, given the way that he has given the way that the show is presented narratively and the way his character is get And we've talked about this before him knowing essentially automatically or with us asking when did he know who the killer is in this episode. I genuinely believe he walks in there and he knows it's him before anything happens.

And even if Kathley was trying to pin the murder on Eddie, he needed more than just the outline and the letter he needed. I hate to go to a horrible movie like Batman v. Superman, but crazy letters needed to have been sent to Mickey Spalaane's character going hey, where's my credit? Hey? Why are you taking my story?

I heard you're doing this? You're stealing my stuff or something. There should have been something more. If he's trying to make Eddie the killer, then there's got to be more of a tie between Eddie and Mickey Spelaine. And it's like why there's nothing other than that outline and then Cassidy is just nothing.

It should have been like, oh shit, yeah, that crazy guy. I don't get it with this episode, because again, there is a good idea here, it just feels completely fumbled in execution. And again I'd like to point out I don't know why we went back to the world of books again this quickly into the show, because we literally just saw it, and Hey, doesn't help that it was the same actor in that episode that's in this one. It's just everything about this episode is seemingly set up to be compared to that original Jack Cassidy episode, like it's It may not have been quote intentional unquote, but it is completely unintentional. And there's no wait.

I can't imagine Jack Hassid is reading the script going didn't already play a character. That's the thing. It's not that he's not good or that Colombo isn't turning in a great performance. It's just why would I watch this episode if I could just watch the first one, which is better in every conceivable stretch of the imagination, including the way it handles the world that this takes place soon I read I think it was in David Caning's book that they weren't originally going to go with Jack Cassidy, but they were talking about, of all people, another Jack Klugman. I believe this or not.

A prohibition against Clugman being on the show because Klugman is basically the same everyman that Peter falk Is. Makes sense with Clugman in a few years would be Quincy, which is a fantastic show as well, and he's the Emmy and he's also the investigator and it's a really solid show. But I would it liked to have seen somebody else in the role, and whether it be Jack Klugman or even how bring mel Farrar back. He wasn't the killer in that episode where the woman had buried her husband under the fountain, So why not bring him back and make him a killer, let him have a chance. I don't know if casting someone else would have fixed it, but at least it wouldn't have made me go, look at the last time he did this.

I can't compare it if you don't do it, but if you do it, I can't help but compare it is the problem. You're putting the onus on me as the watcher to go. I'm not going to compare it to the last one. It's maybe in nineteen seventy four when this episode airs aired, because I couldn't go back and watch the original episode. But given that this is all on Peacock and it is the year of our Lord twenty twenty four.

I can watch this all and I can go and jump between the two episodes, so I know that they weren't taking that into account, but they should have taken into account that Jack Cassidy already did this episode. And yeah, I wonder what it would have been like with someone else, like you said, like a Jack Klugman or just somebody literally anybody else. Would it have worked any better? Maybe? I still think I'd still have the problems of the way that the episode concludes, really feeling just again, You've had all these other opportunities and this is the one you took.

I feel like we I feel like we don't need to wait this long to exhaust all the other options before we go with this one, especially if this is the one you're going with because they created it too. It's a created thing. It's not I don't know the thing with that story at the end, it doesn't even make sense. Really again, Eddie Kane is not part of this story at all other than this one singular thing. It's just so strange to me because again, he should have either been more involved or not involved at all.

He was too good of a character for this episode, I think, and I honestly could have seen John Davis Chandler just being the main villain, like he has that kind of weird energy to him that could have carried some strange interactions with Colombo. Again, I know most of these people that Columbo interacts with very area dyte, and this guy is nowhere near areadyte. He lives in a real weird attic of a building where he makes bombs all the time. This is not a character that Colombo is going to be dealing with, but I think it would have been more interesting to see those two play off of one another. Then again, Colombo just playing off of this Jack Cassidy who's seemingly on the defense of the entire time, because Columbo's already got his number when you read those Colombo books and he's investigating things like JFK's murder or the Manson family.

