It’s more than fair to say that Kate Mulgrew is best known
for appearing as Captain Katherine Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. But, well before that, in 1979, she got the
lead in a very strange spin-off series called Mrs. Columbo.
There’s a lot to explain about all of this, which is amusing
because the series only ran for thirteen episodes. It was an eventful misfire.
It started with the end of the first run of the regular Columbo series. NBC decided that they
wanted to do a weekly hour long spin-off revolving around Lt. Columbo’s
previously unseen wife being an amateur sleuth. (Why she would try to solve a
murder on her own when she was married to the greatest homicide detective in
history is the real mystery.) The creators
of Columbo, Richard Levinson and
William Link, said that it was a horrible idea for a show and they didn’t want
to do it.
So, NBC did it without them.
