Lousy TV Spin Off Show Review - Mrs Colombo.

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Peter Falk’s brilliant highly watchable Colombo and his shabby detective’s cases were mostly set in the Hollywood district of LA, so he often came into contact with murderous celebrities. A regular part of his spiel would be to tell them how much his wife loved their work. He never said that he watched their movies or read their books, just that his wife did. Sometimes Colombo would get an autograph, or a gift from the suspect he was stalking on the pretence of giving it to his wife, telling them how thrilled she would be. It often enabled him to secure a vital clue ready for his trademark ‘just one more thing’ moment when he revealed the final piece of incontrovertible proof that ensnared the killers once and for all. It’s not surprising that we never met his wife, as apart from in the Rock Hudson / Susan Saint James fronted McMillan & Wife, cops don’t take their relatives to work with them, but Mrs Colombo was mentioned so much that she felt like a regular sidekick character. One episode from 1990 was called Rest In Peace Mrs Colombo, in which Helen Shaver plays the vengeful daughter of a felon Colombo had already helped jail. Colombo fakes grief over the death of his unseen wife who has not actually eaten the poisoned marmalade posted to her by the killer. It was all done with an over-complicated ruse, even setting up Mrs Colombo’s funeral, to lure the gloating killer out. The episode was a long tease that we might get to learn more about the enigmatic Mrs Colombo. We never did. Though rightly unseen in Colombo, Mrs Colombo did turn up in one of the worst spin-off shows ever conceived, 1979-1980’s Mrs Colombo, which fortunately perished after just thirteen episodes. One problem was just how much it ignored and contradicted the carefully built up picture of his wife Falk’s Colombo had left us with over the years. He’d been mentioning her since 1967, when he first appeared as an already middle-aged highly experienced homicide lieutenant detective. His descriptions were clearly of a dutiful stay at home housewife and mother. Mrs Colombo presented her as a mid-twenties vivacious reporter, played by Kate Mulgrew, (later to play Captain Janeway in Star Trek Voyager). She was young enough in 1979 to be Colombo’s granddaughter. She solved crimes using intuitive insights akin to those of her husband, sometimes wore a similar raincoat and she was often accompanied by the never named family Bassett Hound, (a dog familiar to viewers from several episodes of Colombo). Fans of Colombo reacted badly to the spin-off from the outset, so the connections to the parent show were quickly erased. Her surname was changed to Callaghan, with hints that she was a divorcee and the series title was eventually changed to ‘Kate Loves A Mystery,’ but the desperate last-minute rapid rewrite disassociation-revisionism was never going to save the show. An episode of Colombo had already revealed that his wife’s first name was Rose, not Kate. Even The Mrs Colombo opening credit sequence in which she is seen tidying the house, doing the laundry and rushing out to the newspaper office with a perpetual smile was unspeakable. She looked as if she was about to advertise toothpaste. The series proved that unseen characters are best kept that way, so we keep our own picture of them in our minds. The Youtube is the Mrs Colombo Titles Sequence Arthur Chappell