David Martin-Jones, Columbo: Paying Attention 24/7

Abstract

To begin at the end – the kind of formulaic reversal any viewer of the American television crime drama Columbo would applaud – in the final chapter of Columbo: Paying Attention 24/7, David Martin-Jones considers how this show might be re-imagined for the present. Starring Joaquin Phoenix as the shambolic detective in a scruffy mac (Martin-Jones’s preferred choice for the role), Lieutenant Columbo would still be ‘policing history’ by unravelling the killer’s false alibi, while directing the viewer to pay attention as he, Columbo, sifts through the fakery in search of the truth. And although the killers would most likely still be drawn from the elite, rather than the millionaire filmmakers, actors and lawyers of old Hollywood, they would now be the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley, who have made their money on the back of a neoliberal capitalist agenda that has helped shape the surveillance culture of our globalized world. Ultimately, however, Columbo would still have the same agenda: the fight for democracy identified as the right of every citizen to a meaningful life – a life that is not about to be taken away by someone who wants them out of the way. This is where Martin-Jones leaves us at the end of the book; how he got there is the intensive work of the previous chapters.