Graeme Virtue 

A reboot of Columbo is a fantastic idea – apart from one enormous flaw

Graeme Virtue: Mark Ruffalo will be great as the character Peter Falk made famous – but not if he persists in making a big-screen version of the made-for-television detective
  
  

Crumpled work ethic: Peter Falk as Columbo.
Crumpled work ethic: Peter Falk as Columbo. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Allstar Colle Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Allstar Colle

Hulk recently smashed Twitter, or at least his punier human half Mark Ruffalo did. The Avengers actor confirmed that he was in the early stages of developing a big-screen reboot of TV's most beloved detective, although the #RuffaloColumbo kerfuffle may yet turn out to be one of those superheated social media storms that flares up and is then immediately forgotten.

At the very least, #RuffaloColumbo has reminded the wider world how much it used to love Columbo. After the late Peter Falk's magnificent, sublimely modulated performances in 69 feature-length episodes, from the gritty 1970s through to the garish 1990s, it feels almost disrespectful to imagine anyone else in the rumpled raincoat. But the last ever Falk episode – co-starring a fresh-faced Matthew Rhys from The Americans, and still on rotation on Channel 5 – screened in January 2003, so enough time has passed to at least contemplate the idea without it feeling like heresy.

It helps that Ruffalo would be fantastic. He's already got the hair, and is capable of projecting a sleepy vagueness to mask the essential "foxy knowledge of human nature" described by Columbo's original creators Richard Levinson and William Link. Ruffalo, or at least the costume designer who gave him a tan raincoat, even seemed to treat David Fincher's period cop drama Zodiac as a stealth audition for the role. He might not be quite as sexy as the sly, twinkly Falk, but you can't have everything.

So rebooting Columbo with Ruffalo is a fantastic idea. But making a movie version with Ruffalo, or anyone else for that matter, is an absolutely terrible idea, and indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the character so great.

He may have first appeared on stage (in Levinson and Link's 1962 play Prescription Murder), but Columbo found his purest expression on TV, partly because the demands of the format chimed with his own dogged, week-in-week-out work ethic. Even though every episode was self-contained – which sounds conducive to mounting a standalone movie – there is an essential cumulative power that comes from witnessing Columbo outsmart a parade of entitled villains.

Every killer thinks they're special, that they somehow deserve to get away with murder, and the template even reinforces their primacy by focusing exclusively on them from the start of every episode. But for the lieutenant, who trundles into the action at some point within the first half hour, it's just another day at the homicide coalface, a repetitive work ritual that doesn't lend itself to a movie treatment. This idea is articulated as early as the pilot, where Columbo wears down a callous killer shrink by explaining that even the smartest murderers are generally amateurs. "He's got just one time to learn," says Columbo. "Just one. And with us, it's a business. We do this a hundred times a year. I tell ya Doc, that's a lot of practice."

By design, the audience already knows whodunit in every episode. The pleasure comes from seeing how Columbo applies his wily process to the murderer at hand. So a movie – striving for event status, shouldering itself into the cultural conversation by claiming to be a once-in-a-lifetime event – simply doesn't jibe with the lieutenant's process. Whoever plays Columbo would have one time to learn how to do it. Just one.

So here's the memo for @MarkRuffalo, whom I don't doubt has the industry muscle to midwife a reboot: Columbo will only work on TV. Keep the feature length, because squashing the lieutenant into hour-long episodes would barely leave room for a "one last thing". The original series cast familiar faces tweaking their popular image, so maintain that spirit. Right now, more film actors are switching to TV than at any point since the 1960s, so imagine the murderer's row of murderers you could assemble – from the past decade of TV anti-heroes alone. Perhaps Hugh Laurie could become the new Patrick McGoohan, appearing in and directing multiple episodes. And give directors creative leeway to shoot each episode however they want, so we still get the odd formally experimental moment.

And if you truly want to respect the memory of Falk, don't limit yourself to just one new Columbo. Adopt the True Detective approach, with Ruffalo launching the first season but being replaced by a new lieutenant every year. That was the brilliant idea put forward four months ago by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast, who made a convincing argument that Columbo is as rich a character as Sherlock Holmes and goodness knows there are enough versions of him afoot. So, the inevitable one last thing. Who would you cast as a villain or the new Columbo? Let us know in the comments below.

• This article was amended on 22 July 2014 because an earlier version said the killer in the pilot of Columbo was a surgeon, when he was a psychiatrist.

 

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