Fare thee well, Peter Falk. I can't convey with any dignity or elegance how much I genuinely fucking love Columbo. I've not been so mortified since Patrick McGoohan's passing.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Just One More Thing...
Generally, I'm suspicious of people who are diligent in cataloging the birthdays & deaths of the better-known among us. It betrays an insipid nostalgia and a cloying, desperate hope that they themselves will one day be remembered fondly & eulogized flatteringly. Death: get over it, eh? But at the risk of hypocrisy, I can't allow this to slip by unnoticed...
Fare thee well, Peter Falk. I can't convey with any dignity or elegance how much I genuinely fucking love Columbo. I've not been so mortified since Patrick McGoohan's passing.
Fare thee well, Peter Falk. I can't convey with any dignity or elegance how much I genuinely fucking love Columbo. I've not been so mortified since Patrick McGoohan's passing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
Fascinating. Sort of like the inexplicable love of the Blues and C&W in the U.K. Columbo was a horrible television show.
Oy, them's fightin' words, buddy. Okay, so it definitely ain't The Wire, but that'd be a false equivalence to attempt anyway - like comparing Martin Denny with Gyorgy Ligeti.
It is kinda curious, though, that Columbo is evidently an intensely polarizing show. Everyone I know is either a dedicated fan or absolutely hates it. This, I do not get.
I'm glad that Homicide: Life On the Street is finally starting to creep out of its descendent's shadow, convinced as I am that, were it not for the various shackles imposed by broadcast standards, it could easily best The Wire. I'll confess a certain civic bias towards both shows, having lived in Baltimore for 9 years. But it tells you how conflicted my relationship was with that city that I continually re-watch Homicide and The Wire out of, er, nostalgia.
Homicide was better than the Wire, I reckon. It was at least unashamed to simply be a cop show.
But it didn't have absurdly grand claims for it made by its writer, its production corporation, and critics and journalists and sociologists and teachers and novelists and economists and legislators and rappers and politicians and Marxist academics and the president and... quiet back there! It's the greatest damn TV show/novel/movie/social research/political commentary in the history of the western world!
Gimme Tony Shalhoub any day...
Post a Comment