What’s this? Mrs Columbo isn’t Mrs Columbo any more? There have been some odd ideas floated around as to why this happened, and in the absence of a detailed interview with somebody connected with this show we can only really speculate. Let’s take the reasons we can find on Wikipedia as our starting point.
Firstly, we have this: “poor ratings and reception from both audiences and the original producers of Columbo.” Only the first two words of that reason can have any relevance. There is no way dramatic changes would have been made to a show that was performing well, so it’s worth keeping that in mind. As for the opinions of the original producers of Columbo, if they didn’t matter when the show was created, they certainly didn’t matter by the time the second season was being aired. Continue reading
Well, I guess they didn’t need the school set any more, or the principal for that matter. Snyder gets eaten, still thinking he can deal with evil by telling it off. He is devoured by a fairly disappointing bit of CGI by today’s standards, but I can promise you that in 1999 that seemed like an exciting and convincing effect. As always, though, this is a show that is about the metaphorical monsters much more than the literal ones, and how we deal with them. 
As we come to the end of season 2, we are greeted with Burgess Meredith playing another bookish character (Time Enough At Last), but he’s a far more likeable one this time around. In fact, this is another strong contender for a top ten episode which is especially weird considering just how wordy it is. I was going to say “talkative” but with a man named Wordsworth as the central character, I felt “wordy” was a better option. In modern terms, this episode could be a scathing critique of office culture: no one is irreplaceable. But thanks to some damned fine writing, this works more like a thought experiment about government gone wrong. You hang on every word, waiting to see how Wordsworth will outmaneuver his opponent, the Chancellor. What makes it even more incredible is that he doesn’t “win”. He does posthumously outsmart his enemy, but he doesn’t find a way out. 
No denying it: I’m a sucker for a werewolf movie. The unfortunate thing is that there are seldom good ones. I have memories of some that I liked, but I think if I view them now, I might regret it, like Peter Cushing’s The Beast Must Die. A more recent one that I really liked was a 2002 horror movie Dog Soldiers, the first movie I’d seen Sean Pertwee in (son of Doctor Who himself, Jon Pertwee.) Interestingly, the protagonists of this episode are referred to as dog soldiers, perhaps as a call back to that movie. Or perhaps with other intent… 
What would you do if a bin bag emerged from the sea and started walking towards you? I think most people would run in the opposite direction, or at least be a little alarmed, but the fisherman at the start of this episode doesn’t seem bothered about it at all, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to him. This is the opening sequence to the first episode of the fourth season of The Avengers, and nearly everything has changed from the show we knew before. 
Look up Space: 1999 and the first few words on Wikipedia is “…a British Science-fiction television programme that ran for two series from 1975 to 1977.” Look up Buck Rogers and you’ll find, “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is an American science fiction adventure television series … between September 1979 and April 1981…” These are basically contemporary shows but from two very different parts of the world and there are some observations that I’m sure we could make into a comedy skit. Space: 1999 was thought-provoking but lacked a warm cast. Koenig is obnoxious, for one, and Helena is about as stiff as a surf board but not as much fun. Notably, the cast rarely was seen in anything but their uniforms, with rare exception. Cut to this side of the pond and the stories are as cliched and pulpy as you can imagine right down to the titles of the individual episode, but the cast is really fun to watch. 
You’ve got to hand it to this show: they tried to choose interesting people as the killers. We had a retired police officer in Murder is a Parlor Game and a ventriloquist in A Riddle for Puppets. Now it’s the turn of a phony psychic, and of course that turn of phrase is tautology, because every psychic who takes money off innocent people is a phony.
Perhaps if it were called The Junkyard, I might have liked it more. The unfortunate truth is I have a bit of a bias myself: I don’t like things to be low class. Crass behavior puts me off and I don’t love dirty places and disorder really throws me off. When my desk gets out of hand, I get twitchy. So an episode taking place in a dump isn’t going to appeal to me aesthetically but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a good story to explore. Except, even that is about grungy people in grungy places. 
Sometimes a story hits all the right marks and manages to say something even when the basis isn’t that deep. What we really have here is a revenge story; revenge against cruelty and tyranny. It revs the engines and has something to say even if we have to look at the background to find it. 
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The View from the Junkyard 