Does anyone know how many days' shoot a 'Columbo' took in the 1970s? Was it less pages per day than an hour show?

I know that many of those hour shows of the 70s were on 7-day shoots; which would put a 90m Columbo on 11 or 12 days, and a 120m one on 14 or so.

But was it slightly more than this? The good Lieutenant's cases look more polished than those contemporary hour shows -- better cinematography, and with a bit more thought put in.

The 90 minute ones were scheduled for 10 days and the 2 hour ones for 14, in line with the other NBC Mystery Movie shows. As time went on, the Columbo schedules got unofficially longer, however, and NBC and Universal split the cost of the overages, which included daily filming costs, as well as per diem salary bonuses for the guest stars.

There are various legends that collide on this point, starting with the facts that

(1) when the series began, Peter had a hard deadline to return to NYC for his Broadway performances with Lee Grant in "Prisoner of Second Avenue," which forced the production team into filming "Columbo" at a furious pace, doing scenes from multiple episodes at a time, so that it would be hard to say how many days it took to film "each" episode; and

(2) equally legendary are the tales of Peter Falk being a perfectionist (OR, playing that role just to get his own way), and demanding countless re-takes of each shot, dragging-out the shooting schedule to a point that drove the network drones insane, making each episode take far longer to complete, than any sane executive would have agreed.

The only really specific data available, as to the number of days per episode, is: Levinson & Link wrote in their book (talking, at least mainly, about the first season):

"The studio insisted that each of our segments had to be filmed in ten days, a woefully inadequate schedule. But Falk refused to be hurried. In the middle of shooting, he would engage the director in lengthy discussions of story and character, and we would invariably drift into overtime. Each episode took longer and longer to make—-twelve days, thirteen days, even fourteen days—-until word got around that we were a 'problem' show with a 'difficult' star."

I recommend reading the whole article by Levinson & Link, "HOW WE CREATED COLUMBO – AND HOW HE NEARLY KILLED US" (viewable on this site by clicking on "Articles" from the home page),or buying the whole Levinson & Link book on Amazon or Ebay: "Stay Tuned: An Inside Look at the Making of Prime Time Television".

Thanks for the replies. Columbo has definitely aged better than most hour shows of the same period, which is why I thought it must've had a bit more time spent on it.