CW: This piece includes descriptions of one of Wiseguy’s on-screen suicides.

Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

January has been Cannell-ary. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month is a Mike Post instrumental from a show that was created or co-created by Stephen J. Cannell (whose daughter, Tawnia McKiernan, is as prolific in the field of TV directing as her late father was in the field of TV writing, and she has directed tons of episodes for the Arrowverse and the NCIS franchise). The instrumentals are my five favorite themes Post wrote or co-wrote for Cannell, and they’re being spotlighted in chronological order.

Previously in Cannell-ary, The Rockford Files rocked. The A-Team teemed with imaginative weaponry and lots of jokes about the fear of flying. Hardcastle and McCormick overturned more cars than Hurricane Milton. Stingray stung criminals for only two seasons.

Nobody makes hour-long escapist buddy comedies like Cannell’s anymore.

The last hour-long buddy comedy where I remember thinking, “Wow, I’m surprised Cannell didn’t create this,” was Burn Notice creator Matt Nix’s short-lived The Good Guys on Fox in 2010. It starred Bradley Whitford in my favorite role of his, as Dan Stark, a rowdy Dallas cop who never stops bragging about the action-packed ’80s movie-of-the-week that was based on his life, and Colin Hanks as his by-the-book partner. (Stark was sometimes reminiscent of the egotistical cop-turned-TV star Hector Elizondo portrayed in “A Good Clean Bust with Sequel Rights,” the 1978 Rockford Files episode where writer Rudolph Borchert poked fun at real-life New Jersey undercover cop David Toma. He was the basis for the short-lived ’70s cop show Toma, a Roy Huggins production whose staff writers included Cannell and another Rockford Files writer, Juanita Bartlett.)

Every episode of Cannell’s buddy comedies was self-contained. If Hardcastle and McCormick were made today, Milton and “Skid” Mark would have to deal with a season-long mystery while chasing the crook of the week. In the streaming era, hour-long shows in the style of Hardcastle and McCormick and The A-Team and their self-contained missions of the week are vastly outnumbered by heavily serialized shows in the style of the Cannell experiment called Wiseguy.

The final Original TV Score Selection of the Week in Cannell-ary is Post’s main title theme from Wiseguy. Created by Cannell and Frank Lupo, the show began its run with one of my favorite first seasons of a TV series ever and then never exactly had another story arc that was as much of a knockout as the first-season ones.

However, the second season’s lighthearted Dead Dog Records arc is a lot of fun. The Dead Dog arc was completely omitted from StudioWorks Entertainment’s early ’00s series of Wiseguy DVDs, Mill Creek Entertainment’s 2010 reissue of Wiseguy, and FilmRise’s Wiseguy syndication package due to music rights issues.

“Oh, what the fuck is that? Hell, why don’t they just waive the rights, for God’s sakes? They don’t need that,” said Wiseguy alum Jonathan Banks to A.V. Club interviewer Will Harris in 2011, after Harris told him that the songs in the Dead Dog arc were too expensive for StudioWorks and Mill Creek to include on their Wiseguy DVDs. I love how I can totally hear those three sentences in Banks’s voice.

Fortunately, Visual Entertainment restored the Dead Dog arc with its songs intact (including guest star Debbie Harry’s “Brite Side,” which she and Chris Stein, her ex-boyfriend and Blondie bandmate, wrote) on its 2022 Wiseguy DVDs, and Shout! Studios’s current 24-hour YouTube stream of Wiseguy’s entire run marks the first time I’ve seen the arc since 1995.

In its first three seasons, Wiseguy was the saga of Vinnie Terranova, a Fordham-educated undercover agent who worked for the FBI’s fictional Organized Crime Bureau (OCB). Vinnie was assigned to infiltrate criminal organizations and then dismantle them. A couple of things made Wiseguy unique: Instead of a case-of-the-week format, each of the OCB’s undercover operations lasted several weeks—in 1987, asking viewers to watch the hero build a case for 10 weeks was unheard of, even on a nighttime soap—and the first crime boss Vinnie had to take down was a man he grew to admire over the course of Wiseguy’s first nine episodes.