He's not dealing directly though, with Charles Manson, who I think would have been a great Columbo villain. But he's also not dealing with the real upper echelon snobs. In that scenario, he doesn't always have to do the snobs versus the slobs. This one would have been Slobed versus slob it was him versus Eddie. But it's still it's possible breaks a little bit with the formula.

But again we're not in like real I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm looking at it from twenty twenty four lens, but like publishing, unless you're a very particular author, you're not making money hand over fist with this stuff. And that's when whenever I interview authors, I'm always just like, oh, you're sitting there on your golden throne, and they have to laugh because they don't get paid anything. So it's not all Stephen King's in the world. Maybe a Mickey Spalane at that point might have been he was supporting himself with his writing, but there's very few people that can do that. The percentage of people who have been able to support themselves through writing is much smaller than the amount of people who have written things that go nowhere.

And in seventy four, maybe this is closer to the golden age of that being a thing, because again the industry was restrictive and there were so many barriers. But now, like you said, with fuck you and I could write a book and publish it by the end of the evening with Amazon print on demand, it's that easy now. Thankfully the Internet has had such a democratizing presence on content creation, not just with video but with audio, like with what we're doing, and then text as well as self publishing is easier now than it's ever been and will continue to get easure So that's the thing. Fifty years on, this all feels a little quaint because, Yeah, to your point, the writing industry, it's a hard industry to get into to be successful.

It's like music, like your pennies on the dollar is what you make for any copy sold or any listen of your songs. So I guess this is worth killing someone over if it's a Mickey Spillane type. But how much money do you realistically stand to me off of any of this. I don't mean to brag, Chris, but I got a rail to check recently for all of twenty twenty three, and I raked in. I've got at least four or five from books out there that have my name on them where I get the royalties.

I raked in a cool fifteen dollars last year. Think all that work you did to make fifteen bucks, and I didn't make that fifteen bucks. I have to do all that work. Maybe in seventy four this was a thing worth murdering somewhat over, but now it just feels a little quaint, which is fun. I'm not judging it based off of that at all.

It's just it is funny to be like, yeah, the author being an author is such a okay, and a publisher is probably just as thinkless. Somebody did the math. I can't where I read this, but at six dollars cup of chili, which is why Columbo was fighting over there. That would be thirty three dollars today, I believe it, yeah, or thirty three dollars, I think it. Back it was thirty three dollars and twenty twenty one money when whoever it was ran it through the calculator, so even more now.

Yeah, yeah, you're probably talking a fifty dollars bowl of chili. I will say, though I have always wanted to read Modern as Tech Courtship Practices. That is a book that I have always been interested in reading. Those like the Greenleaf Publishing books that are on the wall are pretty fucking great. Modern Aztec courting rituals, and my home is a house, I think, is what is this guy publishing on top of everything else?

I guess just hoult novels. Like it's never made clear what green Leaf is publishing other than just like maybe some like seedy bullshit. But again, how much money would they be making off of that? They would have to be publishing real books for this to be worth anybody's time to kill people? Yeah, you have imprints for your different We've got this arm over here that deals with children's literature, or this arm over here that deals with that academic stuff.

Yeah, whoever's printing that? What was that sixty miles to Saigon? It shouldn't be also doing the Aztec mating rituals. Such a bizarre it's just so bizarre. It's such a weird specific choice, just as they do have this moment where Columbo's you took a life insurance policy out on him and he was like, oh my, he got another bullets.

Yeah, but that's just common practice. It's but you did it like a month ago. What What in the hell is going on here? This? It's Jack Cassidy is really doing everything he can to make to get caught, Like to the point where the way, like I said, the way he gets caught is the dumbest of all the options that it's like, why not just like, why not just smoke him on everything else as opposed to this one thing, Like all these other things were way more obvious.

Maybe it's because Columbo wanted him to hang himself even more, But again, Colombo doesn't. In that scene in the hallway where he says the name of the transcriptionist and he like turns around, it's such a lame gotcha moment, So you think you can see Colombo's he's really trying to be like I gotcha, and it's just okay, like all right, you almost couldn't You couldn't even be blamed for forgetting about that guy, because he's I think he shows up what in the first maybe twenty minutes of the episode. Yeah, it's pretty early, I think. Is it Colombo that meets him in the hall Yeah? Yeah, meets him in the hallways, And yeah, you're right, Colombo.

