too weird

This is insane. 

This evening I watched an episode of Homicide which aired 5 March 1974 and which starred John Krummel in multiple roles. 

It's not the best episode, frankly, but it's a very interesting one. The main weaknesses are (1) the attempt to mix comedy with the deaths of three women (2) the compete literal cluelessness of the detectives as they utterly fail to realise that as they keep showing up at the same property to interview a middle aged man called Phelby-Thomas, his elderly father, and their German and Asian (?) servants, they are actually always talking to the same man. And also (spoiler!!!) they are talking to the man who, dressed as a woman called 'Mrs Monday', is the murderer. 

So at a certain point a witness realises she's seen Mrs Monday somewhere before and finally she remembers - she was a character on this thing called The Phil Thomas Show. So the Ds (and the witness, and some kind of skinny archivist) all pile into a viewing theatre and watch what is apparently the only extant example of this show. (Skinny archivist explains that most of the shows went out live, so there's not much evidence of it, but that doesn't really explain why the intro is in colour and the rest in black and white). 

The characters seen in the show are all played by Thomas/Krummel and include:

And, of course, Mrs Monday:

Here by the way are the Ds and the witness and the archivist watching the show:

And the closing credits:

It's not the best Homicide episode. But that's not the weird part (although it is weird that, in the midst of so many good eps, they came up with this oddity). 

I thought well, who were/are you, John Krummel? And I went looking online. I found him. He died two weeks ago, on the 23 February. But his obituary was only published this afternoon, about 7 hours before I'm writing this!!!

By the way shout out to Bettine Kauffman. It's been a while!