After rising in the mob ranks to become the right-hand man of ambitious Atlantic City gangster Sonny Steelgrave (the late Ray Sharkey portrayed him with a lot of James Cagney-esque energy, and Sonny was his best role since Vinnie Vacarri, the fictional Philadelphia rock promoter he played in 1980’s The Idolmaker), Vinnie felt guilty about destroying Sonny’s empire. He viewed Sonny as a replacement for his dead father, who worked as a bread truck driver, and he reconnected with him through this Mafioso who became his newest mentor and best friend. (The previous mentor Vinnie admired, an about-to-retire OCB training officer named Stan—Cannell and Lupo should have named him “Agent Gunnar Liveforever”—was killed off early on in the two-hour pilot.) The scene in Up in the Air where Anna Kendrick’s corporate downsizer character has a tough time firing via video chat a weeping man who looks like her father always reminded me of how hard it was for Vinnie to hand over his father figure to the authorities.

“It wasn’t about cops and robbers. It was all about the seduction of Vinnie Terranova — this guy’s moral center and what was happening to his compass,” said Cannell to Entertainment Weekly in 1996.

Post’s main title theme reflected Vinnie’s worries about that compass. Instead of a rousing anthem like the A-Team theme, the Wiseguy theme and its combination of French horns, strings, and electric guitars were moody and brooding, but like Post said about the Wiseguy theme on his official YouTube channel, “It sounded really kind of aggressive and badass.”

On The A-Team and Stingray, undercover work was a breeze or a glamorous task that changes every week. Wiseguy was a rare Cannell show about how undercover work—or in the case of Banks’s character, a supervisory job that’s so demanding and travel-intensive that it drove his wife, not him (a guy who can’t stomach alcohol), to drink—takes its toll on the people who do it.

Though Wiseguy was never a hit show on CBS (’90s syndication, not CBS, was where I first watched Wiseguy), it developed a loyal fanbase that included future Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim and future Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. In the 2015 Arrow episode “The Candidate,” Guggenheim paid tribute to Wiseguy by naming an unseen Star City mob boss after Rick Pinzolo, the Mafioso villain a young Stanley Tucci played in the Wiseguy arc that featured Jerry Lewis in a non-comedic central role as embattled New York garment manufacturer Eli Sternberg. Then three seasons later, Guggenheim took Vinnie’s OCB ident code, which was 4587 (a reference to the Wiseguy pilot’s first day of filming on April 5, 1987), and made it Oliver Queen’s prison number.

Ten years after Wiseguy’s Steelgrave arc, Donnie Brasco’s depiction of an undercover Fed who develops empathy for the lower-level Mafioso he must betray was reminiscent of the Steelgrave arc. Mike Newell’s movie was recently discussed in A Man on the Inside’s fourth episode. Ted Danson’s amateur spy character watches Donnie Brasco for the first time, and he notices that his conflicted feelings about hiding his purpose for infiltrating the retirement community he has grown to love echo the Johnny Depp Fed character’s situation.

Donnie Brasco was a smash hit several months after a Wiseguy reunion movie, which future 24 co-creator Joel Surnow, the project’s writer, was hoping to be the first in a series of Wiseguy reunion movies, failed to attract viewers on ABC, and the 1996 movie-of-the-week, which was simply titled Wiseguy, ended up being the now-retired Ken Wahl’s final screen project. The original Wiseguy was a star vehicle for Wahl, whose three-season run as Vinnie was a tumultuous one behind the scenes. In 2011, former Wiseguy executive story editor John Schulian—the co-creator of Xena: Warrior Princess—referred to Wahl as self-destructive and wrote that “He had risen beyond his talent and developed all the bad habits typical of too many half-bright actors.”

