Link and Levinson later adapted the script into a play called Prescription: Murder, which they then readapted for a 1968 TV-movie starring Gene Barry as the killer and Peter Falk as Columbo. Four years later (after another successful TV-movie, Ransom for a Dead Man), Columbo began a long and acclaimed run as part of a “wheel” of NBC murder mystery series, sharing its time slot with the likes of McCloud and McMillan & Wife.
By the time of the first regular Columbo installment, “Murder by the Book”—featuring as great a writer/director combo as you’ll ever find for an episode of television: Steven Bochco and Steven Spielberg—the formula for the character was already well-established, and completely irresistible.
Rather than leaving the audience in the dark until the final act about the killer’s identity, Columbo stories opened with the killing, usually committed by a wealthy, powerful individual who appeared to have expertly covered his or her tracks. But we knew whodunit, and so, it seemed, did Lieutenant Columbo. He would shuffle onto the murder scene in his worn shoes and rumpled trench coat, acting completely befuddled by this whole business, even as he locked in on the killer with laser precision. The murderers would, of course, assume they were smarter than this buffoon, and thus indulge his endless queries, confident they were handily winning the battle of wits until Columbo would pause at the doorway, mutter, “Oh, just one more thing…,” and smack them about with an interrogatory two-by-four.
No clue was too minor to elude Columbo’s canny eye: that a victim’s shoelaces were tied in a manner that only his killer could have done, or that an old movie’s running time invalidated the alibi of his chief suspect. He just dug in and kept right on digging, always acting apologetic for being such a pest.
“I can’t help myself!” he told one of his earliest foes. “It’s a habit.”
Some of these smug, aristocratic killers with whom Columbo was so often matched seemed irritated by him, some simply amused, but so many more were almost charmed by him—understandable given the enormous appeal of Peter Falk in the role. Levinson and Link had wanted an older actor for Prescription: Murder—legend has it that Bing Crosby turned down the role because he feared it would interfere with his golf game—but Falk was one of those actors who was just born old. (As a result, the Columbo formula required almost no tinkering when ABC revived it a decade after the last NBC episode, and kept it going, on and off, until Falk was in his seventies.) Columbo’s deconstructions of the killers’ alibis were often so bogged down in detail that they evoked the old saw about an actor whom you’d gladly watch read from the phone book; Falk was so relaxed and verbally nimble that he probably could have recited passages from the tax code for an encore and gotten a standing ovation.
Columbo never called attention to his own brilliance in the manner of his many TV descendants, but it was impossible for even his most arrogant foes to miss. One of the series’ best installments, “The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case,” puts the highbrow snobbery of so many Columbo villains front and center. The killer is Oliver Brandt (Theodore Bikel), an aloof member of a Mensa-like secret society. Brandt thinks he’s indulging Columbo the way a parent does a sweet but slow child, even as the lieutenant is casually picking apart his seemingly foolproof plan to get away with murder. In fact, it’s Brandt’s own superiority complex, and Columbo’s ability to play it like a violin, that elicits the confession, and Brandt’s only way of accepting his defeat is to administer an intelligence test as they wait for other officers to arrive.
Before we get there, Columbo recalls, in his usual humble manner, how he’s done so well for so long against people who seem so obviously his intellectual betters.
“You know, sir,” he says, “it’s a funny thing. All my life I kept running into smart people. I don’t just mean smart like you and the people in this house. You know what I mean. In school, there were lots of smarter kids. And when I first joined the force, sir, they had some very clever people there. And I could tell right away that it wasn’t gonna be easy making detective as long as they were around. But I figured, if I worked harder than they did, put in more time, read the books, kept my eyes open, maybe I could make it happen. And I did.
“And,” he adds, “I really love my work, sir.”
