Hey there, folks, this is Mike White coming at you with a special bonus episode of The Shabby Detective.

On this episode, you're going to be hearing from Glenn Stewart.

He is the author of Colombo Explains the Seventies, a TV Cops pop culture Journey.

I am just so happy with how much Columbo scholarship has been going on over the last few years.

It's really been very exciting for a fan like me.

This is another one coming out from Bonaventure Press.

Actually came out February twenty fifth and is available on kindle as well as paperback and hard cover.

Pick it up at your local bookstore if you can support the arts.

And thank you so much for listening to this special bonus interview Glenn, before I started asking you about Columbo Explains the Seventies.

What's the Glenn Stewart story.

Well, the brief Glenn Stewart's story is that I spent twenty five years in the radio industry across the country.

Before that, I had graduated from Brown University with BA and political science, and so I didn't really use that for my first twenty five years.

But then I got out of radio and I went into teaching, and I was teaching history and I was working at Education Assessment, and I had kind of, I guess, the writing bug, but I didn't really have an outlet for it.

And then I discovered the Columbo File Blog several years ago.

I'm assuming that a lot of your listeners are familiar with the Colmbo File blog.

I mean, if they're not, there's a lot of great content that's there, a lot of great reviews of episodes.

And I thought, well, gee, maybe I can try to contribute something to the Columbo File blog.

And I gave the blogmaster CP I gave him some material and he was kind enough to use it, and he was using more and more of my material, but he wasn't able to use all the material that I was able to think of when it came to Colombo, because I had watched Colombo when I was a kid back in the seventies, and I kept coming back to it, and I realized I had a lot of material that wasn't going to make it to the blog, and so I thought the best thing to do would be to just get to it and write a book about it.

And so here we are.

You said that you watched Colombo back when it was originally airing.

I'm assuming when did you really start to become aware of it, because it's one thing for it to be just on television.

You're not that old of a gentleman, so I don't know if you were necessarily choosing to watch Columbo or for it's something that your parents were watching.

When did you really start to connect with the show?

Well, I was definitely choosing to watch it.

I was fascinated by the plotting and the character and you know, the goutches that would nab the killer.

I was all fascinated by that.

But then it wasn't on streaming.

There was no such thing as DVDs in the seventies.

You watched the show once, and then once you did, you weren't going to watch it again until it came on in the summer reruns.

So a show like Colombo really does stand up to repeat viewings, which is why you can keep coming back to the show again and again and again.

Back in the seventies, that was difficult to do.

And then I would go away to college and then years later I would kind of rediscover Colombo and rediscover all the things that I missed the first time around.

When I was watching earlier in my life and started to realize, oh, there's a lot of stuff here, because a lot of care was taken with Columbo in not just the characterization, but in the guest stars, the supporting actors, the music, the plotting, the sects, all the what I call in the book, I call it the connective tissue that made Columbo such a great show, so that even if let's say a plot wasn't all that great, well, you had an episode that really wasn't, you know, hitting on all cylinders, like I'll pick an example, old fashioned murder.

You can still find elements to that episode that are pretty good because of the high level of craftsmanship that went enter that show.

I love this mix of the political science that you were learning and that you learned that you went to school for and everything, and then the idea of marrying that with Colombo.

I mean that the title of the book, Colombo Explains the Seventies, such a great title and such a brilliant way of taking the show apart in a different way than I've seen anybody else do it.

I'm so glad we're in this almost like new age of Columbo scholarship and Columba explains, the seventies is.

Right up there.

I love your approach to this material.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate that.

I was watching episodes and I realized that a lot of what was going on was very much of the era.

Because I grew up in the seventies and I kind of lived it, I was able to make those connections.

And if you're watching Colombo today, if you've watched Columbo for the first time, or you're streaming it and you're kind of new to Colombo of the seventies, it doesn't resonate like that.

But I think that Colombo was popular in the seventies, the character and the show because it touched on a lot of the values of people of the seventies and a lot of the social issues.

So those issues might be something like, you know, gender equality, women's liberation, class issues, and conflict, power and authority, technology, violence.

There's all sorts of issues that intersect with seventies Colombo, and if you know where to look, you can find those and I like to think that my book provides a guide to that, and I also think that it also gives people another reason to rewatch the show.

And I'm always looking for reasons to rewatch the show, and I hope that my book also provides people with reasons to rewatch the show and think, oh Colombo says that right there.

Yeah, that was a very seventies thing that he said right there.

