Because I always see one of a dozen or so. A couple with Patrick McGoohan (army & undertaker) one with Billy Connolley, one about IRA(?) gun smuggling, one where a woman kills her husband and pretends he’s been kidnapped, one with Donald Pleasance as a wine buff ::takes breath:: one set in London, then we’re back to Patrick McGoohan again. Addmittedly I only catch it in passing since the show irritates the frak of me. But it’s shown endlessly on Hallmark* and both BBC and commercial channels so I catch snatches of it all the time.
But it’s always one of those episodes. The show was on air for decades I should see a new one occasionally surely?
There’s probably a name for this phenomenon. The “I Love Lucy effect” or something.
I do not watch Hallmark (the chick channel) except for Monk and that one episode of Diagnosis Murder guest starring Rachel York. But that’s it
WAG: It’s cheaper for the network just to air a sampling of the most popular ones than to purchase the whole series (which was never a “series” in the usual sense of the word).
I’ve started to watch quite a bit of Hallmark. It does Law and Order and House days. I recorded the whole of season 2 of House not too long ago when they ran the whole thing over a 24+ hour period.
Coindiently I watched a Columbo ep. that I’d never seen before the other night that was on Hallmark.It stared George Hamilton and was called Columbo: Caution - Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
For most of its run Columbo was part of an anthology (The NBC Mystery Movie), with McMillan and Wife and McCloud (and later Quincy, M.E.), so there weren’t as many episodes as one would expect for a show that was on for so long.
Hallmark (the UK version) has obviously bought a package of Columbo movies - those already mentioned, plus the one with Dick Van Dyke in, the one with Jack Cassidy playing a magician, the one with Johnny Cash in, one with Tyne Daly as the murderess, another Patrick McGoohan one where he plays a secret agent, and a few more. They’ve been showing these ad nauseam (I’m guessing they have the right to air them over a certain period of time).
I guess we’ll have to wait until they negotiate another deal for some different ones.
One of the other channels has been showing the first ever Columbo time and time again, Prescription:Murder, with Gene Barry as the killer.
Also, there were two runs of Columbo – the NBC Mystery Movie run from 1971-78 and a series of individual movies from 1989-2003. It’s likely the two versions were sold separately to stations.
Another reason might be music rights making it harder for a station to get a package with all of the episodes.
I asked a question a while back about why Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” service was missing chunks of episodes. Everyone agreed it was because Netflix couldn’t get music clearance for the missing ones.