I have only seen a handful of the revival episodes Chris. The ones I have seen are different in that they shake up the status quo a bit. I saw one where Columbo had to help his Nephew get his bride back I didn't really like that one much. I only caught the second half of it but it just didn't follow the Columbo formula and seemed to be very much in the style of other shows in the 90s. I give the writer kudos for trying something different though.
That one,
No Time to Die, was one of only two installments of the revival that abandoned the usual mystery format in order to adapt Ed McBain procedural stories with Columbo written in as the lead character. The other one, two years later, was
Columbo: Undercover. I didn't care for them, because they were so divergent from the classic format. They even had Columbo carry a gun, though with great reluctance and without ever firing it. But those were the only two that broke the format. The other 22 revival movies were pretty much all in the standard
Columbo format, although some had some interesting variations.
One drawback of the revival is that it was less successful than the original series at resisting network pressure to put in more sex, action, and other supposedly crowd-pleasing stuff. A number of them seemed to go for a more youth-oriented focus, like
Columbo Goes to College, Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star, and the last one,
Columbo Likes the Night Life (though that one was actually pretty good). And there were a number that went for sexually-themed cases --
Sex and the Married Detective (with a sex therapist as the culprit),
Murder: A Self Portrait (the aforementioned one with the polyamorous artist), and
Columbo Cries Wolf (with a Hugh Hefner surrogate as the killer and his starlet-filled mansion as the setting). Yet they still managed to do some very good stories, along with some not-so good ones. (I'm still amazed that the two last ones co-written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, despite being made consecutively, were so radically different in quality.
Ashes to Ashes was superb, while
Murder With Too Many Notes is just about the most incoherent and nonsensical
Columbo installment I've ever seen. That one practically killed the series -- it was three years before they did
Columbo Likes the Nightlife, which unfortunately was the last one ever, but fortunately was a far better swan song.)
I like(d) both the old ones as well as the revival ones. I didn't know there was a break.
There was a gap of 11 years between the two series. Columbo was off the air from 1978 to 1989. But he picked up right where he left off, so aside from the stylistic changes in music, title graphics, fashions, cars, and the like, it might be hard to notice the transition.
Also, of course, the show moved from NBC in the original run to ABC in the revival. It was part of a revived
Mystery Movie wheel for the first 2-3 seasons, but the other mystery series in the wheel weren't as popular, so that got cancelled and
Columbo continued as a solo series of TV-movie specials.