—AS
Futurama (Fox, 1999–2003; Comedy Central, 2008–2013; various direct-to-video movies) Total score: 77
“Detecting trace amounts of mental activity, possibly a dead weasel or a cartoon viewer.” That’s a quote from Big Brain, mastermind of the Brain Spawn invasion of Earth in Futurama, and it is characteristic of the show’s self-deprecating humor. But Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s animated series about the crew of an interstellar courier ship has nothing to be modest about. Pitched by its original network, Fox, as a companion to their already-long-running hit The Simpsons, Futurama quickly proved to have its own personality, rhythm, and visual style. It also showed great affection for the quirks, obsessions, hang-ups, and dreams of its main characters: a dim-witted twentieth-century time traveler named Philip Fry (voiced by Billy West); a one-eyed mutant pilot and space adventurer, Turanga Leela (Katey Sagal); ancient eccentric professor and Planet Express company owner Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth (West again); Amy Wong (Lauren Tom), the intern and spoiled daughter of a buggalo rancher; the socially maladjusted, grotesque, deeply insecure crustacean Dr. Zoidberg (West yet again); Hermes Conrad (Phil LaMarr), a sweet-souled and easily flustered accountant; an alcoholic, sexaholic, kleptomaniac, sociopathic robot named Bender (John DiMaggio); the pantsless space captain Zapp Brannigan (West yet again); Brannigan’s Amphibiosian fourth lieutenant Kif Kroker (Maurice LaMarche); and a galaxy’s worth of recurring characters and guest stars (including every then-surviving member of the original Enterprise crew, which reunited for a Star Trek–themed episode).
The show meandered across media platforms like Farnsworth’s Planet Express ship spelunking the galaxy. It debuted in 1999 on the Fox network, got canceled four seasons later owing to low ratings, reinvented itself as a series of direct-to-DVD movies, landed on Comedy Central in 2008, and stayed there through 2015 (with some interruptions). Despite its chaotic production history, if you could chart wit on a longitudinal graph, Futurama’s line would be robust. It blends genre parody, social satire, raised-eyebrow postgrad cleverness, and fifth-grade-lunchroom spit-take humor. As a bonus, it showcases flat-out beautiful visuals: collapsing galaxies, elaborately choreographed space battles and hovercraft races, time-lapse terra-forming worlds, ravenous space beasts, formless sentient beings. In the season 6 Herman Melville parody “Möbius Dick” (an episode whose very title is a sci-fi-geek pleaser: Note the umlaut), the Planet Express crew tries to escape an interdimensional whale beast in an outer-space version of the Bermuda Triangle by zipping through a graveyard of iconic vessels, including the shuttle from Space: 1999, the monolith and the Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Satellite of Love from Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the UFO from the cover of Boston’s debut album.
Futurama has nearly as many dandy running gags as Groening’s other classic. Among the best are the severed celebrity heads suspended in tanks of preservative fluid (a setup that allows Richard Nixon to serve as galactic president while being borne aloft on headless Spiro Agnew’s shoulders) and Fry’s dumber-than-dumber-than-dumb comebacks to simple statements (Rock creature: “Tomorrow morning, this planet makes its closest pass to the sun. You will all be boiled alive like retired circus animals unless you somehow can cross the great alkaline planes and reach shelter in the cave of harmony.” Fry: “But that sounds hard!”).
As in most sitcoms that are basically farcical, the characters always revert to type. But the writing keeps uncovering new shadings and surprising textures within those types. One can imagine many a smitten time traveler contriving to spend the rest of his life gazing into Leela’s eye, as Fry does, but not many who would have endured as many brutal beatdowns at her hands, or been so moved by her beauty that he’d contrive to write her name in
space or sell his soul to the Robot Devil in exchange for metal mitts that would let him serenade her on the holophonor. In various episodes, Bender becomes a pharaoh, a ghost, a god, a clone army, and the breakout star of the long-running soap opera All My Circuits. And the show is capable of poignant moments, too, none more devastating than Fry’s dog in “Jurassic Bark,” stuck in 1999 after his master’s disappearance, waiting and waiting and waiting outside the pizzeria. His whiskers go gray, his spine slumps, and the neighborhood changes around him as Connie Francis sings, “If it takes forever / I will wait for you.”
—MZS
The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–1965) Total score: 76
“There is nothing wrong with your television set,” the opening narration of The Outer Limits promised. “Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits.”
