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

January is Cannell-ary. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month is a Mike Post instrumental from a Stephen J. Cannell production. They’re five of my favorite themes Post, the producer and arranger of the 1968 Mason Williams instrumental “Classical Gas,” wrote or co-wrote for the late Cannell.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Post and Pete Carpenter’s second and best version of their main title theme from Cannell’s Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.

The theme was a Bonus Track when I previously discussed Tenspeed and Brown Shoe last Cannell-ary. I’ll repeat most of what I said before when I last discussed the one-season wonder, but this time, I’m mentioning the creative involvement of the man ER showrunner John Wells called “the unsung hero of all of [ER],” and everything concludes in a completely different way.

On Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Jeff Davis—a great “fourth chair” during both the Drew Carey and Aisha Tyler eras of Whose Line, as well as the co-host of the Harmontown podcast from 2012 to its demise in 2019—once did a terrific Jeff Goldblum impression that received applause from the studio audience. It looked like he developed it from having watched all 13 episodes of Goldblum stammering his way through the streets and back alleys of L.A. alongside Ben Vereen on Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.

I started watching Tenspeed and Brown Shoe for the first time last January via Shout! Studios’s YouTube channel (the show is also currently on Tubi), and I finished its only season in early November. Every episode made me think of Davis as Goldblum saying, “Why, uh, why is it that you continue to cook, uh, food that the family doesn’t like, uh, uh, and, uh, and isn’t healthy? And isn’t healthy? Why, Mother?”

My favorite description of Goldblum’s offbeat line delivery on Tenspeed and Brown Shoe is actually a description of his line delivery during his two-season run on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In the 2009 Slate article “That Guy from Jurassic Park Would Like to Ask You a Few Questions,” Nathan Heller wrote, “Goldblum turns dialogue inside-out with stylized speech and a range of pregnant pauses, looping his eyes around the room with each caesura as if tracking an imagined hummingbird.”

That perfectly describes Goldblum’s ability to take Cannell’s buddy comedy dialogue and make it sound like he ad-libbed all of it when he played Lionel “Brown Shoe” Whitney on Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. (I’m currently taking voice acting classes, and I’m learning that one of the best ways to make dialogue from a script not sound like dialogue from a script is to say the line exactly like how you would say it in a normal conversation—but without changing a single word. Goldblum is a master at that.) Combine Goldblum being Goldblum with Vereen’s perfect comic timing as E.L. “Tenspeed” Turner, and you have a Cannell show that makes you say, “Man, this should have lasted as long as The Rockford Files.”

I didn’t expect Tenspeed and Brown Shoe to be such a blast. They don’t make shows like that one anymore. “Blue skies”-era USA Network used to make shows like that one. Both Psych and the short-lived Common Law—a surprisingly funny procedural about the uneasy partnership between a Black LAPD detective (played by Michael Ealy) and his white partner/best friend (played by Warren Kole), who are forced by their captain to attend couples therapy together—immediately come to my mind.

The first of many ’80s buddy comedies that were created or co-created by Cannell (as well as the first series from Cannell’s indie studio), Tenspeed and Brown Shoe didn’t have an ambitious concept like many of his later shows did. The things that made it special were Cannell’s sharp dialogue (Juanita Bartlett, who came from the murderer’s row of legendary writers Cannell led over on Rockford, also brought her creative magic to a few Tenspeed and Brown Shoe episodes) and the chemistry between Goldblum and the top-billed Vereen.

The premise was simply this: Lionel, a naive SoCal private eye with a black belt in karate, is learning how to be more street-smart from E.L., whose “Tenspeed” nickname (which wasn’t actually uttered on the show all that much) refers to his Roger from American Dad!-style ability to quickly change personas.

As a gumshoe, Lionel thinks he’s Bogart in The Big Sleep. He’s more like Jimmy Stewart (before a stint in the Air Force during WWII hardened Stewart, whose post-war film roles tended to be mostly dark roles). Lionel doesn’t have the confidence of Bogie or the hunky alien commander Goldblum played in Earth Girls Are Easy or the oily lawyer/drug dealer Goldblum played in Deep Cover. He towers over everybody like the fish out of water Goldblum played in The Tall Guy, the hilarious 1989 rom-com that took place in London’s West End theater scene. Both his height and inexperience make it hard for him to hide from bad guys, whereas the shorter and more street-smart E.L. has an easier time tricking people—mostly because, well, white folks think Black guys all look the same.

