Columbo ( RIP Peter Falk 1927-2011 )

Peter Falk as Columbo Finally, the play was made into a two-hour television movie that aired on NBC in 1968. Mitchell had died, and the writers suggested Lee J. Cobb and Bing Crosby for the role of Columbo, but Cobb was unavailable and Crosby turned it down (though Cobb's later role as Lt. Kinderman in The Exorcist had faint echoes of Columbo). Director Richard Irving convinced Dick Levinson and Bill Link that Falk, who wanted the role, could pull it off even though he was much younger than the writers had in mind. The first pilot, "Prescription: Murder", has Falk's Columbo pitted against a psychiatrist, played by Gene Barry (star of the TV series Bat Masterson, Burke's Law, and The Name of the Game), whose alibi Columbo breaks. Barry essentially played the same role that Joseph Cotten had played onstage in the play of the same name. The second pilot, made in 1971, was "Ransom For a Dead Man", with Lee Grant playing the killer, who is also caught by Columbo. The first pilot's script suffered from a number of conceptual flaws,[citation needed] and was not picked up for a series. Columbo himself did not appear until a quarter of the way through the two-hour show, after a lengthy and complex build-up to the murder, with Gene Barry, although playing the killer, being a surprisingly sympathetic figure. Columbo's character in this first pilot has been seen as too cold and hard-bitten. He harasses the principal witness and bullies her into co-operating with the police.[citation needed] The popularity of the second pilot prompted the creation of a regular series on NBC that premiered in the fall of 1971 as part of the wheel series NBC Mystery Movie. The network hedged its bet by arranging for the Columbo segments to air once a month on Wednesday nights. Columbo was an immediate hit in the Nielsen Ratings and Falk won an Emmy Award for his role in the show's first year, with the character quickly becoming an icon on American television. In its second year the Mystery Movie series was moved to Sunday nights, where it then remained, running in all for seven seasons. The show became the anchor of NBC's Sunday night line up; and a fixture of the Network's programming scheme of the period to (in the days before hundreds of cable channel choices) hold viewers in a fixed time slot each week even though their favored show did not air weekly. After its cancellation by NBC in 1978 Columbo was revived on ABC between 1989 and 2003 in occasional made-for-TV movies. Columbo's wardrobe was provided by Peter Falk himself; they were his own clothes, including the trenchcoat which made its first appearance in the second episode.[4] Falk would often ad libitum "Columbo-isms" (fumbling through his pockets for a piece of evidence and discovering a grocery list, asking to borrow a pencil, becoming distracted by something irrelevant in the room at a dramatic point in a conversation with a suspect, etcetera), inserting these into his performance as a way to keep his fellow actors off-balance. He felt it helped to make their confused and impatient reactions to Columbo's antics more genuine