Created by Leslie Stevens, a film and TV producer who also wrote an influential New Age philosophy book, Est: The Steersman Handbook, The Outer Limits was an anthology series strongly modeled on The Twilight Zone; the affinities were so obvious that it will probably always be thought of as an inferior imitation, or a second choice, a perception that disappears once you watch its often resonant and frightening episodes. Episodes dealt with time travel, extraterrestrial possession, and a rogues’ gallery of monsters, mutants, and space creatures. The series drew high-profile science-fiction writers (including Harlan Ellison, whose Outer Limits episode “Soldier” was partly plagiarized, by James Cameron’s own admission, for The Terminator, and resulted in a settlement and an onscreen acknowledgment). It was also a major influence on Star Trek, a series that mimicked its merger of straightforward action and suspense with moral tales and brainteasers.
Where The Twilight Zone placed more of an emphasis on psychology, many of the episodes of The Outer Limits had a more existential feel. The series was mainly concerned with what happens when you’re suddenly placed in a situation entirely beyond your control, much like the audience moved to inaction when the narrator warned visitors not to adjust their sets.
—MZS
Northern Exposure (CBS, 1990–1995) Total score: 76
Fish, say good-bye to water. Joel Fleischman, say good-bye to Manhattan.
In the summer of 1990—at the dawn of a decade where the TV landscape would come to resemble that famous New Yorker cover, “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” presenting a map of America where everything west of the Hudson may as well not exist—St. Elsewhere creators Joshua Brand and John Falsey opted for a different sort of medical drama, one that celebrated the mystery and wonder of one of the smallest, most remote communities in TV history.
Northern Exposure was the whimsical, at times magical story of an obnoxious urban doctor (Rob Morrow as Fleischman) who, due to crippling student loans, was pressed into indentured servitude to the one-moose town of Cicely, Alaska. In the pilot, Joel is assured his new community is as sophisticated as it gets in these parts, but is horrified by how small and slow it feels: When he orders a bagel and cream cheese at the general store, the clerk asks, “What’s a bagel?”
In time, though, Joel comes to recognize that Cicely is a haven for expatriates—including Maggie O’Connell (Janine Turner), a former debutante from Grosse Pointe who prefers a life as a bush pilot; Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin), a retired astronaut who owns much of the town and its businesses; Chris Stevens (John Corbett), ex-con and oracular DJ of the local radio station; and Holling Vincoeur (John Cullum), a bar owner who claims to be a direct descendant of Louis XIV—and that native-born Alaskans, like film buff Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows), offer their own charms as well.
It’s a town where everyone is in everybody’s business, but in the best possible way. When Joel’s fiancée, Elaine, calls off their long-distance engagement with a Dear John letter, the townsfolk go to elaborate lengths to afford him closure, including simulating a date between Joel and “Elaine” (actually Maggie, who will become the new love of his life for a time) so that he can explain how he really felt about the whole relationship. As the seasons went along, the town took on an air of the supernatural, sometimes benefiting from local phenomena like the aurora borealis, sometimes simply from the sparks generated by the eclectic cast of characters. The third season concluded with a flashback to the town’s foundation in 1908 by a lesbian couple looking for a place where they wouldn’t be condemned for their differences, when it briefly took on a reputation as “the Paris of the North,” where Franz Kafka might come in search of a cure for writer’s block. This seemed about right, based on what we had seen of the modern version.
When Morrow got into a contract dispute in later seasons, the show wrote him out by having the good doctor go native, falling so in love with a region he was once desperate to escape that he leaves the relatively sophisticated confines of Cicely to provide medical care to people in more remote parts of Alaska. By that point, it was easy to understand how he had become so seduced.
—AS
Batman (ABC, 1966–1968) Total score: 75
Thwack! Pow! Crash! Whenever a fight broke out on ABC’s Batman, and the camera tilted to even more extreme angles than before, these onomatopoeic words splashed across the screen in brash block letters, their exclamation points and asterisks and “splat” graphics flashing like bits of defective neon signage while a funk-jazz brass section blatted and wailed.
