The 1989 episode "Sex and the Married Detective" is one of the more unique and darker entries from Columbo's ABC revival era, specifically because of how it explores themes of identity, performance,and how men view women.
Joan Allenby is an incredibly accomplished, brilliant sex therapist, but she realizes her unfaithful partner, David, doesn't actually value her mind, he is driven entirely by visual and superficial desires. To kill him and establish an alibi, Joan constructs "Lisa."
Lisa is a literal caricature of male fantasy: a mysterious, sultry femme fatale in a dark wig, high heels, and fishnets. Joan explicitly constructs this identity because she knows it is the only thing that will completely blind David (and the other men at the bar) to who she actually is. She exploits the fact that under the male gaze, men look at the archetype of a sexy woman, but they don't actually see the individual human being behind it.
What makes the episode genuinely creepy and dark is that Joan doesn't just use Lisa as a mask; she begins to dissociate into her. During her final confession to Columbo, she admits that she wasn't frightened by the act of murder. Instead, she was terrified because she enjoyed being Lisa more than she enjoyed being herself.
The text hints at a tragic reality: Joan felt more powerful, desired, and liberated acting out a hyper-sexualized male fantasy than she did living as an accomplished, brilliant professional woman. The tragedy is that the male gaze swallowed her own identity.
The episode sets up a sharp contrast between how the victim looks at women versus how Lieutenant Columbo looks at people. While David is blinded by lust and surface-level aesthetics, Columbo is famously a man who looks past the surface entirely.
When Columbo investigates, he isn't distracted by the allure of "Lisa" or the clinical authority of Dr. Allenby. He breaks the case by analyzing the mechanics of the clothing itself—using a faceless mannequin to reconstruct the outfit. Columbo strips away the sexualized power of the disguise and reduces it to what it actually is: physical evidence.
While the episode definitely has some of that late-80s network television camp—including a notoriously long scene where Columbo plays the tuba—the core psychological breakdown of Joan/Lisa makes it a surprisingly bleak look at how women alter themselves to be "seen" by men.
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