Wahl had to be written out of Lewis’s highly anticipated garment district arc after a camera dolly ran over his foot—an injury that resurfaced the following season and caused his screen time to also be reduced in that season’s Lynchboro arc—and he locked horns with Cannell over the direction of Wiseguy’s writing. (Wahl and Wiseguy showrunner David J. Burke wanted the show to be more cerebral—Burke, an ex-journalist, idolized and emulated Paddy Chayefsky’s monologue-heavy writing style—while Cannell preferred an approach that was closer to Wiseguy’s action-packed pilot.)

But Wahl didn’t mind being overshadowed by a guest star who was a greater actor than him, whether he was Tim Curry (the way Curry would enunciate “Terranova” was one of my favorite things during the Dead Dog arc, just like how the way Curry would later trill “The RRRRRReach” was one of my favorite things on Young Justice), the late Paul Winfield, or Sharkey, whom Wahl enjoyed acting with so much that he disagreed with Cannell’s decision to have Sonny kill himself at the end of the Steelgrave arc.

“I think that [humility] comes from my sports background, where if everyone does well, we all benefit from it,” said Wahl in 2019 to Edward Gross, the author of The Unofficial Story of the Making of a Wiseguy, a 1990 book about Cannell and Lupo’s creation, and the co-author of the Fifty-Year Mission series of unauthorized Star Trek oral histories. “I wasn’t trying to outdo my teammates, and I felt like we were teammates, especially, of course, on Wiseguy, because it was a continuing thing and lasted for three and a half years. I was like the captain of the team, and I wanted everybody on the team to do well. And they did, so I had no problem with giving everybody some time in the spotlight. No problem at all.”

Wahl was a solid lead actor, but he was never my favorite regular on Wiseguy. (Vinnie’s angst also got kind of old.) As Special Agent Frank McPike, Vinnie’s sardonic, cranky, and overworked handler, Banks was my favorite—and he clearly was Gilligan’s favorite as well. Banks’s exceptional work as McPike was why Gilligan and his colleagues cast him as Mike Ehrmantraut, the complicated hit man on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

Though Wiseguy was one of the darkest and most violent shows that came out of the Cannell factory, it was full of Cannell’s offbeat sense of humor. In the first season, McPike did primal screams to alleviate stress, but his primal screams reminded me of Carol Burnett doing a Tarzan yell. And while ’80s Hollywood gave Asian American actors nothing but shitty roles with heavy accents—even Cannell himself was guilty of that shit—Clyde Kusatsu, most recently a semi-regular in A Man on the Inside’s first season, quietly stole some scenes in three episodes of the first season’s Profitt drug empire arc as Kenny Sasusha, a Central California OCB agent with no accent and a fondness for Yiddish terms. (Two of Kenny’s disguises were as a gun dealer and a dentist. IMDb has Kenny’s last name listed as “Sushia.” That’s wrong. It’s pronounced “Sasusha” in “Independent Operator.” The Unofficial Story of the Making of a Wiseguy confirms that it’s “Sasusha.”)

Wiseguy lacked the style and glitz of Michael Mann’s Crime Story, a cops-and-gangsters show Burke and two other Wiseguy writers, Eric Blakeney and Clifton Campbell, wrote for earlier in the ’80s. But it had something Crime Story—which had only one comic relief character in the form of John Santucci’s Pauli Taglia, an inept mob flunky—didn’t: Cannell’s ear for funny dialogue (“Every character on a Cannell show seems a little more three-dimensional and fleshed out when Cannell is writing for them,” said Jaime Weinman in 2006), particularly in the first season, when Cannell was most involved with the writing during the Wahl era of the show. McPike was a deadpan riot. Roger Lococco, the icy contract killer Vinnie befriended to investigate his mysterious activities, called everyone “Buckwheat” for no reason.

