Saturday, June 11, 2022

Wu's TV Corner #30: Tenspeed and Brown Shoe

 


https://thegoldenhornblog.blogspot.com/2019/12/tenspeed-and-brownshoe.html

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0719528/

1980 ABC. "Savage Says, What Are Friends For?" Jeff Goldblum and Ben Vereen private detective/con artist show. From Stephen J. Cannell. Good news on this front as there are multiple ways to watch all the episodes now. Youtube has them on the Free With Ads channel and they are also at Tubi. I watched this show as a kid and waited for years for it to show up on Youtube. I would check two or three times a year and one day they were finally there.

How many TV shows feature scenes with a character lying on a couch reading a book? Much less a book titled, "The Deathward-Bound Damsel." A Mark Savage Mystery by Stephen J. Cannell himself. Lionel Whitney (Jeff Goldblum) is an accountant who turned into a private detective and has a real fondness for the detective fiction genre, especially those books featuring his hero, Mark Savage. His partner E.L. Turner (Ben Vereen as Tenspeed) is a gifted con artist. Together they solve mysteries. This week Lionel's accountant friend Marty (James Murtaugh) hires them to find out who is threatening him over shady investments. Also features the lovely Deborah Shelton as Marty's wife, Sylvia, and Martin Kove as the biker gang leader. The biker gang, and their illicit profits, may be behind the investment scheme to launder drug money.

Tenspeed and Brown Shoe still holds up well. Very solid and fun detective show. I watched it and liked it as a kid when it aired, and when I watched it again as an adult I thoroughly enjoyed it. The book jackets and titles on the Mark Savage mysteries are a nice bonus for fans of detective fiction.

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