Mine is Columbo.
What’s yours?
Wojohowitz
Adrian Monk (gotta love Tony Shalhoub!)
Lene’
Morse,
Sherlock.
I am sure there’s someone else but I can’t think who.
I was crazy about the 1975 Levinson/Link series Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton and David Wayne, and set in the late 1940s. Best whodunits ever televised.
Sets and costumes were perfect, John Hillerman made a nifty foil, the guest stars were always spot on, and best of all, Hutton would turn to the camera just before the last commercial break and explain that YOU THE VIEWER had all the same clues he had, and if you weren’t such an unobservant mook YOU TOO would be able to nail the murderer, just like he was going to do right after these important messages.
Jim Rockford
Wow, Ukulele Ike, I was going to say Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen. Best true mystery mystery ever on television. In fact, one of the reasons it only lasted a season (besides Hutton’s erratic behavior) was that it was just too hard to come up with perfect least-likely suspect, fairly-planted-clues plots on a weekly basis.
For private eyes, how about David Janssen as Harry O?
Real detective: Columbo.
Not actual detectives, but did the same job:
Jessica Fletcher, writer, who invariably did a far better job than the local Sheriff.
OK, this one is a stretch but I’ll nominate him anyway:
Quincy, the coroner and part time ladies man. Quincy rocks, if only for the 70s kisch lack of PC.
Columbo and Wojo are both great (I haven’t seen Monk), and I always liked James Garner in The Rockford Files, but the best has to be Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes. The shot I remember best has Holmes getting Watson to explain the case as Holmes’ expression goes from bored and supercilious (almost sneering) to totally smug - without moving a muscle in his face!
Exapno, I’ve always had you pegged as a man of wealth and taste. It was the Queen series that sparked my affection for cozy crime novels, and all the rest of the genre for that matter.
You ever seen any videos/DVDs of that season? I’d be willing to spring for a whole set, or at least for the 2-hour pilot…where Ray Milland was the chief red herring, if not the actual murderer.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a teevee private eye I’ve loved as much, but I’ve always wanted to see the 1959 series Staccato, starring John Cassavetes as the jazz piano-playing investigator Johnny Staccato. Has anyone here ever come across this?
I would be a man of wealth if it all didn’t go for books.
Sadly, I don’t know of video/DVDs of the show. There are no entries in the Shop Ellery Queen box on the show’s page in the IMDB either. In fact, the show’s leading fansite is having a write-in campaign to get Columbia House to being it out as part of its Classic TV Library reissue series.
On second read, never mind. That’s a 1999 page.
Fortunately I took care to video tape them when they were on A&E a few years back. I think I have all but one episode and maybe the pilot.
I am an Ellery Queen fanatic myself, with all the books and much associated paraphernalia (an Ellery Queen calendar and jig saw puzzle mystery game, for example).
Did you know that the Cyber49er radio show site has 14 episodes of the radio show available for listening to?
http://209.151.137.58/Cyber49er/index.html
A word here has to be given to Burke’s Law, with Gene Barry as millionaire chief of detectives Amos Burke. He would ride to homicides in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and hobnob, he said euphemistically, with all the beautiful women who were suspects. But the real reason I bring the show up is that it originated the gimmick of having each week’s suspects be stars in their own right who could come in for a week and have a ball chewing the scenery in over-the-top roles. The Hutton-version Ellery Queen used this gimmick to great advantage.
My curent favorite is Jerry Orbach’s Lenny Briscoe on Law And Order. I love the sarcasm, made truly funny by his deadpan delivery. Now if they could just let him sing and dance.
There can be only one: Lenny Briscoe
- Jim Rockford
1A. Lt. Columbo - Frank Pembleton from “Homicide: Life on the Streets”
- Lenny Brisco
- Thomas Magnum
- Arthur Dietrich (sp?) from “Barney Miller”
- Kelly Garrett from “Charlie’s Angels”
Gotta be Jim Rockford. I am suprised no one has mentioned Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue. He is a detective, although the show doesn’t really show much detective work.
Adrian Monk.
Sabrina Duncan - Charlie’s Angels.
No question - Lt Columbo
I gotta vote for Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin on A&E’s (I think) “Nero Wolfe”. I read every single one of the books when I was a kid, and this has got to be the absolute best adaptations of them. From the red and yellow chairs in Nero’s office, to the nightly ritual of Fritz bring Nero his nightly beer, to the face-off of every suspect in Nero’s office, every episode seems exactly the way it would have been described in the books. Maury Chaykin is the PERFECT Nero, and Colin Fox looks exactly as I would have pictured Fritz. I also believe that Rex Stout was the originator of the mystery novel/cookbook genre.