This one is for real old-timers. Before Columbo there was a very early TV show featuring a detective.?

Question

He wore a sloppy overcoat, had a basset hound, a run down car and often talked to his wife who you never saw or heard. This has to be the show Columbo was based on. Anyone remember the name of the show? I really need proof of your answer.

I guess I should hav made it clear. his was a series in the early, black and white, poor quality days of television - not a special, stage play or pilot. Someone told me it might have been Boston Blackie but I don't remember that show.

I guess I should have made it clear. This was a series in the early, black and white, poor quality days of television - not a special, stage play or pilot. Someone told me it might have been Boston Blackie but I don't remember that show.

Answer 1

The first TV pilot movie "Prescription: Murder" was based upon a play first performed in 1962.
http://www.crazyabouttv.com/columbo.html

Columbo talked about his wife but we never saw her in the show and he had a basset hound.
http://www.festivalusa.com/columbo/

http://www.columbo-site.freeuk.com/dog.htm

Answer 2

Columbo (partly inspired by the Crime and Punishment character, Porfiry Petrovich) was a shabby, apparently slow-witted police detective — although, as criminals eventually learned, appearances can be deceiving

The character Columbo pre-existed his eponymous television series. Before Falk assumed the role in 1968, Bert Freed portrayed him in a 1960 TV appearance. Thomas Mitchell then played Columbo in a 1962 stage play.

Bert Freed as Columbo
The character of Columbo first appeared in 1960 in an episode of the NBC anthology series The Chevy Mystery Show, where he was played by Bert Freed, a character actor with a thatchy grey mane of hair. The episode, titled "Enough Rope", was adapted by Levinson and Link from their short story "May I Come In", in which the character of Columbo did not appear. Link's name was listed first in the billing for the writers at the beginning of the show.

Freed wore a rumpled suit and smoked a cigar to play Columbo, but played the part somewhat straighter than either of his two successors in the role, with few of the familiar Columbo mannerisms. However, the character is still recognizably Columbo and uses some of the same methods of misdirection on his prey. During the course of the show, the increasingly frightened murderer brings pressure from the district attorney's office to have Columbo taken off the case, but the detective fights back with his own contacts. There is one particularly visible mistake in the live telecast (aside from the usual constant boom microphone shadows), with a momentarily flustered Columbo introducing himself to a receptionist as "Dr. Columbo," whereupon she magically deduces that he's actually "Lt. Columbo" when she notifies her supervisor.

Although Bert Freed received third billing, he wound up with almost as much screen time as the killer, once he appeared immediately after the first commercial, several minutes into the show (more or less exactly the same formula used in most of the later Falk shows). Unlike many live television shows, this one continues to exist and is available for viewing in the archives of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and Los Angeles.

Thomas Mitchell as Columbo
The "Enough Rope" teleplay in turn was adapted into a stage play called Prescription: Murder with revered character actor Thomas Mitchell in the role; the 70-year-old Mitchell had previously played the drunken Doc in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), for which he won an Academy Award, as well as Scarlett O'Hara's insane father in Gone With the Wind that same year, and also portrayed the absent-minded Uncle Billy in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). The stage production starred two veterans of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre and Citizen Kane: Joseph Cotten as the murderer and Agnes Moorehead as the victim.

Up to this point the writers had regarded Columbo as only a supporting role, but with Mitchell playing the part, they soon found that he was deftly stealing attention away from the stars. Mitchell died while the play was touring in out-of-town tryouts; Columbo was his last role.

Peter Falk as Columbo
Finally, the play was made into a television movie for NBC in 1968. Mitchell had died, and the writers suggested Lee J. Cobb and Bing Crosby for the role, but Cobb was unavailable and Crosby turned it down. Director Richard Irving convinced Levinson and Link that Falk, who wanted the role, could pull it off even though he was much younger than what the writers had in mind.

The TV-movie pitted Falk's Columbo against a murdering physician played by Gene Barry, who, of course, is uncovered, charged and arrested.

The popularity of the character prompted the creation of a regular series on NBC that premiered the fall of 1971 as part of the wheel series NBC Mystery Movie, initially on Wednesday night. Columbo was an immediate hit in the Nielsen ratings. Falk won an Emmy Award for his role in the first year of the series, and the character became an icon on American television. In the second season it was moved, along with the other shows in the Mystery Movie rotation, to Sunday night and ran for a total seven seasons. After cancellation in 1978, it was revived in occasional made-for-television movies on ABC.