Peter Falk Never Once Showed Columbo’s Wife, Then NBC Gave Her Her Own Show Without Him

He would be halfway out the door, rumpled raincoat and all, when Lieutenant Columbo turned back with one more thing. Very often that one more thing was his wife, the woman waiting on dinner at home and the one who once bought him a new raincoat he spent a whole case trying to lose. For the 35 years Peter Falk played the detective on Columbo, from 1968 to 2003, viewers heard about her constantly and never once saw her face.

So was there ever really a Mrs. Columbo? The short answer is yes and no. On Columbo itself she stayed an unseen voice in her husband’s stories, which was exactly how the show’s creators wanted it. But in 1979 NBC gave her a face, a first name and a series of her own starring a young Kate Mulgrew, over the objections of the men who invented her. Falk never appeared in it, the show quietly divorced her within a year, and one of Columbo’s own creators later wondered aloud whether the woman existed at all.

Who Was The Woman Columbo Kept Talking About?

From the very first Columbo film, 1968’s Prescription: Murder, the lieutenant used his wife the way other detectives used a magnifying glass. A story about her would put a suspect at ease, fill an awkward silence or set up the question that sprang the trap. He phoned home in the middle of cases, and in “Troubled Waters” in 1975 the two of them were on a cruise together when a passenger turned up dead. Even then she stayed just out of frame for the whole voyage.

That was a deliberate choice. Creators Richard Levinson and William Link built the character around what the audience never got, which is the same reason almost nobody caught Columbo’s first name on his badge (we told that story in how eagle-eyed fans finally spotted it). “The magic of Columbo’s wife is that you never see her,” Levinson said when the idea of showing her first came up, according to the show’s history on TVmaze and Wikipedia. As it turned out, he had good reason to be worried.

Why Did NBC Give Columbo’s Wife Her Own Show?

Columbo wrapped its original NBC run in 1978, and network programming chief Fred Silverman was not ready to let a hit name go to waste. His plan was to build a new series around the most famous woman on television nobody had ever seen. Levinson and Link opposed the idea outright, and when it went ahead anyway they fought over the casting. They wanted an actress closer to Falk’s age, and the names they put forward were Maureen Stapleton and Zohra Lampert, a friend from Falk’s circle. NBC turned both down.

Instead the network chose Kate Mulgrew, who was 23 when Mrs. Columbo premiered on February 26, 1979. She played Kate Columbo, a reporter for a small local paper who solved murders while raising her young daughter Jenny, played by Lili Haydn. Mulgrew later recalled Silverman telling her, “We believe at NBC, Ms. Mulgrew, that you have great natural gravitas.” She also admitted she had said no at first, “because I had been offered Desdemona on Broadway,” before “they made me an offer I felt at 22 that I could not refuse,” as TVLine reported. The lieutenant, meanwhile, was never in the house, and the man who played him had made his feelings clear.

What Did Peter Falk Think Of ‘Mrs. Columbo’?

Falk never made an appearance, not even a phone call or a raincoat glimpsed in a doorway, and he never endorsed the show. The Television Academy’s oral history of Columbo describes the spinoff as “ill fated and ill advised,” noting that Levinson and Link both disavowed it and Falk disliked the concept. Columbo historians have long reported that Falk called the series a “bad idea” and “disgraceful,” and the Columbophile blog, one of the most thorough records of the show, repeats that verdict.

Mulgrew herself came to agree with him, and she says so with real affection for the original. Looking back, she said the premise “didn’t have a leg to stand on.” In the same reflection she put her finger on exactly what the network had broken. “First of all, Peter Falk was so singularly great,” she said. “That we never saw her. The wonderful secret of it.” Once the secret was gone, NBC tried to undo the damage in a very strange way.

How Did Kate Columbo Become Kate Callahan?

The first five episodes drew poor ratings, and by the time the show came back in the fall of 1979 the Columbo name had been scrubbed away. Starting with the sixth episode, the heroine was Kate Callahan, divorced from her unseen husband off screen with no explanation on the air. The title kept changing too, through Kate Columbo and Kate the Detective before it landed on Kate Loves a Mystery, and Don Stroud joined the cast as Sergeant Mike Varrick. NBC canceled the series in December 1979 after just 13 episodes in all, and the last of them trickled out in March 1980.

Mulgrew believes the show might have survived had it started out the way it ended. “If they’d done it [as] ‘Kate Loves a Mystery,’ it probably would have worked,” she said, according to TVLine. “But ‘Mrs. Columbo,’ how could you possibly do that?” She went on to a career few TV stars can match, as Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager and as Red on Orange Is the New Black, and at 71 she is still making convention appearances for fans who remember all of it. The question of whether there was ever a real Mrs. Columbo, though, came back around in a place nobody expected.

So Was There Ever Really A Mrs. Columbo?

William Link had a theory, and it was a bold one for the man who co-created her. He suggested that the wife and the whole parade of relatives Columbo talked about might be a fantasy, a tactic the lieutenant used to disarm the killers he was hunting. When James Lipton put that idea to Falk on Inside the Actors Studio in 1999, the actor wasn’t having it. “Oh no no, all those people exist,” Falk answered, as MeTV and the Columbophile blog both recounted from the broadcast.

The show backed him up. When Columbo returned on ABC, the 1990 episode “Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo” built an entire mystery around her, with Helen Shaver as a widow who blames the lieutenant for her husband’s death and plots revenge against his wife, according to TCM. Columbo was plainly still married, which left NBC’s divorced Kate Callahan with nowhere to fit in the story. Even in that episode, his wife never steps in front of the camera.

So the woman who kept dinner waiting and bought him that raincoat was real, at least to the man who played her husband for 35 years. Falk died in 2011 at 83, Levinson in 1987 and Link in 2020, and not one of them ever let us see her. That was the whole point. Somewhere just past the edge of the frame, Mrs. Columbo is still waiting for him to come home for dinner.