Lately my partner and I have been watching Columbo reruns. From a narrative standpoint, especially in terms of a viewing culture that’s familiar with procedural drama, it’s fascinating.

Most of the fare we see these days involves intricate plotting that the agents of law and order have to unravel, expose, and then prosecute over the course of an episode, so the order of operations is well and truly established. In Columbo, the model is upended: the viewer gets to see the whole of the crime (give or take some concessions to 1970’s morality), gets to see the measures the culprit takes to cover their tracks, and then gets to see Peter Falk, who plays Detective Columbo, get at the truth through dogged persistence and strategic efforts to get the antagonist(s) to underestimate him until it’s too late.

All told, most episodes deliver a kind of olde-skool satisfaction. Columbo is decent, generally likable, and he embodies a mode of detection that anyone might rise to. His effectiveness stems from his humanity, his astute observation, and his experience. There are seldom forensic fireworks at play–just basic assumptions about how people act and a readiness to tease out the threads of discrepancy.

Most cases involve premeditation by some clever, privileged criminal, one who has a solid understanding of how the machinery of law and order works and the sorts of conclusions it usually produces. Quite a few of the culprits assume they can pin their crime on a less privileged suspect, ruses Columbo invariably sees through. The criminal’s plans usually begin to unravel when they either a) do something too clever by half to cover up what they’ve done (wiping away the fingerprints from a doorknob, for example, that should be covered with the victim’s), or b) when they volunteer explanations for some oddity that Columbo has observed that makes alternative solutions seem (at least to Columbo) even more unlikely. Most episodes are especially satisfying at that level. We get to see criminal masterminds with all sorts of advantages at their disposal brought low simply because they couldn’t shake free from the detective’s tenacity.

The magic of Columbo has aged strangely, in part because it’s vision of the world is somewhat romantic, at times even idealistic. More modern procedural shows tend to be predicated on the assumption that everyone has secrets to keep and will lie incessantly to keep them. The workman with the shaky alibi is often having an affair, for instance, a complication that will often find our detectives, however able, chasing down the wrong scent for 30-45 minutes. Columbo’s antagonists are always clever (and successful because they are so clever) and quick on their feet; the working class folks in their orbit are almost always decent, salt-of-the-earth folks. The culprits are always lying at the fundamental level of their commission of the crime, but they otherwise deal in plausible possibilities and half-truths. The episodes usually end when Columbo exposes one key element of their pattern of misdirection and the house of cards collapses so dramatically that the criminal has no choice but to concede that Columbo got them.

It’s a lovely, reassuring structure, especially since Columbo always arrives at the conclusions for the right reasons, unraveling every thread, reconstructing precisely the crime we’ve already witnessed, and laying it all out plainly. It’s a far cry from the fog of lies and denials we normally see, lies extended and compounded, amplified and echoing, judged and justified. And that’s just in our plotted fictions. Public discourse seems to me even wilder more often than not, the fog of fictions considerably thicker, with folks known for their integrity wittingly and unwittingly thickening the mist through various acts of critical self-promotion. Columbo, even with all the vicious premeditation, feels like a kind of cognitive comfort food, even with a modern acknowledgement that much of what he does would constitute harassment by modern standards. At times the overall design of the show feels contrived, which I think can be appropriate for the genre. Getting to the satisfactions of actual justice involves a kind of relentless engineering we don’t often see, given our own less clever but more brazen doers of wrong.