I was so glad when you started one chapter off Tucky that quote from going to forget which episode it was, where the woman's like that, I've tried st I've tried, you know, I'm okay, you're okay, you know, all the self help movements, just to really open up that idea of like, this is a contemporary show.

Those things were terms at the time, and I really appreciated that you look deeper than just being like, oh, Columbo was a class warrior, and that it wasn't just class, that it was really more about the power.

And I've found that to be such a refreshing take on that whole angle of where Colombo was coming from.

Right, thank you.

I know that most people and most writers of Colombo, all the appreciations of Colombo, they always come back to the class element, the middle class public servant who's going after the rich and entitled killer.

That's great, that's a part of it.

And I get that that's very satisfying when those people are brought down.

But I think there's more to it than that, And I think you have to go back to look at what was going on in the late sixties and the seventies to really appreciate it.

Because back then you had the Vietnam War, and it was very contentious back then, and you had a lot of people who were suspicious of what the government was telling them, and there was what was called the credibility gap between what the government was saying was going on and what was actually happening on the ground in Vietnam.

Then you had things like the Meli massacre being covered up by the government.

You had in nineteen seventy one the Pentagon Papers and Daniel L's and those get printed, and those papers are telling us that the government had certain motives and actions that they were doing in Vietnam that we didn't know anything about.

So government is lying to us.

Then nineteen seventy two Watergate and Watergate just brought to a whole other level of mistrust and it cast a shadow over the entire seventies decades.

So I come back to a catchphrase from the late sixties and early seventies that showed up on a lot of bumper stickers at the time, and that's question authority.

And to me, question authority, that phrase is the key to Colombo, because yes, he was going after rich people, but he was also going after powerful people, people with power and authority.

And I don't necessarily mean just you know, political power, but powerful CEOs of industry, powerful professionals, people who were authorities in their field.

You know, food critics, art critics, concert conductors, actresses for country singers, people who are authorities in their field, who get respect from everyone, and Colombo wanted to make sure that they lost their power and authority because because they were killers.

Now a lot of times these people were rich, but at the end of the episode, Columbo's not interested in taking away the money of the killers.

He's interested in.

Taking away their power and authority.

And the way I like to describe it is that Colombo was looking for the social injustice of people getting away with murder, not the social inequities of people trying to get away with capitalism.

That's to me, that's the key to really getting into the show.

Well, the way that he does it with the disarming, the charm, the self put downs.

And I really liked how you very specifically went through some of those examples as far as the lady lawyer will put him in a plane and then like have control over him or have power over him that way, or you know, it's just amazing to read all of those quotes as far as people just a little slight put down.

It's like a person like you, mister Colombo, the mister to the mister Colombo.

This that is so crucial and I hadn't ever really thought about that.

You.

Of course, you get those great speeches, you know, like oh, yeah, you're trying this act and you know, I can see right through you.

But the other ways that he charms and disarms, and that the way that people use their power and put him down, I think is really that chapter really resonated for me.

Well, thank you.

Yes, there's a dominance element to it that Colombo is dominated by the killers, but Colombo also wants to be dominated.

He opens up that door so that the killers think that they have an advantage on him, And I think that's really expertly done.

And I know there's a lot of you know, there's and this is a good conversation to have as far as chatter about, oh, is Columbo authentic in what he says to killers and how he's very humble, and is he an authentic character?

And I think that most most of the time, he is.

But I also think that he knows that he has an advantage to exaggerating some of these character traits, so that's what he'll do.

He'll fumble around a little bit extra time for that pencil that he needs, or he'll do a little bit of extra sneezing when he's in the company of the killer, just to kind of invade their personal space and put them off guard.

So I think there's an authenticity to his character, but not without just a little bit of exaggeration.

The coming into their personal space, that's wonderful and I love is marveling around their technology.

You know, the term future shock has been used for a little while.

I remember what it means, and hopefully most of our listeners remember what it means.

But he encapsulates that so well, and you really bring that to the four As far as the use of the technology in those episodes.

Yeah, future Shock was.

I think people underestimate now how really important the Future Shock book was.

And Alan Toffler's theories about the shadowing stress of the consequences of too much technology, too fast, and that was part of the decade.

Toffler was on all the talk shows, and the catchphrase made it into the Colombo episode of Friend Indeed, So that tells you right there how important it was.

And I think that that element of technology was in Colombo from the very beginning.

So going back to the creators, Richard Levinson Wayne Link, I think that was always a part of their plan to have that part of the Colombo character.

They created in nineteen sixty seven, before the Prescription Murder movie, they created the Mannux character, but Mannix was part of a huge detective agency in a gleaming skyscraper with banks and banks of computers and technology to help them fight crime.

That show didn't work, so they had to change up that premise.

But Levinson and Link took that concept and they just used it.

And death lends a hand with Robert Kulpa's the villain, so Levenson and Link, I think we're on top of that from the very beginning.

And then you have an episode, the first series episode Murdered by the Book, where Colombo is marveling at the fact that elevator buttons can register the heat that comes off your hand.

I mean, no real reason for Colombo to say that.

It's not a clue that has anything whatsoever to do with the episode, but it shows that Colombo is going to be very tied into technology, and he has to be because that's part of his job.

And so he walks us through the viewer who might be a little scared of some of this new technology.

He walks us through how to adapt to it because he has to adapt to it himself.

And my favorite example of this is in Exercise and Fatality, where he gets the phone number of mister Lewis Lacey, and so this is the accountant who he wants to try to get some evidence from, and so he calls Lewis Lacey at home.

Phone picks up, says hi, I'm Lewis Lacey.

Colombo starts talking to him as if it's a regular person.

Then it is stunned to.

Find out that it's an answering machine that's pitted up, and Colombo doesn't quite know how to react, and so Lewis Lacey leaves the message that every person in the seventies left at the end of their answering machine message, which was when you hear the beep, leave your message and I'll get back in touch with you.

Now that's very quaint today, but back then nineteen seventy four, a lot of people didn't have answering machines.

A lot of people didn't know how to react to answering machines, and so Colombo.

The funny part is a Colombo then talks very slowly leave his mess and that's the funny part.

But it's also instructive, So it's it's how to interact with technology.

That's a big theme throughout throughout the seventies episodes.

That's a little bit about class, a little bit about technology.

Also, we need to talk a little bit about some of the social movements that were happening back then, when it comes to women's liberation, racial equality.

I mean those also get worked into the script as well.

And again i'd love especially the what was the name of the chapter, the Yes.

Liberation and Lady Killers and the seventies for television and dealing with the women's liberation movement, that was a that was a balancing act, not just for Colombo but for all the shows of the seventies because the women's liberation movement, feminism, gender equality, those issues were gaining steam, but it was very difficult for a lot of people to wrap their arms around those issues.

In Colombo.

The Colombo character was one of those people.

So if you equate feminism and liberation with him being strong as a female character, Colombo had a lot of strong female characters, not just as killers, and we can point to Lee Grant, we can point to Vera Miles.

Strong female killers were also strong supporting characters as well, And if you look at it from that way, Colombo was very progressive as far as having women of strength on the show.

But the other side of it is that Columbo himself as a character has a tough time grappling with these new ground rules or how to deal with you know, how to deal with women.

So he looks at a male secretary in the Bye Bye Sky High IQ case and he says to the male secretary, what is this women's lib Don't ladies do this work anymore?

He says to Leslie Williams, Lee Grant, and Ransom for a dead man.

He says to an associate of hers, he says, I don't know how you do it.

I don't know how you can work for a woman, he says to the Valerie Harper character in Most Crucial Game, He says, Oh, you'd be an ornament in any office.

It's like you.

Listen to some of this now, Oh, it's very cringey, but it was totally representative of the times and how people would react to of how pretty a woman was, and how.

They would react to women who had a little bit of power.

Now, the good news for Colombo is that we know that he has a kind heart.

We know he's open to change, and we know that he believes in equal justice.

So we like the thing that you know, we to agreeing that women might need to be a little bit more equal world.

But again, this was a very this was a very contentious.

Issue back in the seventies.

Let's suck a little bit too.

As far as racial minorities.

I mean that it's very nice to see how it's not even an issue for him and it's never really brought to the fore in a negative way as far as people of color and just he treats everyone very equally, whether they again, whether they be a killer or not.

He will treat people with respect.

But it feels very genuine when it comes to minorities.

Yes, he really didn't have any one of those bones you know, in his body for that.

I do think that overall, Colombo did a good job of representing racial equality and advances in their characters.

In a lot of the background characters that you would see, and in a lot of the crime scenes, you would have African American detectives and fingerprinters and people milling around doing their job.

And that was roughly in the same and I did some counting of off these episodes to know that it's roughly the same percentage that African Americans were being represented in society at large.

Now, having said that, I think that Colombo could have pushed the enveloplon this a little bit more.

I think it's very good that Levinson and Link didn't want to have any African American killers on Colombo, because he William Link has said this, he didn't want African Americans represented as criminals.

