10 Best Columbo Episodes
9. Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous To Your Health
George Hamilton was already an alumnus of Columbo's golden age (having portrayed the murderer in A Deadly State of Mind in 1975) when, in his first screen role after The Godfather Part III, he played Wade Anders, the host of a Crimewatch-style programme whose name had become a household word. When he is blackmailed by an envious, chain-smoking colleague (played by Peter Haskell, who famously fell victim to the killer doll, Chucky, in the very same year that this episode aired), Anders conspires to murder his oppressor with a poisoned cigarette.
What makes this a fascinating episode of Columbo is that it deals almost entirely in the politics of the media, with nods to late 1980s and early 1990s culture that helped to distinguish the later episodes of Columbo from its original 1970s run.
There is also a brilliant sequence in which Columbo's battered Peugeot 403 Cabriolet collides with Anders's pristine Mercedes-Benz. An irritated Anders inspects the damage and, upon seeing Columbo's Peugeot, which has certainly seen better days, asks "This didn't just all happen, did it?"
The evidence used to prove Anders's guilt also takes a cue from a key piece of evidence featured in Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film, Rear Window, demonstrating the show's fondness for the classics.