It takes a while for him to show up in this one, and we've seen recently I think, let's see, I'm trying to remember the last episode, but the one before that we see him as part of the guard for Jackie Cooper. The one before that, we saw him in the police station as the girls coming in talking about her missing boyfriend, so they are finding ways to bring him in earlier, but this one definitely it's you know, after the murder's done, then we bring in Colombo, then we show him. I did have a question for you, because we have covered Barney Miller and we continue to cover Barney Miller. Where is Gregorycire in this episode? Because I saw him credited on IMDb.

He's credited on the episode itself. It's not even one of those weird IMDb things because when the credits roll, he's the first person listed. And I went through all of those Columbo books that I go to every single time we record an episode, and I'm just like, where's Gregorycierra. No one has an answer. It's like in the last episode we talked about how oh yeah, that woman at the beginning was cut out.

We'll talk about her, right, but there's no mention what's his name, Lou Dallassandro or something like that. Yeah, And there's no mention of Lou or anything that Lou's got going on. I'm just like, yeah, where is this guy here? We probably wouldn't have made a big deal out of it if we didn't watch Barney Miller at greg Orycierra wasn't like a missed presence on that show. But yeah, it's weird because I scrubbed through the entire episode several times and I thought, Oh, maybe he's the guy at the funeral home that Colombo talks to you.

But that's the next or two episodes down the road. So yeah, I don't I couldn't find anything. I'm glad you looked as well, But where's Gregor? You know what? Why not have Gregorycierra be the Jack Cassidy character.

I don't know, just spitball in here. I just saw him in an episode of Banichick, so he was making the rounds and it was really odd. I think he was the killer in that one. Don't tell anybody spoilers for Banichick, And he did not have any accent whatsoever, and I was just like, Oh, he was laying it on for Barney Miller. I didn't realize that.

I thought for some reason, and I've seen Gregory Sierra and other things, and I know that he doesn't always have a thick accent, but to hear him after we've gotten familiar with him on Barney Miller, and then suddenly he's in this Banichick episode and look out over there, hey mister, none of that kind of sime. He's not like a cartoon character on Barney Miller, but he's much more cartoonish than he was in this. And yeah, Gregory Sierr, he would have been prime for this role. He didn't have any luck killing Banichick, but I could really see him taking a swing at Colombo if things got tough. And again, he was apparently in this episode already so weird.

James b Seeking is also sorry. Si King is also allegedly in this I looked for him, I didn't see him. I don't even think he has a line though, But he's not fourth build in the cast, Sierra was. I was just like, what, how can that be? Yeah, I don't.

I must have been a must have been in a contractual obligation or something. There's no other there's no other explanation because he's literally not in the episode. It's not a blink and you'll miss him. He's There is no character named lou Dellasandra in the episode. I got to assume and maybe he's someone that works at the publishing house or something like it.

They never even say the name of the character, so it raises the question of like, where is he in the show? However, David Chase is in this episode, So there is that Chase. I laughed so long. Ye oh Chase. Oh, there's a real guy with that name.

He was He's working on the next lot, working on culture. Yeah, like they had the kinning of seventy four. Yeah, yeah, that didn't seem like an accident, let's put it that way. That's one shame about Colombo. When we talked about Kolchak, we were able to read I'd say probably eighty percent of the scripts were out online voting, ones that never even showed up in film form.

And when it comes to Colombo later on, like the eighty nine up episodes, those are available, a lot of those scripts are available, but these are early ones. Man. I want to say, there's one for this season and that's it, and it's not this episode stuff. Being a Colombo fan, because I know Kenny definitely had his hands on some of those scripts from his book, and I'm just like, what about this one? Man?

I want to know what happened here, Yeah, because there's literally, like last episode, there's literally stuff missing and it feels like it. And to your point, it's an hour and thirteen. I think it could have been an hour and a half, at least an hour twenty three, maybe not a full hour and a half. But we have seen these episode's clock in ten to fifteen minutes longer, and greg oryce here is on the cutting room floor somewhere. That is the reality he is in this episode.