Another Cannellian touch was Lococco’s ride, which Cannell based on armor-plated getaway cars that were used in real-life New York bank robberies. Lococco drove a T-Bird he outfitted with submachine guns in the front lights and a Gatling gun in the trunk. Cannell’s ongoing obsession with fast cars frustrated Blakeney, who said to Gross in The Unofficial Story of the Making of a Wiseguy that the show’s younger writers were upset about Wiseguy turning into “a hardware show with a James Bond car” during the Profitt arc.

As Lococco, an ally to Vinnie who was a glimpse into Vinnie’s future if he threw away his moral compass, William Russ was, hands down, the best actor in the Profitt arc. Fuck Kevin Spacey. (He won acclaim early in his career for chewing the scenery as the incestuous, heroin-addicted Mel Profitt, but Spacey’s sexual assault scandals and monstrous behavior sucked all the fun out of rewatching his scenes as Profitt.)

Just like Banks, Russ, who reprised his role as Lococco in the Lynchboro arc, was brilliant at both deadpan humor and heavy drama. Wiseguy is a great place to see beloved TV dads playing the most psychotic motherfuckers. Russ played Lococco before he was cast as Alan Matthews, the sensible and occasionally flawed dad on Boy Meets World, and before his most popular role as Jack, the gruff Arnold patriarch on The Wonder Years, Dan Lauria was terrifying as a crooked cop in the 1987 Wiseguy episode “A Deal’s a Deal.”

The show is also a great place to see how ’80s network TV handled serialization in a way that was different from the A-story/B-story/C-story structure of Dallas, Knots Landing, Dynasty, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, and L.A. Law. Those dramas had large ensembles, while Wiseguy had only three regulars and only occasionally did an A-story and a B-story, like when McPike, estranged from his alcoholic wife, had an affair with another Fed, played by a pre-Parker Lewis Can’t Lose Melanie Chartoff, while Vinnie was undercover as muscle for the Profitt siblings.

Wiseguy’s arc format was structured so that in between arcs, the show would do one or two standalone episodes about the downtime between cases for Vinnie, McPike, or Daniel “Lifeguard” Burroughs, warmly played by disabled actor Jim Byrnes. Working under the cover of Mike Terranova, Vinnie’s fake uncle, Lifeguard is the avuncular OCB communications expert who often saves Vinnie’s hide from his call center in his loft apartment and is, like film critic Sean Axmaker said in his 2009 review of Wiseguy’s first season, “at times his best friend in a world where no one can be trusted.”

The standalone stories—the best of which was 1989’s “Stairway to Heaven,” a beautifully acted episode about McPike’s dilemma over where to get the money to pay for his wife’s liver transplant, as well as the episode the above GIF of McPike shooting a jukebox comes from—allowed viewers to breathe between arcs. They were a common thing in the comic books I read when I was a teen, whether it was Batman during its Jim Aparo/Norm Breyfogle era or the DC Comics version of Star Trek. But this was new to network TV. Wiseguy’s format was viewed as an oddity in the late ’80s. Nowadays, it’s the norm.

In 1996, Steven Bochco’s critically acclaimed Murder One, which landed Post an Emmy for the harpsichord-heavy theme he composed for Murder One’s main titles, was the earliest network TV drama to emulate Wiseguy’s format. After it failed to attract ABC viewers to its initial gimmick of building an entire season around a high-profile Hollywood murder trial, Murder One changed its format to a Wiseguy-esque one in the second season. It divided the season, which was initially about the upheaval at the law firm that defended the previous season’s primary murder suspect, into three arcs, with each one focusing on a different murder trial. (The story about why Anthony LaPaglia replaced Daniel Benzali as Murder One’s lead actor in the second season is a really strange one I’m saving for a future Couch Avocados header. Let’s just say Benzali shit the bed.) The changes to Murder One still didn’t lure ABC viewers.

