Show Notes
What's the perfect alibi? Being at the doctor's office while your dogs do the dirty work. Mike White and Chris Stachiw sink their teeth into Season Seven's "How to Dial a Murder," a 1978 episode that features one of the most ingeniously gruesome murder methods in the entire Columbo canon.
Nicol Williamson commands the screen as Dr. Eric Mason, a behavioral psychologist with iron self-control, a house full of movie memorabilia, and two very well-trained Dobermans named Laurel and Hardy. When he discovers that his late wife had been having an affair with his best friend Dr. Charles Hunter (Joel Fabiani), Mason devises a kill that's equal parts Pavlov and Orson Welles: dial home, ask a question about Citizen Kane, and let the dogs handle the rest.
There's also the small matter of Columbo's complicated feelings about the dogs — and whether they deserve what the legal system has in store for them.
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More from The Shabby Detective: Yet Another Columbo Podcast
Peter Falk strolls through gunfire like it’s light rain while Alan Arkin screams for both of them, and there isn’t a trace of Columbo in sight. The In-Laws (1979), directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Andrew Bergman, lands on The Shabby Detective during the long haul between Columbo Season 7 and Season 8. Mike and Chris sort out whether this mark-and-stooge romp earns its reputation. They weigh Falk playing against type, a first hour that stalls before the madcap begins, Richard Libertini’s black-velvet art gallery, screenwriter Walon Green’s tales of William Friedkin wrangling Falk on The Brink’s Job (1978), the troubled Big Trouble (1986) reunion, and the The In-Laws (2003) remake with Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas. Serpentine!
Mike spends the cold open dodging one simple question: why, exactly, are he and Chris watching a 1979 Romanian comedy called Nea Mărin miliardar? He won't say. The answer arrives thirty minutes and seventeen seconds in, when a stranger billed as Detective Columbo shuffles into frame and asks for one more thing.
Peter Falk said no. Richard Levinson and William Link said no. Fred Silverman did it anyway. Mike and Chris take a detour into the Columbo universe's most dubious corner: Mrs. Columbo, Season 2, Episode 5, "A Chilling Surprise" (aired November 22, 1979). Kate Callahan — no longer even Mrs. Columbo in any meaningful sense — investigates a body that won't stay put in a restaurant freezer.
Mike and Chris close the book on Season Seven with "The Conspirators," a 1978 episode that takes Columbo somewhere the series rarely ventured: the murky, morally weighted world of real geopolitical conflict. Clive Revill — Tony-nominated stage actor, Matilda's trainer in the boxing kangaroo film of the same name, and the original voice of Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back — plays Joe Devlin, an Irish poet and public charmer who moonlights as a gun-runner for the IRA.