Deb­o­rah Shapiro’s Watch­ing the Detec­tive chron­i­cles the par­tic­u­lar plea­sures of watch­ing Colum­bo, the tele­vi­sion detec­tive series orig­i­nal­ly aired on NBC through­out the 1970s (and spo­rad­i­cal­ly revived by ABC, begin­ning in 1989).

In recent years, Shapiro streamed her way through the Colum­bo cat­a­log, find­ing, in its vast col­lec­tion of scenes, a sprawl­ing Amer­i­can text that was not sim­ply enter­tain­ment but also a rev­e­la­tion about the notion of enter­tain­ment itself, cre­at­ed at what now feels like the dawn of its epic, water­cool­er-friend­ly genre. Maybe it sounds a lit­tle pre­ten­tious, but in Shapiro’s hands it’s nerdy fun — a wel­come dose of extend­ed pop cul­ture exe­ge­sis in a world of hot-head­ed split-sec­ond takes.

Shapiro con­vinc­ing­ly places Colum­bo on the lev­el of crit­i­cal his­tor­i­cal arti­fact that may feel sur­pris­ing to some­one like, for exam­ple, me, whose faint mem­o­ries of the series were broad­cast from my grandmother’s wood-pan­eled tele­vi­sion. Why does Shapiro love Colum­bo so much? Falk, the actor, was Jew­ish, and the char­ac­ter he played was cod­ed ​“eth­nic.” ​“I under­stood that lin­eage,” Shapiro writes, ​“you could trace back to over­crowd­ed New York City ten­e­ments, to the chil­dren of late 19th cen­tu­ry immi­grants — and their children’s children.” 

Shapiro’s approach to the past is less focused on nos­tal­gia than Colum­bo​’s unde­ni­able for­ma­tive influ­ence. ​“There can be com­fort in famil­iar­i­ty: Colum­bo, as an idea, a char­ac­ter, a pres­ence, that has been there for so long,” Shapiro writes. ​“The dura­tional qual­i­ty, the con­stan­cy. The show’s cul­tur­al foot­print was so large it stamped its way into the col­lec­tive uncon­scious.” Colum­bo mat­tered. The Greeks had Homer, the Eng­lish Shake­speare, and Amer­i­cans of the 1970s had Peter Falk in his icon­ic trench coat, dri­ving around Los Angeles. 

Any­one with an inter­est in bygone cin­e­ma cul­ture will enjoy tag­ging along as Shapiro weaves names into a nar­ra­tive mean­der­ing pleas­ant­ly all over the place. John Cas­savetes, Faye Dun­away, Wim Wen­ders, Ter­rence Mal­ick — they all con­nect back to Colum­bo. A young Steven Spiel­berg direct­ed the pilot episode, ​“Mur­der by the Book.” Shapiro observes that Columbo’s Los Ange­les would’ve over­lapped writer and ​“supreme Los Ange­les chron­i­cler” Eve Bab­itz. ​“Did Bab­itz ever watch Colum­bo?” Shapiro won­ders. ​“What would she have thought?”