This gimmick gave journalists an easy set of clichés to lean on whenever comics were discussed. But even in 1966, the year that this knowingly ludicrous series premiered, comics were already moving away from the naive aesthetic that formed the core of Batman’s style. They had to, really, after gallery artist Roy Lichtenstein blew up comic-strip panels to poster size as part of the Pop Art movement a few years earlier. Still, this was no one-joke show. The handwritten fight “sounds” were one part of a more complex and supple nostalgia act, one that included the black-and-white morality espoused by the Caped Crusader (Adam West) and his Boy Wonder ward, sidekick, and surrogate son, Robin (Burt Ward).
The year 1966 was pivotal in the development of the US counterculture. The Beatles took rock and roll a step closer to psychedelia with Revolver; and movies such as Blow-Up, Masculin Féminin, The Battle of Algiers, Seconds, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? expressed a cynical or depressive attitude toward bourgeois morality that was about to go mainstream. White middle-class college students were protesting the Vietnam War in increasing numbers, smoking pot and dropping out and burning draft cards and expressing sympathies with African Americans protesting police brutality and systemic discrimination. Snipers and mass murderers claimed headlines along with political prisoners and self-immolating monks. In this context, Batman’s square jaw, cough-syrup monotone, and delicate hand gestures seemed hilarious to young viewers lit up on nonregulation ciggies; West’s performance, the brilliance of which has required decades to be properly recognized, played as if series creator William Dozier and chief “developer” Lorenzo Semple Jr. had taken the establishment’s fantasy of itself and dolled it up in tights and a cape.
West’s Batman was the superhero as daddy-in-control, Dragnet’s Joe Friday in black rubber and gray spandex; Robin and Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl and all their allies were part of the ’Man’s extended family. The anarchic gangs of supervillains and henchmen that kept trying to capture or destroy Gotham City stood in for the forces of chaos that kept threatening to engulf “civilized” America throughout the ’60s, only made colorfully grotesque and
knowingly silly. The show’s bad-guy Hall of Fame included Cesar Romero as the Joker; Burgess Meredith as the Penguin; Frank Gorshin and John Astin as the Riddler; Catwoman, played variously by Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether (in a spin-off film made between seasons), and Eartha Kitt; and numerous baddies created specifically for the series, including Joan Collins as the Siren, Milton Berle as Louie the Lilac, and Liberace as blackmailing twins Chandell and Harry. The puns were so bad that supervillains didn’t so much speak them as lob them like grenades (“I’m not just pussyfooting around this time, Batman!” Catwoman exclaims). The heroes gave as good as they got, with Batman’s imperviousness to humor becoming a bedrock of hilarity itself. He was the immovable object to the irresistible force of the show’s bad guys, who gloried in their supposed audacity and wit, but were always undone by hubris. “It’s obvious,” Batman says, in a typical deductive epiphany. “Only a criminal would disguise himself as a licensed, bonded guard yet callously park in front of a fire hydrant.”
If you doubt that every jagged bit of sociologically pungent camp swirling through this maelstrom was intentional, check out any of Semple’s subsequent screenwriting credits, but especially 1974’s The Parallax View, the most paranoid of paranoid thrillers, starring a long-haired reporter who loved mocking rednecks and authority figures; the 1976 King Kong remake, which turned the big gorilla into a serpent-slaying Christ figure caught in a love triangle between a hippie primatologist and a ditzy actress who asked Kong what his sign was; and of course the spin-off Batman movie, which showed the Caped Crusader trying to throw a lit bomb off a pier and being thwarted by the inopportune appearance of two nuns, a mother and child, a polka band, and ducklings. Like those cheeky movies, the weekly adventures of Batman and Robin were a funhouse mirror that turned real-world anxieties inside out and sock-puppeted them with goofy voices. The sets and costumes were boldly designed and garishly painted but still cheap-looking (every villain’s lair seemed to have been built on the same medium-sized soundstage) and the repetitiousness of the fight scenes killed their in-jokiness after a while (though stray lines brought them back to life, like, “Batgirl’s being frozen in that caviar!”).
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