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Eight years before the first episode
The series everyone knows started in 1971. The character is eleven years older than that, and passed through two other actors before it reached Peter Falk.
A writers’ strike, and Dostoevsky
The character was born out of a labour dispute. In 1960 Writers Guild members could not write for scripted television, but they could write for live broadcast — so Levinson and Link wrote an hour-long play, Enough Rope, transmitted live on 31 July 1960 as part of The Chevy Mystery Show. Bert Freed played the detective: physically imposing, direct, almost the opposite of what the part would become.
Its ancestor is openly literary. Both writers had read Crime and Punishment at college and took from it Porfiry Petrovich — the investigator who knows who did it from the first page, keeps turning up without a reason, talks about everything except the case, and builds the whole thing on the suspect believing himself the cleverer man.
The stage version, and a last role
Two years later the same story became a stage play, Prescription: Murder, which opened on 2 January 1962 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. Joseph Cotten played the murderer, Agnes Moorehead the victim, and Columbo was seventy-year-old Thomas Mitchell — winner of an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony. The billing put Mitchell second, but audiences responded to the detective more than to the killer. The play never reached Broadway, and Mitchell died of cancer that December. Columbo was his last part.
The stage directions describe him as a rumpled policeman of indeterminate age, vague and mumbling, with an apologetic, almost deferential manner. That was written six years before Falk — and it is exactly him.
Bing Crosby said no
When the play was adapted for television in 1968, the part was offered first to Bing Crosby: the right age, and the amiable manner from his Christmas specials. He turned it down rather than let filming interfere with his golf. Lee J. Cobb was unavailable. Falk, who had just turned forty, was considered too young — and got it anyway.
The film aired on 20 February 1968 and drew an audience large enough that the network wanted a series. Falk did not: he agreed only years later, and then reluctantly, contracting for six films that became eight in the first year.
The wheel
Columbo did not run weekly. NBC placed it inside the NBC Mystery Movie — a rotating slot shared with McCloud and McMillan & Wife, each show returning every third or fourth week. That is why a season can be six films rather than twenty-two, and why each of them is ninety minutes and shot like a feature. The format is the reason the series still holds up: nobody had to fill a weekly quota.
What the people who made it said
They came to Hollywood as young New York writers, with a reputation that meant something then: Hollywood was for craftsmen, New York for theatre and real writing.
“We came in sort of the young Turks, and we were from New York. We had that cachet in those days — that was something.”
The sharpest observation about what the series would become was made not in rehearsal but at the curtain call of their own play. The star was Joseph Cotten; the lieutenant was played by the character actor Thomas Mitchell — “like an old Irish leprechaun”, nothing like what Falk would do with him.
“When they came out, Mitchell would get all the applause, and then out came the star and the applause level would drop. Dick and I said: there's something about that cop character.”
Hargrove traces the whole format back to Russian literature: the audience knows the murderer from the first page, and the tension comes from inevitability rather than mystery. Hence the central device — a man everybody underestimates.
“Here's a guy — he looks like a bum, but he's really Sherlock Holmes. So people constantly underestimate him and he uses that to his advantage.”
The best explanation of why the lieutenant never reads as a predator came from a director rather than a writer — and he once said it to Falk himself, who, by Butler’s account, had not thought about it in thirty years.
“Columbo is a great character because he wants everybody to be innocent. «I believe everything you say, but there's just one thing that bothers me» — I didn't read that as malicious, I read that as hopeful.”
The lieutenant has no first name on purpose: the creators wanted as little known about him as possible. “Frank” on the ID badge — still argued over by fans — was the prop department’s doing, on the assumption that nobody could read it on a television set of that era.
“The prop department created an ID and where there's room for a signature they scribbled the name — legible though sloppy — Frank Columbo.”
Quotes are given in the speaker’s own words, taken from the transcript of the recording; each player opens at the right minute. They are shortened — the full interviews are behind the videos.
Common questions
Who created Columbo?
Richard Levinson and William Link. The character first appeared in 1960 in a live television play, then in a 1962 stage play, and only became a TV movie with Peter Falk in 1968.
Who played Columbo before Peter Falk?
Two actors: Bert Freed in the live broadcast Enough Rope (1960) and Thomas Mitchell in the stage play Prescription: Murder (1962). It was Mitchell’s last role.
Was the character based on anything?
On Porfiry Petrovich from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment — an investigator who knows the killer from the first page and simply stays close until he breaks.
Why did the show stop and come back?
The original NBC run ended in 1978 after seven seasons. Falk returned to the part on ABC in 1989, and films appeared irregularly until 2003.