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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 284978" data-attributes="member: 23">Uneasy Lies The Crowncontinued There are some familiar faces here, though I must confess I wish some hadn’t been. In good news, there’s the one who looks like Julianne Moore and who replaced Linda Hamilton in Beauty And The Beast. Jo Anderson gives a nice reading here as the cheating-but-vulnerable wife. And there’s Neal McVane from Dynasty (or C.C. Capwell from Santa Barbara) as the dentist’s father-in-law who can’t wait to push the younger man out of his practice and out of his daughter’s life. Again, it’s a nice, weighty performance. His grinning vengefulness made me think he’d have been a good fit for a Columbo killer. But there’s also the bizarre addition of some old has-beens. There’s the replacement Darrin from Bewitched, a baseball player who really should stick to sports and an actress from… McMillan & Wife. Their presence as poker playing witnesses to the killer’s whereabouts was fine until Columbo interviewed them and it became apparent they were playing themselves. Then it became jarringly distracting. I’m on the fence with the actor playing the killer. He pretty much held his own. But there’s also a blandly generic Nineties-ness to him. He could have been Matthew Perry or Jack Wagner or any number of other brash, overpaid young actors of the time. I can see why he was chosen for this role. He has a bit of a young Robert Culp look to him. But perhaps the age of the series and its star by this point went against him. His relative youth made it feel a little uneven and there was never any doubt that Columbo was going to outwit him. All the same, he did a nice enough job. And he certainly had the smug and smarmy thing down to a fine art. The Gotcha was another that stretched credulity to its limit, what with Columbo outright lying in order elicit a confession, and the killer confessing at the very moment Columbo’s bluff would have been called had he continued. It also relied on some very convenient conversations, such as the sneezing waiter’s time-release coated medication. But for me - because the episode was so well-plotted overall it stayed the right side of the line and I liked the idea of Columbo out-bluffing the seasoned poker player. Again, this is far from the best the series has to offer, but I think it’s a decent enough entry that stands alongside some of the Seventies episodes. In fact, of all the revival episodes so far I’d say this is a contender for my second favourite instalment after Agenda For Murder. </blockquote>

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