Somewhere. Maybe it's one of those weird interactions that Colombo just has with people. Remember was it one or two episodes ago where he's in the tailor? You remember that, And there's that whole ten minutes of just going back and forth about it was the episode that political candidate where he sends him to his like suit maker, Like, maybe it was something like that. I could see a Gregora, I could see Gregorycire playing that kind of character.

But again, would that have added anything to the episode overall? Clearly not, given that they thought it didn't need to be in it. But again, everything that wasn't the main Jack Cassidy, Peter Faulk back and forth is so good that I've got to wonder maybe it was something worthwhile and they just again were focusing on the wrong thing throughout most of the time working on this episode. I loved how Colombo was basically pitching the idea for candidate for crime to jackcass. That's pretty good.

I didn't expect that. Yeah, and the guy that wrote this was a mystery guy, Peter Fisher, Peter S. Fisher. Sorry, he worked with Lincoln Levinson many other times. He worked on Murder.

She wrote, I'm thinking he must have been like one of the writer's room guys, just because you don't get your names on that many scripts for that. But yeah, and then he went on to do one more episode of let's call it Regular Colombo, and then he would do a ton of the post eighty nine stuff Rest in Peace, Missus Colombo, Butterfly, and Shades of Gray. Yeah, he was in a lot of this stuff. He co created Murder, she wrote, with the two of them, there you go, so there it is. So that's why his name is on every single episode, because two sixty four is the full run of that show.

That is a mountain that someone else has already climbed. I don't want to sail that mountain. No, now, thank you. No. I have been watching episodes occasionally when like Andrea won't be watching him, I'll come home and she'll have it on and I'm just like, oh, okay.

But it's just some of it feels too contrived for me and just too cute. See it feels too Hallmark Channel. Sometimes I watched a little bit of it. I actually just have left it on in the background from time to time. And the thing that I do notice is that it does seem a tad formulaic, even early on.

But to be fair, I'm sure people could level the same thing against Colombo, but the singular strength of that show is in Angela Lansbury the same way the singular strength of Columbo as Peter Falk, Like, you have such a fantastic actor that alone can carry your show for the most part, And from what I've seen of Murder she wrote, it clearly carries that show. And Colombo. We talk about how great Peter Falk is all the time, and that's because he is, and that's because he carries this show. And she does the same. But I'm with you, it is a little cutesy.

Those like Cottage Murder books like The Cat's gonna solve the murder. I love those books. By the way, I read a bunch of those books the last two years. Cat Solving murders, Dog solving murders, What was it? Caterers solving murders?

Because when they go cater people's houses, people get murdered. People getting murdered at like with sewing as the background of it. There's so many of those. Weird The eighties and nineties were a weird time for take a profession, that person is now solving frimes in the world of that profession, and there are these weird tangents of Like I said, one of them is like this caterer who solves murders, and every book has like a food name and murder she wrote reminds me of that. Everything is very cutesy.

The steaks are pretty low like Columbo, at least people getting Colombo has an edge to it that Murders, he wrote, doesn't have. But at the same time, I appreciate that about the show. At the same time, it's just I don't think it's something I'd want to spend more than just the five minutes we've tangentially talked about, and not an entire show. About it. It's nineteen seventy four now, and looking around Lincoln Levinson were doing, they were doing a lot of stuff.

Obviously they left the show pretty early on. I want to say, what beginning of the second season kind of thing. And there's a lot of good stuff in seventy four that we could be taking a look at, So maybe we'll go down that path at some point. But also I want to say we'll be at some point talking about a Peter Folk TV movie. I want to say, between seasons, so there's that to look forward to.

So there's some good stuff that we have in our future, including I want to say that the next episode mind Over Mayhem. I can't remember if I like that that episode or if I don't like that episode. I don't know. I just remember Precocious Child. Does Mike Connors ever show up in Colombo Mannix from Levinson and Link's other show, He doesn't.

