The NBC Mystery Movie

While it was a long and profitable collaboration, it finally succumbed to the changes of the commercial broadcast market regarding both structure and content by the end of the decade.

By the late 1970s, the increasing popularity of situation comedies, coupled with their lower production costs and much greater scheduling flexibility and resale opportunities, surpassed that of these feature-length (90–120 minute) drama anthologies.

In addition, a fourth show was added to the rotation, lasting two seasons (1972–1974): NBC also launched a clone of the umbrella series, The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie, which debuted in the original time period and featured three new programs: During the 1973–1974 season, the programs rotating on Sunday remained the same, while on Wednesday, Cool Million and Madigan were canceled and Banacek rotated with three new series: Rescheduling to Tuesday nights as The NBC Tuesday Mystery Movie during January 1974 was not enough to help boost ratings, and the midweek series was canceled.

The opening credits consisted of a shadowed figure carrying a flashlight slowly walking toward the camera in a desert landscape under dramatically lit clouds, as images of the various rotating series appeared sequentially on the screen; at the end, an announcer (Hank Simms) presented the night's main actors and series (example: "tonight, starring Peter Falk as Columbo").

Some syndicated episodes of Columbo retain this opening credit sequence, though the original title caption which included "NBC" and (after the first season), a day of the week was instead replaced by a similar graphic, simply showing multiple colored filmstrips with "MYSTERY" written within the frames, scrolling upwards within a circle (in the original animation, some of these filmstrips contained the NBC logo, and they scrolled upwards at a faster pace), alternatively, the portion of the introduction featuring Columbo replaced the original NBC-branded end graphic.

Some syndicated reruns of other Mystery Movie shows retained the intro, but simply faded away before the NBC-branded opening graphic could be shown.

The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie theme was composed by Quincy Jones for its first season and had an animated open to show the lineup.

The network brought back original Mystery Movie series Columbo to be part of the wheel, with Peter Falk returning in the title role.

[1] It was originally meant to be on Saturdays, but moved to Mondays amidst production delays related to the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike.