Tenspeed and Brown Shoe

Tenspeed and Brown Shoe
Genre	Detective fiction/Comedy
Created by	Stephen J. Cannell
Starring	Ben Vereen Jeff Goldblum
Composer(s)	Pete Carpenter Mike Post
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	14 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Stephen J. Cannell
Producer(s)	Juanita Bartlett Alex Beaton Chuck Bowman
Running time	approx. 50 minutes (per episode)
Production company(s)	Stephen J. Cannell Productions
Release
Original network	ABC
Original release	January 27 – June 27, 1980

Tenspeed and Brown Shoe is an American detective/comedy series originally broadcast by the ABC network between January and June 1980. The series was created and executive produced by Stephen J. Cannell.

The one-hour program revolved around two detectives who had their own detective agency in Los Angeles. E. L. ("Early Leroy") "Tenspeed" Turner (Ben Vereen) was a hustler who worked as a detective to satisfy his parole requirements. His partner Lionel "Brownshoe" Whitney (Jeff Goldblum) was an archetypal accountant, complete with button-down collars and a nagging fiancee (at least for the pilot episode), who had always wanted to be a 1940s-style Bogart P.I. A running joke was his penchant for reading a series of hard-boiled crime novels, sub-titled, "A Mark Savage Mystery", written by Stephen J. Cannell (though he never wrote such a series of novels), with Goldblum reading particularly purple passages in voice-over. He was sharper than he seemed, although a little naïve and more reasonable than his career path demanded, and had picked up karate to Black Belt standard.

This was the first series to come from Stephen J. Cannell Productions as an independent company (it was distributed through Paramount Television, one of only two such collaborations - the other was Riptide) and is also the only one not to carry the famed Cannell logo on any episodes, having "A Stephen J. Cannell Production" appearing in-credit (the logo was introduced in 1981 when The Greatest American Hero began airing). It was heavily promoted by ABC at the time it premiered in late January 1980. The series attracted a substantial audience for its first few episodes (indeed, the series was the 29th most-watched program of the 1979–80 U.S. television season, according to Nielsen ratings), but viewership dropped off substantially after that and the series was not renewed for the 1980–81 season.

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