Wouldn't it make sense for him to show up at some point? It totally makes sense for him to go up because he's I believe he's in an episode of at least one episode of murder. She wrote, like you mentioned, Levinson and Link have three big shows in three decades. They have Manix from fifty seven to sixty four, and then they have Colombo, and then they have Murder, she wrote, And those are three pretty big Columbo and Murder, she wrote, are pretty big about Mannix is pretty big too, But those are three big shows in three separate decades, like Levinson and Link are man I'm a huge fan of the stuff that they've worked on. For the most part, I don't know if we're going to cover the execution of Private Slatvic or The Gun.

I like the Gun quite a bit, but for sure I want us to cover Roller Coaster when we get there in nineteen seventy seven, because that movie is fucking fantastic, and then also Murder by Natural Causes that Lincoln Levinson did in seventy nine. I didn't realize until probably ten years after I graduated from high school that I can't remember if I was in the play or if I just watched the play, but my high school put that on, and so when I saw that the I think I was like at Blockbuster cleaning the tape wall, and I picked this up and I was just like, wait a second, this is the same as the plot of this play that Leon and Mark were in. Honestly, I think when we get to it, we should cover maybe like towards the end of this if not, like the final thing we cover is the movie based on Lincoln Levinson's partnership.

Oh there is one, The Guys, starring of all people, James Woods and John lithgow As as Lincoln Levinson. Essentially, I never knew that. Wow, yep, it do. It's very It's inspired by their lives apparently, But the synopsis is Walter and Arty are almost married. They have turned out scripts for movies and TV shows for twenty years and are writing partners.

They have a shared lifetime experience, experiences that include already three packs of cigarettes a day. It's funny like Lincoln Levinson. Obviously, like you said, they left at the top of the second season, but they have such a pronounced effect on the quality of this show, and I feel like them two being the people that created the show. While we haven't gotten to those episodes that you're talking about, this show has been consistently great, and I think it's because of the two of them just being again. They've created some of the bigger shows in the history of televisions, and they employed some of the people that would go on to create even bigger shows, like a Stephen Kannell.

So I would be interested to see what they fictionalized version of their partnership would be, like, all right, do it, man, we will do it. Unfortunately it's James Woods take the good with the band. We'll be talking about John Lithgow later on this zero and we cover Cliffhanger. Oh nice, Yeah, that's right. I assume that Colombo the later gets in the run of the show, we will start to see more like current Do current actors show up in the show as like villains or is it a lot of like TV like Royalty as the villains.

I would say it's more TV royalty because you get tying Daily in there. You get Brenda Vaccaro, you get Greg oh Bj and the Bear I can't remember his name. You get Norm from Cheers, you even get Al Sweeringen from Deadwood. Okay, I get interesting. I'm Ian McShane.

Yeah interesting. Columbo is such a long run time talking about the new because again I don't even know what that means yet, the new Colombo. You've talked about it enough, but the so far has been fantastic. So you have a few more good years here talking about this stuff so great, you're in for a treat. So until we come back to you talk about Robbie the Robot, and oh man, I'm fucking excited beyond belief to talk about the next episode, you have no idea.

I have almost just gotten through this episode because I know that the next episode we're getting to talk about is way more fun than this way, until we come back with that, Chris, what are you working on these days? It's a new year, so that means time to throw yourself headfirst into all of the things that you've been wanting to work on. Just working away tirelessly over at Weirdingwaymedia dot com on weekly, bi weekly and monthly podcast featuring me, some that I produce and some that I just sit back and watch other people do. Weirding Way Media is where you can go to find all of those great audio diversions. What about you, Mike, same thing.

Go over to the Weirdowaymedia dot com where you can find out some of the other stuff that I work on the projection booth. We're working on Midnight Viewing, which is now turned from a night gallery podcast into a hor anthology podcast which is very exciting. We are moving into Tales from the Dark Side territory. I'm super psyched about that. So far, not on Wood, but so good with this season, so I'm excited to see more and until then, I want to thank John Walker for giving us our theme song and Colin Gallagher for giving us our end song, and I want to thank everybody for listening to this and continuing to support the show.

It's been a fantastic ride and I look forward to going into the cold robotic clause of Robbie the Robot with you. Chris in Agent day Bower a Gay bows An