The original incarnation of The NBC Mystery Movie consisted of three rotating series. McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver as a modern-day western marshal transplanted from New Mexico to the streets of New York City, was a holdover from NBC’s earlier Four in One lineup. McMillan and Wife starred Rock Hudson and Susan St. James as San Francisco Police Commissioner Stewart McMillan and his wife, Sally. And the most successful Mystery Movie segment of all, Columbo, featured Peter Falk reprising his role from the highly rated 1968 NBC made-for-television movie, Prescription: Murder, as a seemingly slow-witted yet keenly perceptive and doggedly tenacious Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) homicide lieutenant.

The new Wednesday night series was an immediate success for NBC, finishing at number 14 in the Nielsen ratings for the 1971–72 season. In addition, Columbo was nominated for eight Emmy Awards (including all three nominations for dramatic series writing), winning in four categories. For the next season, NBC attempted to parlay the Mystery Movie’s success in two ways. First, it moved the original Mystery Movie lineup of Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife to the highly competitive Sunday night schedule and, as a fourth installment to this rotation, added Hec Ramsey, starring Richard Boone as a turn-of-the-century western crime fighter. Also, NBC initiated a completely new slate of similar shows and moved these into the Wednesday time period formerly occupied by the original Mystery Movie lineup. Thus, NBC’s 1972 fall schedule contained the original Mystery Movie shows, now called The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie, plus a completely new set of programs, titled The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie.

NBC continued to achieve commercial and critical success with its Sunday Mystery Movie series. The umbrella program finished tied as the fifth-highest-rated series of the 1972–73 season, and Columbo garnered four more Emmy nominations to go along with acting nominations for McMillan and Wife’s Susan St. James and Nancy Walker. But the Wednesday Mystery Movie lineup never was able to realize a similar degree of success. The new Wednesday series included Banacek, starring George Peppard as a sleuth who made his living by collecting insurance company rewards for solving crimes and insurance scams (Banacek’s Polish-American heritage was also a featured element of the program); Cool Million, a segment that featured James Farentino as a high-priced private investigator and former CIA agent; and Madigan, starring Richard Widmark as a New York police detective. While the shows’ concepts may have sounded similar to those of the original Mystery Movie segments, they lacked the novelty and unique characterizations of the originals, and NBC’s attempt to clone its Mystery Movie format in such a way that it could fill a second block in its prime-time schedule was ultimately unsuccessful. The “knock-off” Wednesday lineup was retooled several times over its two seasons on the air. Madigan and Banacek were retained for the 1973 fall season, joined in the rotation by Tenafly, which featured African-American actor James McEachin as a Los Angeles P.I. (the series title was suspiciously similar to the 1972 “blaxploitation” hit film, Superfly), The Snoop Sisters, which brought Helen Hayes to prime-time television as half of a mystery-writing/crime-solving team of elderly sisters, and Faraday and Company, starring veteran film and television actor Dan Dailey. But after seeing no better results in its second year, the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie was dropped for the 1974 fall season.

NBC was not the only network unable to clone the Mystery Movie formula successfully. Both ABC, with its 1972 The Men series, and CBS, with its 1973 Tuesday Night CBS Movie (which rotated made-for-TV movies with the series Shaft, featuring Richard Roundtree reprising the title role from the film of the same name, and Hawkins, starring the legendary Jimmy Stewart as a small-town attorney), failed in similar short-lived attempts. But while its imitators struggled, the three original Mystery Movie entries remained strong into the mid-1970s. Over these years, NBC continued to try to find a fourth element that could be added to the Columbo/McCloud/McMillan and Wife mix, trying out such shows as Amy Prentiss, McCoy, and Lanigan’s Rabbi. Finally, in the fall of 1976, Quincy, M.E., starring Jack Klugman as a Los Angeles medical examiner, joined the rotation. In early 1977 it was spun off as a regular weekly series and would go on to have a successful seven-year run on the network.

By the end of the 1976–77 season, The Sunday Mystery Movie had reached the end of its run and was replaced on the NBC schedule by The Big Event. But The NBC Mystery Movie had left a legacy that would not soon be forgotten, and the series served as an inspiration for a future television trend: the recurring made-for-television movie, featuring regular characters and routine plotlines, which would appear only a limited number of times each season. Ironically, one of the most popular of such recurring programs would be Mystery Movie’s own Columbo, which was revived in the late 1980s by ABC and would go on to garner once again high ratings and still more Emmy Awards for its new network.