The Shabby Detective: Yet Another Columbo Podcast

Hell hath no fury like a TV executive scorned. Mike and Chris train their cameras on Season Seven's "Make Me a Perfect Murder," a 1978 entry that puts Trish Van Devere center stage as Kay Freestone — a network programmer who, after being passed over for the big promotion by her boss and lover Mark McAndrews (Laurence Luckinbill), decides that a well-timed gunshot during a screening room preview is a more satisfying career move than updating her résumé.

Our hosts wrestle with the episode's real weaknesses: a runtime that overstays its welcome by a good twenty minutes, bogged down by a meandering subplot involving Lainie Kazan's has-been singer and one too many scenes of Columbo fiddling with TV equipment.

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As Mike and Chris continue to traipse through the controversial official final season of Columbo with the Shabby Detective returning to the kitchen to face off against Louis Jourdan as a snotty TV chef and food critic who uses blowfish poison to take out a victim of blackmail who was going to go public.

Is the all-star cast and steady directing from Jonathan Demme enough to save the episode?

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Mike White and Chris Stachiw kick off season seven of Columbo with a close look at “Try and Catch Me,” where literary titan Abigail Mitchell (Ruth Gordon) believes she’s engineered the perfect murder—cool, elegant, and legally, uh, airtight—only to underestimate a rumpled detective who thrives on patience and psychological pressure.

The conversation delves into Columbo's new show-runner, giving the Lieutenant's catchphrases to others, and how a skilled mystery writer can bungle a crime so badly.

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Mike and Chris dig into the uneasy moral terrain of The Storyteller, a 1977 NBC movie that turns television itself into the accused. Starring Martin Balsam as a celebrated writer blamed when a child’s death echoes the plot of his work, the film wrestles with guilt, responsibility, and the limits of artistic intent. Written by Richard Levinson and William Link, this forgotten TV drama fits squarely in The Shabby Detective’s wheelhouse: smart, talky, ethically thorny, and very much of its era—when network television wasn’t afraid to put itself on trial.

Watch the movie on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go0Yesa9m0Q

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Mike and Chris keep their arms in the car at all times with writer-producer and Rollercoaster superfan Richard Hatem for a wild ride through James Goldstone’s 1977 star-studded disaster-thriller that pits George Segal’s weary safety inspector against Timothy Bottoms’s soft-spoken, delightfully unhinged bomber. 

They dig into the film’s oddball mix of procedural beats, theme-park mayhem, and Sensurround feeling, tracing how Rollercoaster fits alongside Link & Levinson's energy and why its cat-and-mouse structure still works. Expect talk of Segal’s hangdog charm, Richard Widmark’s righteous scowling, and the many ways a bomber with a walkie-talkie can make a grown man sweat.

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