Double post but I love that guy's Columbo remixes. The Majong one gets stuck in my head. He made a new one this past week as a short that was pretty good too. There's another guy who does similar things turning Star Trek dialogue into classic Christmas songs.
The one thing that always struck me was just how happy most of the killers were with killing someone and just how they basically shrugged their shoulders when Columbo caught them. He busts them, they share a drink or dinner or whatever and no one ever tries to make a run for it or jump out a window when it's clear they're going to prison.
Or, ya know, just shoot the fucker.
Susan Clark threatened to do that in S1/E7 Lady In Waiting but he reminded her there were a bunch of cops waiting outside the room.
Okay, but if you're already going down for murder, in for a penny...
Not only Columbo, but also Terry Salavas returned for a couple of tv movies in the early 90s until he pass away after a fight against cancer and faced the same music as Columbo.
IIRC the show had a much lower budget for the 90s run. They switched from film to video, the set lighting was all 90s sitcom flatness and the writers just weren't the same calibre. Far less creative writing, with more by-the-numbers plotting. Some stand-outs, like Butterfly in Shades of Grey, which was mostly carried on the back of Shatner's ham, but the majority just wasn't as good. It didn't help that Peter Falk was getting old and was showing early signs of dementia towards the end of the run.
I guess I'm the fan who hasn't died of old age yet. Matlock was great theater. They really ran with the "Now ah'm just a humble country law-yuh" schtick as a way of making his opponents underestimate him. But they also genuinely made him a country bumpkin asshole at times, too. I remember an episode where the B plot was him trying to defend himself in court after he got a ticked running a stop sign. He brought in props and everything. And another where a prosecutor was using cheap tricks in the courtroom, so Griffith walked over and tried to flip his table onto him before getting shouted down by the judge.
Also Matlock did a comeback in a two-part episode of Diagnosis Murder. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0559218/ Speaking of Matlock and Diagnosis Murder, too bad they didn't have a crossover with Perry Mason...
Monk and a lot of other shows that were probably inspired by Columbo also had that issue.
About the 2024 Matlock, there's a bit of a double meta reverse twist: Matlock was a show in-universe, and Kathy Bates's Matlock shares the character's last name, which she says during the pilot inspired her to get into lawyering for real.
There was also that guy with the dogs and the poisoned wine guy, from what I remember.
The top surgeon, how can we forget Leonard "Spock" Nimoy for his performance as the top surgeon? Let's also remember the one starring Martin Landau who portrayed twin brothers who accuse each other to be the murderer but Columbo founded they worked together.