Great Television Characters

#1 Columbo Played by Peter Falk Columbo was an incredibly easy choice for the first in great television characters. I'll give you a little bit of history on the character to begin with, he was created by Richard Levinson and William Link and first appeared in an 1960 episode of the anthology series The Chevy Mystery Show in which he was played by Burt Freed and this same episode was adapated into a stage play in 1962. Peter Falk first played Dt. Columbo (there is a lot of argument over what is first name is) in 1968 in a television pilot in an episode called "Prescription for Murder" and a second pilot in 1971 called "Ransom for a Dead Man", the popularity of this pilot created a regular series on NBC that premiered in 1971 as part of the wheel series NBC Mystery Movie and was an immediate hit. The show stands out intially because of the way the clichés of the whodunit story are reversed: You see the killer commit the crime in the first act and how it's done (in a standard whodunnit it's usually not until the final act the killer is revealed). The "mystery" from the audiences point of view is spotting the little clues to how Columbo will solve the crime. What makes the character of Columbo so unique, he often appears scatterbrained and the killer often don't take him too seriously at first ---often he begins to annoy them---, Columbo rarely displays any anger (the murderers are often from privileged backgrounds), unlike most detectives he oesn't carry a gun and as never required physical force (there's never been a scene he's chased the killer). Columbo is one of the greatest creations in television history and Peter Falk as earned his place in television history with this one role.