Columbo
Shabbily-dressed and seemingly slow-witted, homicide detective Columbo’s (Peter Falk) fumbling and overly polite manner made him an unlikely choice to solve any crime in the Los Angeles Police Department, let alone complex murders.
Often underestimated by his fellow officers, and by the murderer du jour, his demeanour is revealed to be a complex act.
Hidden beneath this unlikely exterior lie’s a brilliant detective with an eye for minute details and the ability to piece together seemingly unrelated incidences and information to solve crimes.
The audience witnesses a murder at the beginning of each episode and Columbo most often confirms a criminal's guilt by lulling them into a false sense of security and then setting up circumstances which encourage them, in their newfound hubris, to incriminate themselves.
Columbo's signature interrogation technique is to conduct a seemingly innocuous interview, politely conclude it, and exit the scene, only to stop in the doorway and ask, "Just one more thing...".
This always leads to a jarring question regarding an inconsistency in either the crime scene or the suspect's alibi. In some episodes, murderers who believed they had committed the "perfect crime" congratulate Columbo before being arrested.
The programme is noted by TV critics for the way it reversed the cliché of the standard 'whodunit' mystery, occasionally referring to it as a "howcatchem", though it is more properly known as an inverted detective story, a subgenre created by British writer Richard Austin Freeman.
Columbo Season 9 is out to own on DVD on 30th March.