The basic idea of ”Columbo” is deceptively simple: there was a murder and the lieutenant-colonized and friendly Columbo of the Los Angeles police service is on the case, always resolving the case just at the end of the episode. The torsion is how almost every episode takes place, because the public discovers who is the killer before Columbo presents himself. Most episodes of “Columbo” last about 75 minutes, and the first 15 of these minutes are dedicated to us to learn the situation and to understand why someone would make a murder before doing the dirty act. Essentially, the suspense of each episode wonders how Columbo will capture his career, which is why the show does not belong to the “whodunit” sub-genre of Mysteries but to the “Howcatchem” instead.
Another oddity in the story of “Columbo” is that the first two episodes are considered separated from unique television films, mainly two distinct pilot episodes, one of which was broadcast in 1968 and the other broadcast in the spring of 1971. But when Steven Spielberg took a step behind the 24 -year -old old age camera, he launched the first regular episode of “Columbo” Upon lower “although the show was created by Richard Levinson and William Link,” Murder by the Book “was written by Steven Bochco. If this name sounds a bell, it should; Bochco was going to write to or create programs like “Law”, “NYPD Blue” and “Hill Street Blues”. So, in essence, “Murder by the Book” captured lightning in a bottle without even realizing it. Although nobody would say (without being a counter-contract) that the “murder by the book” decreases as the greatest thing that one of these Stevens has done, it is very easy to watch the episode and to see the seeds of grandeur, especially in the staging of Spielberg.
The intrigue of “Murder by the Book” revolves around a pair of authors, Ken Franklin and Jim Ferris (represented by Jack Cassidy and Martin Milner, respectively). They have managed to co-write a series of detective Miss Marple novels for years, but Jim has been ready to work on his own projects without Ken. Ken is dismayed mainly because he appreciated a certain type of lifestyle offered by the success of books … which he has really not written much for a very long time. So, to leave with a nice insurance policy, he attracts Jim to a quiet cabin of his where he kills his partner and tries to load him on invisible gangsters, which implies that Jim was doing research for a book that criminals wanted unpublished. Of course, things like this are not easy. Ken must soon kill a local store owner who has) has a big crush on him and b) realizes that Ken has killed his co-author and wants to make him sing for the privilege of being his lover.
The basic elements of almost all the episodes of “Columbo” are present in “Murder by the Book”, and the way it is presented is visually both Spielbergian and an effective model for the appearance of the show in future episodes and seasons. One of the critical but often unknown aspects of “Columbo” is that almost every episode serves as a comment on the courses in the 1970s. Columbo himself, played so masterfully by Peter Falk, is the living incarnation of the word “cut”, with a raincoat that seems to be flowing a few times, a haircut to a boil and an apparent incapacity to remember what it has in what it has. (Falk’s incredible performance is all the more remarkable since you realize that it was not even the first choice to play the character.) Conversely, its suspects are among the most tonic members of the Los Angeles Society. Here, it is a high -end author, but the future episodes would star Columbo in front of an NFL style director general, a world renowned conductor (played by the longtime friend of Falk, John Cassavetes), and the deputy police chief, among others. At the same time, the appearance of the episodes, the tension of the building between suspect and ravable, and the large epic scale of the way in which Columbo is presented in the backdrop of Los Angeles, all stem from the way Spielberg uses these pieces in this first episode.
