Knowledge and Structure in Columbo
Knowledge and Structure in Columbo
I was writing a post about another murder mystery, and decided to spin this out into a new post. I can’t believe nobody ever spelled this out in the #Columbo tag, But first -
There is this TV show that was produced here in REDACTED in the 90s. They still air re-runs. Detective stories, murder mysteries, that stuff. Unfortunately, or fortunately in this case, the writing soon turned rather uninspired, and the show was severely hampered by the short length of each episode: In a time slot under and hour with three long ad breaks and a lengthy intro, the actual episodes take maybe 35 minutes. Every episode is extremely formulaic, must be extremely formulaic, in order to fit into the limited time budget. That makes it very easy to guess the murderer based on timing. The killer was almost always introduced around the seven minute mark. Every suspect introduced after minute 15 is a red herring, or it would feel like a solution coming out of nowhere. If they start to suspect one of the early suspects around minute 20 or 25, he’s a red herring. The guy who found the body is too obvious, so it’s never him. That means around minute 27, we get new forensic evidence or an alibi crumbles, and they start to look into the third guy from the beginning again, and then everything falls into place and the guy confesses, because it’s a TV show and we need some form of catharsis. Roll end credits.
Based on audience expectations and the structure of the narrative, it’s easy to guess whodunnit. It’s bad and formulaic, but it’s TV comfort food.
You can do a lot more with 42 or even 45 minutes. You can also do a lot wrong in a Netflix show with 10 episodes that have an hour of runtime each. Every Netflix show seems to be a bad copy of Twin Peaks, with all the loose threads and misdirection and cliffhangers.
Midsomer Murders is a guilty pleasure of mine. It was only really good during the first episodes that were directly based on Caroline Graham’s novels, but it managed to live on as self-parody and self-plagiarisation until today. What makes it work is that the episodes have 90 minutes, enough time for the plot to develop for half an hour so that characters introduced late don’t feel like they “came out of nowhere”. You can characterise the different suspects (or villagers, or victims) better, you can have more characters, you can have a second murder happen, or you can have the plot develop before the first murder has happened. The other thing that makes Midsomer Murders work is that the identity of the killer is really secondary. Everybody has a Big Secret, like a child given up for adoption, an ongoing love affair, impending bankrupcy, war trauma, or maybe their secret love child is living right next door, unknowingly. A good episode of Midsomer Murders has Tom Barnaby solve the Big Secrets of all the villagers, and that is the key to the murder mystery. There are multiple clues early on, people acting suspicious, but in the end the solution “comes out of nowhere”, and nobody remembers that one of the suspects was alone with the body for an hour after the guy who called the police left to look after his baby, but before the police arrived, and how some of the physical evidence did not make sense. A bad episode just has the means, motive and opportunity come out of nowhere, without Barnaby finding out who killed the second victim, or what the secrets of the other villagers are. You don’t mind the Ass Pull as long as at least the side plots are resolved. That’s the great misdirection of Midsomer Murders: The side plots are the main attraction.
In CSI: Miami, it is literally the point of the show that the solution comes “out of nowhere”. They analyse some residue on the victim’s shoe, and they find out that it’s alligator poop and the killer has a pet alligator, and then they match the composition of the alligator poop to the brand of pet food he buys at Wal-Mart. Also, this other guy had a Big Secret: He’s a sex trafficking hedge fund manager, but that’s unrelated to the murder. Nonetheless, he goes to jail: People like you *takes off glasses* make me sick.
It’s not just timing and setup/payoff. There are other structural-narrative considerations that make certain solutions to murder mysteries look unfair. If your suspects are Donald, Daisy, Gyro, Launchpad, Fenton, Gladstone, Hughie, Louis, and Dewey (not looking up the spelling but instead covering all my bases, I hope one of them is correct), then any one of the last three will feel weird. Either all three of them did it together, or none. If you want to make it look believable that the middle one of Donald’s nephews did it, you have to give them all distinct personalities and motives beyond having a different favourite colour, favourite food, and different hobbies.
Columbo is not constrained by all that. It’s a show where you already know who the killer is, and rather crucially, it’s a show where there are usually no big secrets and red herring characters. Here’s what tumblr posts about “why Columbo is great” seem to miss though: There are many scenes shot from the perspective of Columbo, and many from the perspective of the murderer, but most of the time, the audience knows what the killer knows, not what Columbo knows. Usually everything Lt. Columbo finds out in scenes that show his point of view is already known to the suspect, but maybe he doesn’t know that Columbo knows it. This way, there can be last minute eye witnesses, surprise twists you saw coming from a mile away, and forensic evidence that solves the case five minutes before the credits roll, but the audience only learns about the forensic evidence when the suspect is confronted with it.
In an episode of Midsomer Murders, it would be a letdown if there was some forensic evidence DCI Barnaby didn’t tell DS Troy about. At the very least, we have to see him open an envelope from forensics and look at Troy knowingly. It’s not “out of nowhere” if he doesn’t tell Troy what the result is, but the audience at least needs to know that the forensic evidence was a paternity test, or a fingerprint on the jewel box, or a ripped-up bank statement glued back together.
In Columbo, those things can literally come out of nowhere.
If you look at it through the eyes of Columbo, and not through the eyes of the suspect, he is not actually annoying suspects into confession. This is what the woman who killed her husband and made it look like a botched kidnapping observed in the first episode of the series, but it only looked like this from her perspective. It’s actually mostly regular police work. That’s just not what the audience sees. The audience looks at Columbo through the killer’s eye and sees a man in a wrinkly coat, just like the killer does not see the whole institution behind him.