Today, I poke some fun at shows where the police all continue to doubt the detective who is always right about their cases.
This is Disgrace Distract and Bother Me, a feature where I just point out minor things that annoy me in pop culture. Basically, think of it like the lowest level of criticism, then Remember to Forget is the middle, where it’s like, “Okay, this is bad, but not, like, offensively bad” and finally, Things That Turned Out Bad is for, “This is seriously messed up.”
I’ve been enjoying the hit ABC TV series, High Potential, about a single mother with an exceptional mind gets hired by the Los Angeles Police Department as a consultant due to her knack for solving crimes.
One of the trickiest things in TV series is how to handle a character’s dominance as a detective. Essentially, if they’re always right, how can you continue to doubt them? In the case of the iconic detective, Columbo, the solution was for the rest of the LAPD to all know he was a legend, but the people he is investigating only know him as a seemingly bumbling fool, until he nails them to the wall (or, at least, figures out their crimes enough for them to inexplicably confess. Way too many episodes of Columbo end with the bad guy confessing once Columbo figures out how they committed the crime, even if the criminal justice system requires more than “Columbo has figured it out” as evidence to convict someone. So many Columbo murderers would likely have walked if they just pled “not guilty,” so instead, they all just confess when Columbo figures it out to avoid that issue).
In the case of High Potential, the show should probably go that route, as well, because the current approach of “Yes, you’re right every time, Morgan, but in this one instance, you’ve gone too far!” is kind of silly (the Season 2 premiere DID at least throw in some off-camera examples of her being wrong on some hunches, but generally speaking, if she’s CONVINCED something is the case, it probably is the case).
We all get WHY shows do it, as they want conflict for the sake of drama, but just move that conflict to the criminals that Morgan is helping to investigate. Her fellow cops should all have total faith in her by now.
Columbo was what I would call a “Harassment Detective.” His art was being so annoying that he would literally haunt the prime suspect, always popping up at golf courses or funerals or places of business or their bedrooms or closets or basements or front lawns etc. over and over and over and over again with his quaint “And one more thing,” or various non sequiturs (“I couldn’t resist your pinball machine”) and that the suspect would just confess out of frustration and exhaustion just to be rid of Columbo. Yeah, the show did it a lot but Columbo was the master. Once he had your scent, it was like getting rid of Bugs Bunny. We just needed an episode where some murderer in an ascot had fled all the way to Antarctica and tried to relax on an ice flow, only to see Columbo pop up in snow gear and a, ” ‘Ey, I forgot to axe ya one more question…”
Another infamous example was Dr. Mark Sloan from DIAGNOSIS MURDER. The show ran 8 seasons and 4 TV movies at at least a third of the time Dr. Sloan solved the case by either harassing the prime suspect enough that they’d confess out of exhaustion (which his cop son Steve would always be off camera audio recording), or the suspect would decide to try to kill Dr. Sloan himself (or one of his friends) and get caught that way.
I agree that the trope of “questioning the detective who is always right” is annoying, but I think some TV writers want to avoid the other extreme, which is BATMAN ’66. Finding someplace in the middle seems to elude them.