He didn't want to make that stereotypical judgment.

And I think that's great for the first few years of the show, But once the Colombo formula was established, I don't think it would have been that bad to have a Sammy Davis Junior or James Earl Jones type be a African American killer.

We wouldn't have all jumped to the conclusion that, oh, they're stereotyping African Americans.

And I think that's great that they didn't want to have an association of race with being criminal.

The flip side to that, I would argue, would be that we didn't get to see any black individuals as rich, as powerful, as famous, or intelligent enough to craft some of these you know, intricate murders that Colombo had to deal with.

And we didn't get to see an African American character have a battle of wits with Colombo, like say a Jack Cassidy would, And I think that was a bit of a missed opportunity.

I get the sentiment where they're coming from, but I also think that on what could have been pushed, I think they also probably could have had a feed minute rather a African American sergeant on board, you know, get rid of Sergeant Kramer for an episode, and let's introduce a new sergeant to kind of a one on one with Colombo.

Colombo getting taught to uniformed officers who are African American, but they weren't really part of the fabric of the show.

And you're Bob, Dishy's your Dennis Dugan, like, yeah, having somebody along with him would have been really nice.

I mean, those those characters were few and far between.

I mean, the times of Dishy comes Back is always a pleasant, you know time, but yeah, let's switch it up a little bit.

And those characters are there just basically so Colombo can provide someone with exposition.

So he's not turning to look at the camera and say, okay, if you were here's what I think.

You know, he's talking, he's talking to the sergeant and then we're learning about how his mind has worked.

We're about to record our episode, Last Salute to the Commodore, which doesn't have mcgoen in.

More of the camera and Mike, I'm sorry to hear that.

Yeah, yeah, I know it's pretty universal, right, yeah, yeah, doesn't it's got Patrick mcgoin involved, but it's behind the camera rather than in front of the camera.

You write a lot about McGowen, and I'm curious what you see as you know, his influence not just as an actor, but as creative force and really working with fulk on this well.

Before I get into Patrick McGowen, I should say that I love The Prisoner and I love what Magowon did with The Prisoner.

The show from it aired in Britain in nineteen sixty seven, was in the States in sixty eight and sixty nine, and The Prisoner was groundbreaking, exciting.

I loved watching The Prisoner and I have a high regard for Patrick McGowan.

Having said that, for Patrick McGowan and Colombo, I look at it in three different elements.

There's the acting, there's the writing, there's the directing.

In the acting, he was a villain on four episodes between the seventies and nineties, I thought he always did a superb job, really very good job, even in the nineties episodes, which I'm overall not high on.

But Magoonn as an actor, I thought it was spectacular, particularly in the seventies episode by Don's Early Life.

So I have no problem with Magoo and the actor.

Magowin the writer and the director mixed bag.

I think that as a writer he didn't really take a lot of writing credits except for I believe for a Murder was too many notes in the nineties.

But any episode that Magowan was a part of He would always rewrite things in the script even if it didn't show up in the opening credits, and I would point to an episode like Identity Crisis.

I know that's not everyone's cup of tea, but I like what he did with some of the writing scenes in Identity Crisis, and I think it does a good job with that.

I think his directing on the episode Identity Crisis was pretty good as well, But now we talk about some of the you know, the downside and his directing and last salute to the commodore is, in my humble opinion, it's a dreadful because he's encouraging to push Colombo at Peter Fock into areas that really I think are embarrassing and that don't serve the character very well and don't treat the viewer with intelligence, and in the same vein as directing in episodes like Murder with Too Many Notes in the nineties very I think poorly done, poorly conceived, and I think that his directing and his writing had some good elements, but unfortunately, I think it took the series in the wrong direction.

Now, Peter Fox loved him, and I say, for better or worse, Peter Fox let Patrick mcgoon do pretty much whatever he wanted.

It's just the way it is.

You mentioned the eighties, nineties, and even into the two thousands episodes, And I know this book is called Columbo explains the seventies, not those other decades.

But I'm so curious.

Are there episodes that are redemptive, redeemable?

I show this, I guess it's the word in your opinion.

Are there any that carry on with that classic tradition from the seventies?

A small number.

I wouldn't say that Columbo was much better suited to the seventies.

He was much more relevant in the seventies than he was in the nineties.

And I do spend a chapter talking about that, just so I can point up the difference between the nineties and the seventies and how Colombo is really relevant to the seventies.

I also just don't think the show was produced very well.

