There's something extremely depressing about watching a Columbo-style show, or an Ace Attorney-style game, these days. Those works go to such incredible lengths to explain complex murder situations, with everything hinging on the slightest discrepancy or odd piece of peculiar evidence, and everything comes falling down on the guilty party because of it.

Meanwhile in the real world, powerful assholes murder and steal out in the open, and even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, they don't get convicted. Or even if they do, they can just ignore it.

You couldn't make Columbo today, because it presupposes faith in a functional judicial system.