An unwritten rule in journalism states that you need at least three occurrences of an unexpected phenomenon to generate a “What’s up with that?” feature. Having fruitlessly searched for a third, I am, however, forced to settle for just two examples of current TV shows revisiting Columbo’s “howcatchem” structure. You see that in the excellent Poker Face. You also see it in the amiable Elsbeth. What’s up with that?
There is also welcome evidence here of a drift back to a wider convention of classic telly, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Let me take a pencil from behind my ear and flick through a tattered notebook while puffing on a cheap cigar. Where was I, ma’am? Ah, yes. Not the whodunit, the howcatchem.
More formally referred to as the inverted detective story, such entertainments begin by showing us the crime being committed before following the coppers as they work their way to the solution.
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Both the current examples go further in their homage to their durable 1970s inspiration. Like Peter Falk in Columbo, Natasha Lyonne, as the wandering savant Charlie Cale in Poker Face, and Carrie Preston, as the relocated attorney Elsbeth Tascioni in Elsbeth (a spin off from The Good Wife), spend large parts of each episode making inexhaustible nuisances of themselves to that week’s chief suspect.
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All three exhibit borderline-supernatural levels of perception. The moment they arrive on the scene, one tiny anomaly points them towards the perpetrator, and no amount of disingenuous evasion will distract them from their pursuit.
The audience, rather than fretting over whether the butler did it, focuses attention on which apparently airtight element of the murder is set to spring a leak. Sometimes the murderer is strangely likable. They are almost always comfortably off and so in a position to look down their noses at Columbo/Cale/Tascioni.
If you turned on your telly in a hotel room and encountered an episode of Dad’s Army, Kojak or The Dukes of Hazzard it mattered not which “season” it was from
It is a perfect, easily replicable format, and nobody should be surprised – or irritated – that the makers of these new shows look to be paying it deserved tribute. The folk behind Poker Face have even gone so far as to imitate the graphics from Columbo in their own opening credits. Respect where respect is due.
Something else is, however, worth noting in the popularity of these series. We are finally seeing kickback against the hitherto unstoppable move from TV in stand-alone episodes to continuous, season-long serials. Until relatively recently most sitcoms and cop shows offered you, each week, a self-contained story that reset before the end credits. There was, in the era of Columbo, occasionally some glacial progression. A new junior detective would turn up. We met his dog for the first time.
But, essentially, nothing of note changed in Columboworld between 1971 and 1978 (or, indeed, up to the close of the lesser revival in 2003). If you turned on your telly in a hotel room and encountered an episode of Dad’s Army, Kojak or The Dukes of Hazzard it mattered not which “season” (as nobody in Ireland then said) it was from. You would get one story arc that ultimately reversed any disruption to the established scenario. Harold never escaped his father in Steptoe and Son. Starsky and Hutch were forever in the same Ford Gran Torino.
I was reminded how recently this changed when talking to Michael Cera, star of Arrested Development, two weeks ago in Cannes. One reason, he explained, the show did not catch on during its initial run, 20 years ago, was that the creators insisted on a continuing plot. “If your friends said this show is funny and you watched episode six with no context, you really couldn’t enjoy half of the humour or the story,” Cera told me.
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Arrested Development arrived a few short years before streaming changed everything. Now every episode was sitting neatly in the same virtual space. Episode one was always available if you wished to get stuck into the larger narrative. Cliffhanger endings abounded. The dealers (streamers) soon had the users (viewers) hooked on a near-endless supply of gear (telly).
Yet decisions made for the current, second season of Poker Face confirm there is still a desire for mainstream TV in discrete packages. The first outings of both that show and Elsbeth did have superficial, peripheral season arcs about which nobody much cared. It seemed there was a law against making a show that didn’t at least tip its hat to the serial aesthetic.
Even that has now gone for Poker Face. Speaking to GQ, Rian Johnson, creator of the show, acknowledged that he wanted to get away from “the superstructure” and “get back to what the show is really supposed to be about, which is, each week, let’s have a fun mystery.”
He delivers on that. Watch the new episodes in whatever order you prefer. It’s 1978 all over again.
Poker Face and Elsbeth are available via Now TV