I don't think the quality was very high, and I think that when you look at the seventies, you've got a number of episodes that are a grade A or A minus.

There is a lot of them, and unfortunately, in the nineties, I don't see any episode as being that high in grade.

I see a small handful of episodes as being a B or a B minus grade.

And if we're looking at what I think would be the best episode of the nineties, I know for a lot of people it's Colombo Goes to College.

I disagree.

My favorite episode from the nineties.

It's not perfect, but I think the best.

One is Butterflying Shane's Gray, and that's because I like William Shatnan.

If you don't like the shat then you're not gonna like the episodes that he's in.

He pushes the envelope on his chewing of the scenery, but he knows that he's doing it.

He does it with a wink and a nudge, and most importantly, Peter Fought knows it.

And Peter Fought has great chemistry with William Shatner, and they're scenes together and I think there are like eight of them.

They really milked it in that episode.

It's great chemistry, it's great fun.

That episode was written by Peter Fisher, who was a story editor in the seventies, and he wrote a water of great Columbo's episodes in the seventies, so the story elements are in place there not a perfect episode, like all the nineties episodes, it's way too long and has filler in it, But overall, I would put that as the best episode of the nineties for me.

You were a teacher for a while, and I'm curious, what do you think Colombo could teach some of these modern detectives, who, if anybody might hold a candle to him, or what do people need to go back and rediscuss and really bring from the seventies back into the two thousands.

But the detectives of today, in the pressedigue shows of today, I think they've learned a lot in the last fifty years of watching television and knowing what viewers responding to.

I don't know that there's much that I.

Could say about that, except that I would emphasize being intelligent, and I think that's the real key to Columbo of the seventies and it's treatment of the viewer.

It treated the viewer with intelligence.

It was a smart show written by smart people, designed for intelligent viewers, so we can have intelligent conversations about it like we're having right now.

And Colombo of the seventies treated the viewers intelligently.

Colombo of the nineties I don't think learn that lesson, And the example I would give would be the difference in how they treated humor, and the humor of the seventies most often came from the characters around Colombo and how they were reacting to him.

So the gold standard for me is the soup kitchen scene.

Yeah, the soup kitchen scene is great in negative reaction, and people aren't laughing at Colombo.

We're laughing at the reactions of Joyce Finn Patent to Colombo.

Now you compare that to a scene from the nineties caution murder, maybe hazardous to your health, And you've got Colombo in the parking lot with the wad Enders character played by Jeorge Hamilton, and they're doing bumper cars and there's you know, back and forth and the silly sound effects, and they're repeating their actions and there's you know, painful grimaces and silly music.

And Colombo of the nineties talked down to the viewer, and I think treated the viewer as less intelligent than it treated viewers in the seventies.

If prestige television to stay prestige should be treating its viewers with intelligence, because that's what Columbo did.

First book out of the gate.

I think he nailed it.

Is there something else?

Do you have something else you want to write about, or more Colombo or something else that you want to tackle next?

Yes, I do.

Funny you should ask, but it's not Colombo related.

But it is television related.

And right now I'm working on a book.

We'll see how it goes, we'll see what what kind of attraction it gets.

And it's about television in nineteen sixty eight and all the different elements of connections between not just one show, but all of television in nineteen sixty eight, because that was a very contentious year and there was a lot going on.

You had the Democratic National Convention, you had a tet offensive in Vietnam.

You had shows like Julia, like Rowan and Martin's Laughing, like the Smothers Brothers Show.

Nineteen sixty eight has a lot of material.

And so I'm tackling that right now.

That sounds fantastic.

I can't wait to read that.

And yeah, I totally agree.

Nineteen sixty eight, nineteen sixty nine the next year as well, with all of the political upheaval happening then, such a tumultuous time and such an important time in the world, not just the US.

Yeah, I think that'll be something that would be very readable for people.

So we'll see what happens.

I just have one more question for you, how much did you pay for those shoes?

Or you could ask as Peter Fogg did at the DeMont and Roast, So I think he has dan if his shoes were rented.

I'm so glad you're right about that.

And then also even going into things like McGruff the crime Dog Bravo, sir, Well, thank you.

I thought it was important to put Colombo in context because again, Colombo's got a lot of new viewers and they may not be aware.

They may have been told, oh, Colombo is very popular in the seventies, they may not be really aware of the context of how popular Columbo was in the seventies.

So I try to do that at the beginning of the book.

Well, mister Stewart, thank you so much for your time.

This has been great talking with you.

Well, thank you.

Appreciate the kind words, and I appreciate your having me on the podcast.