After Murder One, several prestige shows adopted Wiseguy’s format. You know how Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dexter, Breaking Bad, Justified, and the non-prestige Defenders and Arrowverse shows had one main villain per season (or half-season)? Those shows reminded me of Wiseguy, except they were even more willing to take their time with their storytelling. Not all of these more recent dramas worked. After a promising first season, The Flash regularly sucked at Wiseguy-style serialization, while Breaking Bad and Justified did wonders with it.

Shout! Studios’s 24-hour Wiseguy stream is a favorite of mine on YouTube, even though I’ve seen every first-season episode more than once or twice. (The Joan Chen episode from the second season is the worst. I skip it whenever the stream gets to it. I haven’t seen it since 1995, which was when I first watched it.) I often go to the stream to revisit Banks’s scenes as McPike—I recently realized that Buzz Hickey, Banks’s criminology professor character on Community (and a much funnier curmudgeon character than Chevy Chase’s Pierce Hawthorne), was basically McPike if he were older and originally a soldier instead of a law enforcement guy since his 20s—or re-experience any of the moments where the dad from Boy Meets World says or does things that would turn Mr. Feeny’s stomach.

Sometimes I just want to hear Post’s hummable Wiseguy theme again. I never get tired of hearing it. But for a certain type of female viewer that loves to ship male characters and write fanfics about their love that knows no bounds, Wiseguy scratches an itch I don’t have. (I prefer to ship movie franchises instead of fictional characters. Speaking of Cannell properties, 21 Jump Street should have hooked up with Men in Black.) I remember what TV critic Joyce Millman wrote about Wiseguy in a 1996 Salon article that’s no longer online, and I wonder if there are any women who are watching Wiseguy for the first time via Shout! Studios and are thinking the same thing Millman said.

“‘Wiseguy’ was heavy on the Italian Catholic guilt stuff, not to mention metaphoric father/son tensions. But the thing that really made ‘Wiseguy’ a trip was its seemingly oblivious homoeroticism,” wrote Millman. “The climax of the legendary Steelgrave Arc was a long, over-the-top brawl/bull session between Vinnie and Sonny that ended with them locking meaningful gazes while the Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’ filled the soundtrack; shortly thereafter, Sonny stuck his finger in an electrical socket so Vinnie wouldn’t have to turn him in. This was a candidate for ‘The Celluloid Closet’ if ever there was one.”

Though “Nights in White Satin” was deleted from Wiseguy reruns 25 years ago due to music rights issues and has never been restored to the show, Vinnie’s guilt over taking down Sonny is still the first thing I think of whenever I stumble into that song—thanks to Wiseguy.

Bonus track: Wiseguy wasn’t the only Cannell production that was ahead of its time. The Quest, the creation of Juanita Bartlett, followed four Americans—all of them distantly related to King Charles, ruler of the fictional Mediterranean kingdom of Glendora—as they competed in an around-the-world competition to inherit the king’s throne while also banding together to protect his kingdom from the exiled and malevolent Count Dardinay. The oldest of the four potential heirs, a good-natured retiree from Kansas who used to be a sheriff, was played by an old friend of Bartlett and Cannell’s: Rockford Files regular Noah Beery.

The action highlight of The Quest’s two-hour pilot, which was mostly filmed on location in France, is a scene where a thug in a helicopter chases leading lady Karen Austin, who later starred as John Candy’s wife in Summer Rental, across the Glendoran countryside and scoops her off the ground. When ABC found out that Austin performed the dangerous helicopter scene without a stunt double, the network lost its shit and fired the stunt coordinator who directed the scene.

The Quest flopped hard in 1982 on ABC, which immediately yanked the hour-long action comedy from its schedule and left four episodes unaired. I had no idea of The Quest’s existence until I watched its pilot’s end titles on David Gideon’s YouTube channel full of title sequences from obscure shows. (The only things I remember from 1982 prime-time TV are The Powers of Matthew Star, Knight Rider, Silver Spoons, and the time travel show Voyagers!) The only episode of The Quest that’s on YouTube is the pilot, and it’s solid from start to finish. But The Quest would have been better as a competitive reality show. If it had been made into a reality show, it probably would have lasted more than 30 seasons.