A con man who befriended Lionel and rescued him from a miserable corporate existence in the show’s feature-length, Bringing Up Baby-esque pilot episode, E.L. is trying to get Lionel to see that the streets are even tougher and more complicated than the streets from Lionel’s favorite series of private eye novels: the adventures of Mark Savage, whose “body was a road map to remind him of old cases. He had scars to remember lost dreams and fractured lives.” (Cannell lent his name and face to the off-screen author of the fictional Savage novels that annoy E.L. and entertain Lionel. My favorite Savage novel titles are Death and the Doting Dowager and The Purloined Princess and the Poisoned Prince.) At the same time, Lionel tries to show E.L. how to be more like him: a law-abiding citizen and a desk-bound goody-two-shoes who enjoys paperwork (Lionel used to be a stockbroker).

The pairing of Vereen and Goldblum was initially reminiscent of 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 in early 1980 on ABC.) 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. (One of the funniest revelations in Lower Decks’s penultimate season was the revelation that when Mariner was a Starfleet Academy cadet who majored in xeno-history, she spoke less like the hardened, street-smart, and profane rebel/Dominion War vet we’re more familiar with and more like Boims, an easily excitable Starfleet fanboy who, like the mostly squeaky-clean crew of the Enterprise-D, only occasionally curses.)

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.”

One other intriguing thing about Tenspeed and Brown Shoe is its occasional bursts of visual panache. Cannell shows weren’t exactly known for being visually striking. (A couple of exceptions to this were Stingray—where frequent episode director David Hemmings, the star of Michelangelo Antonioni’s stylish Blow-Up, brought stylishness and visual flair to the nighttime half of Ray’s undercover missions—and Silk Stalkings. Rita and Chris’s outfits while on duty and the walls of Silk Stalkings’s Palm Beach police station, whose gaudy interior Captain Ben “Hutch” Hutchinson, Vereen’s by-the-book Silk Stalkings character, happened to complain about to Rita in the pilot, all had a color palette straight out of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy.) The Cannell studio preferred to shoot things—whether it was a car-chase-heavy show like Hardcastle and McCormick or a more cerebral drama like Wiseguy—quickly, efficiently, and conventionally.

In the Tenspeed and Brown Shoe episode “Loose Larry’s List of Losers,” director Rod Holcomb placed the camera on top of a hospital stretcher and came up with a dazzling shot from the point of view of Lionel for the sequence where E.L. shifts from posing as a paramedic to posing as a surgeon and then orders Lionel to lie on the stretcher and pretend to be his patient so that they could escape together from cops. The escape sequence surprised me because it’s not very Cannell-esque. It’s more like something out of ER, which isn’t surprising because the late Holcomb later directed ER’s mesmerizing 1994 pilot, where he and cinematographer Thomas Del Ruth pioneered the use of Steadicams, a then-unusual stylistic choice that turned a conventional medical drama into a visceral and innovative action thriller.

Tenspeed and Brown Shoe should have been around for four or five seasons. Cannell thought so as well. That was why in the last five episodes of Cannell’s equally short-lived J.J. Starbuck—it wasn’t a Battlestar Galactica spinoff, but its title sure made it sound like one—in 1988, Cannell got Vereen to reprise his role as E.L., who became the chauffeur for Dale Robertson’s title character (a Texas oil magnate who goes around solving murders), but Lionel was absent because Goldblum’s star had risen and he became too busy in 1988.

If you loved both the partially ad-libbed banter between Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal in Running Scared—Detective Hughes and Detective Costanzo’s friendship in that movie was harmonious instead of argumentative and proof that buddy comedies where the lead characters aren’t at each other’s throats all the time can be just as entertaining as the more argumentative ones—and the support Troy and Abed had for each other on Community, you’ll get a kick out of the similar vibe between Vereen and Goldblum during Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. And remember that it’s “Get it, get it, got it,” not “Giddy, giddy guy.”