Fresh off the success of The Greatest American Hero’s “Believe It or Not,” a song from the point of view of a reluctant hero, Post and “Believe It or Not” lyricist Stephen Geyer came up with “Kings and Queens,” a song about four much less reluctant heroes, for The Quest’s main and end titles. I like “Kings and Queens” more than “Believe It or Not.” Lisa Lee Morgan’s effective vocals and the clever use of regal-sounding chimes are why “Kings and Queens” is another winner from Post.

Another bonus track: Unlike Wiseguy and The Quest, the charming Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, the first of many ’80s buddy comedies that were created or co-created by Cannell, didn’t have an ambitious concept. The things that made it special were Cannell’s sharp dialogue and the comic energy of both Jeff Goldblum—in the first of four scripted series regular roles that included a stint in the Law & Order franchise (Goldblum’s most recent series regular role was as Zeus on last year’s Kaos, the Netflix flop about Greek gods reigning from a modernized Mount Olympus)—and the top-billed Ben Vereen.

I’m currently watching Tenspeed and Brown Shoe for the first time, thanks to YouTube. It lasted only 13 weeks (over the course of five months) on ABC in 1980. Those 13 episodes weren’t enough for syndication, so Tenspeed and Brown Shoe was hard to find until Mill Creek Entertainment’s 2010 DVD release of every episode except the two-hour pilot. (CBS owns the rights to the pilot, but it refused to relinquish them to Mill Creek or Shout! Studios, which owns the streaming rights to the rest of the show’s run, so a Tenspeed and Brown Shoe fan posted on YouTube a bootleg of the 1987 British VHS release of the pilot.) In the mid-’80s, Oakland’s KTVU-TV, back when it wasn’t yet a Fox affiliate, occasionally aired Tenspeed and Brown Shoe reruns as a time-filler between hour-long syndicated specials and KTVU’s immensely popular 10 o’clock News with Dennis Richmond—the definition of “dapper Black anchorman”—as co-anchor. KTVU was where I first learned of the existence of Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, but I never watched it there.

Cannell’s first show after The Rockford Files’s demise starred Vereen as chameleonic con man E.L. “Tenspeed” Turner and Goldblum as Lionel “Brown Shoe” Whitney, a naive SoCal private eye who learns how to be more street-smart from E.L. (while Lionel, a former stockbroker, tries to get E.L., who’s out on parole, to be more of a desk-bound guy and a law-abiding citizen). Lionel idolizes a fictional private eye named Mark Savage—Cannell lent his name and face to the off-screen author of the fictional Savage mystery novels Lionel frequently devours—and has a black belt in karate.

The pairing of Vereen and Goldblum was initially inspired by the scenes between Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in Silver Streak. (Stir Crazy, the second and most popular Pryor/Wilder buddy comedy, wasn’t released yet when Tenspeed and Brown Shoe first aired.) But E.L.’s interactions with Lionel ended up being more like a much later mismatched interracial friendship: Mariner’s friendship with Boimler, particularly her attempts to show Boims how to be more street-smart in Star Trek: Lower Decks’s earlier seasons and Boims’s influence on Mariner, who, in the final season, learned to temper her rebelliousness and became less ashamed of her dorky younger self. (At Starfleet Academy, Mariner majored in xeno-history and spoke an awful lot like Boims, a Starfleet fanboy.)

Vereen and Goldblum talked faster than Pryor and Wilder and at a speed that matches Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid’s. For example, E.L. developed a cool handshake catchphrase with Lionel that was incomprehensible to the extremely Caucasian closed captioner for Shout! Studios. E.L. says, “Get it, get it, got it.” The closed captioner thought he says, “Giddy, giddy guy.”

Tenspeed and Brown Shoe should have been around for four or five seasons (although Vereen later reprised his role as E.L. in the last five episodes of Cannell’s equally short-lived J.J. Starbuck in 1988). When The Greatest American Hero made fun of superhero tropes, you can tell Cannell, Bartlett, and the other writers either wanted nothing to do with superhero comics or never enjoyed reading one, whereas on Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, when Cannell made fun of private eye novel writing styles, he did it with affection, and he clearly had read a lot of gumshoe novels. (In fact, when Cannell left behind the TV industry, he became an actual crime novelist and wrote a series of novels about LAPD detective Shane Scully.)

Vereen and Goldblum’s show is a classic case of “great show, lousy title.” E.L. only refers to Lionel as “a brown shoe” (E.L.’s term for a stockbroker) in the pilot, and people rarely call E.L. “Tenspeed.” The only guys who acknowledged E.L.’s nickname in each episode were Post and Pete Carpenter, who, every time E.L. began a scam, added to the score the bicycle bell sound effect that represents Vereen’s character in Post and Carpenter’s excellent main title theme (well, the second version is excellent; the much more synthy version in the first two episodes isn’t so great, and it brings to mind Ray Ellis’s really cheesy synth theme from the 1980 Filmation version of Tom and Jerry).

I wouldn’t be surprised if the title hurt Vereen and Goldblum’s show just like how the baffling choice of Terriers as the title of FX’s terrific Donal Logue/Michael Raymond-James private eye show hurt that FX show. It made Vereen and Goldblum’s show sound like it was about a bicycle racer and a Naval aviator, so confused Sunday-night ABC viewers must have said, “Eh, what’s happening on Archie Bunker’s Place?”

The title also must have pissed off newspaper proofreaders because “Tenspeed” was spelled as one word, while “Brown Shoe” was spelled as two, so I also wouldn’t be surprised if the American Society of Newspaper Editors conspired to kill Tenspeed and Brown Shoe’s chances of becoming a hit.

One last bonus track: I began Cannell-ary with Post and Carpenter’s theme from my favorite Cannell show, The Rockford Files. I thought it would be fitting if I wrapped up the month with the end credits version of “Believe It or Not” from the first Cannell show I ever watched.

The Greatest American Hero was the second show Cannell produced under Stephen J. Cannell Productions. The first was Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. The Greatest American Hero was, for a very brief time, a much bigger hit than Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. I liked The Greatest American Hero when I was four—even though I didn’t watch the two-hour pilot from start to finish, I enjoyed only the superhero stuff, and I paid zero attention to the dialogue. My big brother, who was nine at the time, was an even bigger fan of The Greatest American Hero. The Genius site didn’t exist back then, so he wrote out in ink all the lyrics to “Believe It or Not” on a piece of paper and drew the white and red emblem on the chest of Ralph Hinkley’s supersuit at the bottom of the page.

After the show entered syndication when I was seven, I started to understand why Ralph always sucked at flying: He accidentally lost the instruction manual for the supersuit a group of aliens gave to him when they picked him and FBI agent Bill Maxwell to fight crime on Earth.

But as an adult who revisited several of Ralph and Bill’s adventures in 2024 via Shout! Studios’s 24-hour The Greatest American Hero YouTube stream, The Greatest American Hero is a mixed bag.

The Welcome Back, Kotter-esque half of the show never worked. Ralph taught a remedial class, the type of work he preferred over being a superhero, but his students added nothing to the show and were unconvincingly played by actors who were way too old to be pretending to be in high school. (The Greatest American Hero wisely spent less time in the classroom later on its three-season run.) The villains Ralph and Bill busted each week were a boring blur: They were either Adventures of Superman villains or warmed-over Rockford Files villains.

Cannell, who created The Greatest American Hero on his own, wasn’t a fan of superhero comics. In 2008, he said to Los Angeles Times writer Geoff Boucher, “I had severe dyslexia as a kid so I didn’t really get into reading comics. And then when I became a writer, I didn’t like [superheroes] because they had everything. If the only thing that can get you is a piece of kryptonite, then that’s not very interesting to me; I was always more interested in the flaws in character.” Cannell wanted Ralph to fight ordinary criminals instead of supervillains. But the problem with pitting a superhero against the same kinds of crooks Jim Rockford, E.L., and Lionel dealt with is that the show quickly runs out of gas, which was what happened to The Greatest American Hero. (Right now, I like Tenspeed and Brown Shoe a hell of a lot more than The Greatest American Hero.)

After ABC network execs Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, who backed Cannell’s vision of the supersuit as the only fantastical element on The Greatest American Hero, left the network, Cannell fought with the new execs who replaced Carsey and Werner over their demands for Ralph to take on Six Million Dollar Man-style antagonists. He lost, while The Greatest American Hero Companion author Patrick Jankiewicz enjoyed the addition of a few supernatural threats and said to io9, “I love when the show embraces the genre; one week he’s fighting a biker gang, another week is ninjas, a ghost, aliens. I think that’s the best part, where you don’t know who you’re going to run into week in, week out.”

I never watched the biker gang episode and the ninjas episode, but “The Beast in the Black,” the Bartlett-penned episode where Bill is possessed by an evil woman’s ghost played by guest star Christine Belford, is the Greatest American Hero episode I watched the most. It’s a great horror episode, mostly because of Robert Culp’s performance as the possessed Bill. The sight of Culp sneering and shouting in Belford’s dubbed-in voice instead of his normal voice may be cheesy to most people, but it looked spooky to me when I was seven. The next time Cannell produced a show that featured a ghost, it was one of NBC’s biggest flops in 1991: The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage, Cannell’s only collaboration with Disney.

James Wong and Glen Morgan, who later found greater success as X-Files writing partners and stewards of the Final Destination franchise, co-created Black Jack Savage with Cannell. Daniel Hugh Kelly, a.k.a. McCormick from Hardcastle and McCormick, starred as a white-collar criminal and the only person on the fictional Caribbean island of San Pietro who can see and talk to the ghost of 17th-century pirate Black Jack Savage. (Kelly also co-produced the show.) Steven Williams, a.k.a. Captain Fuller from 21 Jump Street, played Black Jack, who has to team up with the Wall Street pirate to save 100 souls from damnation (or else both men get sent to hell), and for some reason, a black high-tech powerboat that looked like the Batskiboat from the following year’s Batman Returns was part of the action. (A couple of Black Jack Savage fans posted the show’s entire run on YouTube and Internet Archive. Hard pass. I have better things to do with my time.)

The Greatest American Hero may not have been great shakes as a superhero show, but at least its premise wasn’t unnecessarily complicated like Black Jack Savage’s, and the decision to have Ralph gradually stumble into powers he didn’t know the supersuit is capable of was a fun conceit. Where the show worked best was as a three-way buddy comedy that was like Cannell’s version of All in the Family. Ralph and Pam Davidson, his divorce lawyer and girlfriend (and eventual wife), were both Meathead—except Ralph and Pam were way more likable than the self-righteous Meathead—and Bill, whose right-wing approach to things was at odds with Ralph and Pam’s liberalism, was Archie with a gun and a strange fondness for dog biscuits. Cannell lucked out with the trio of Culp, William Katt, and Connie Sellecca.

If you’ve never seen The Greatest American Hero before, come for George Costanza’s favorite TV theme, stay for the chemistry between Culp, Katt, and Sellecca.

Speaking of the greatest, Cannell and Post were one of the greatest TV partnerships, from the days of Toma to the final show Cannell produced: 1996’s Profit, a delightfully twisted corporate satire created by David Greenwalt and John McNamara. For me, it was a Rockford Files-style blast revisiting this month the highlights of Post’s work for his longtime friend—whether Post was on his own or with Carpenter, the creative partner who died in 1987—and the Cannell shows those instrumentals helped elevate.