Series / Tenspeed and Brown Shoe

Tenspeed and Brown Shoe was a 1980 ABC detective-comedy series, created by Stephen J. Cannell as the first show from Stephen J. Cannell Productions.

In the two-part Pilot Movie, the paths of clever hustler E.L. "Tenspeed" Turner (Ben Vereen) and timid stockbroker Lionel Whitney (Jeff Goldblum; his brown shoes provide the one-off nickname of the title's second half) unexpectedly cross. The very weekend Lionel's due to be married to his boss's daughter, a case of stolen mob money that E.L. intends to use to pay a relative's medical bills (since he'd been roughed up by said mob) ends up in Lionel's possession by mistake. Forced to team up to sort things out, they end up exposing and capturing a Nazi war criminal. With the reward money Lionel receives — and having learned his fiance was untrue — he decides to leave high finance behind and live out his dream, fed by his love of mystery novels, of becoming a private detective. Since E.L. needs a job to fulfill parole requirements, Lionel decides to make him his partner in the Lionel Whitney Detective Agency.

Lionel is ridiculously idealistic, easily flustered, thinks in detective fiction tropes, and unsuited to the mean streets even with his black belt karate skills, while E.L. is overconfident and finds it hard to resist at least bending the law — particularly to counteract their Perpetual Poverty. But both men are fundamentally goodhearted and Lionel's courage and E.L.'s cleverness, exemplified by his Master of Disguise skills, are more than sufficient to get them out of scrapes, if often very narrowly.

While the show had a strong start in the ratings as a mid-season replacement, ABC only kept it for one season of 14 episodes. However, in that time it gained a cult following and was a major stepping stone for Goldblum, providing as it did his first starring role in any medium. The entire series was released on DVD in The New '10s, though rights issues involving the Pilot Movie mean it and the rest of the show were released by different distributors. Shout! Factory now owns the rights to this series aside from the Pilot Movie, and in August 2020 it was added to the free-with-ads streaming service Tubi.

Compare with two subsequent Cannell productions:

• The Greatest American Hero, which applies a humorous naive hero/savvy partner dynamic to Superhero fiction rather than Detective Drama
• Hardcastle and McCormick, which Wikipedia points out is a Wunza Plot series that also has an ex-con as one of the lead characters

Tenspeed and Trope Shoe:

• A Birthday, Not a Break: "Loose Larry's List of Losers" takes place on Lionel's birthday, and starts with E.L. throwing a little surprise party for him at their office. Unfortunately, the watch he gives him as a present turns out to be stolen, and on top of that E.L. has to go to his monthly parole hearing — and his new officer is a lot tougher than the old one was...
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • "Savage Says: What Are Friends For?" has by far the saddest ending in the series. Not only is Lionel's best friend from high school/colleague from work killed by the villains, it's because the friend's wife — whom Lionel had pined for from afar all these years, and who seems to return his feelings — was in on the plot all along, using him as a pawn. He's genuinely heartbroken by this betrayal. What sweetens it is that after he confronts her and turns her in, an admiring E.L. drops his usual wisecracks to assure him he's done the right thing by way of comforting him.
  • "The Sixteen Byte Data Chip and the Brown-Eyed Fox" has E.L. becoming smitten with the sister of the computer programmer they're trying to find. In the end it doesn't work out, partially because it turns out the villains offed him. They're brought to justice, but she needs time to grieve.
• Book Ends:
  • Probably coincidental since it did only last one season, but the show begins and ends with stories involving Lionel's (ex-)fiance Bunny. In the last episode, "Diamonds Aren't Forever", she and his parents try to convince him to give up the detective business.
  • Several episodes have Lionel reading the latest Mark Savage novel in both the opening and closing scenes. (In fact, most episodes have that be the first thing he's seen doing.)
• Briefcase Full of Money: The Pilot Movie, as noted above, has one of these serving to start all the trouble.
• The Cameo: In-universe, Stephen J. Cannell is the author of the Mark Savage novels Lionel loves, and a picture of him appears on the back of their dust jackets. He has a silent onscreen cameo at a police station in one episode, briefly distracting Lionel from the business at hand.
• Character Development: Not a lot given the short run, but the effectiveness of Lionel's karate skills goes up as the show progresses because he becomes 1) more used to using them in defense situations and 2) less prone to warning opponents about them beforehand. He also becomes (slightly) less of a rules stickler through his experiences with E.L., and more self-confident.
• Cold Case: Lionel decides to try his hand at solving a 1940s beauty queen's murder in "This One's Gonna Kill Ya".
• Credits Montage: Several episodes, especially later in the run, have one. This is likely to pad out the running times since the alternative sequence, which unspools over a still from the episode, is at least 30 seconds shorter.
• Crossover: In 1988 E.L. Turner also appeared in the final five episodes of Cannell's J.J. Starbuck, which was about a Texas billionaire-turned-detective-Walking the Earth. Ben Vereen reprised his role. The crossover was not initially planned but rather served as a means of working around an actual injury sustained by lead actor Dale Robertson — Turner becomes Starbuck's driver/partner.
• Defective Detective: Mostly Played for Laughs, but also played with.
  • Lionel Whitney zig-zags the trope in that his biggest problem is that he decided to become a detective (after spending most of his working life as a stockbroker) as a way of living out pulp fiction-inspired dreams of being a hard-boiled gumshoe, and as a result tends to see the cases his agency takes on in melodramatic genre terms. At the same time he's not quite equipped to handle the grayed morality and action that requires in practice, being something of a Knight in Shining Armor. More straightforwardly, he's also prone to The Dulcinea Effect, is overly trusting of others (especially women and children), and in the last episode it's revealed that his parents are deeply disappointed he gave up his old life for a career that leaves him in Perpetual Poverty.
  • E.L. Turner, of course, is an ex-con out on parole. While Lionel especially is determined to keep him on the straight and narrow, E.L. is prone to hatching zany schemes to counteract the aforementioned Perpetual Poverty — usually by way of his Master of Disguise skills — which sometimes run headlong into or cause the case of the week with varying consequences.
• The Dulcinea Effect: Lionel is prone to this in episodes with a Girl of the Week. It gets him into a lot of trouble in "Savage Says: There's No Free Lunch" because that week's Dulcinea is actually The Vamp. Even better? The novel he's working his way through at the time sees Savage similarly deceived, but it isn't until Lionel's recovering in the hospital that he finishes it and realizes how strong the Plot Parallel was. E.L., who is also laid up, is not amused.
• Eye Catch: A shot of the heroes from the title sequence, accompanied by the bicycle bell Leitmotif and the first notes of the theme tune, was used for this purpose.
• Funny Bruce Lee Noises: Lionel is prone to making these when he goes on the defense against thugs or kicks open the occasional locked door. Unusually for this trope, he has genuine karate skills — he's a third-degree black belt — but since he's played by a then-27-year-old Jeff Goldblum, the comedy remains. Lionel's real problem is that, being an awkward gentleman who never expected/wanted to use his skills in actual combat, he tends to waste time warning his attackers of his skills — allowing them to get in the first hit.
• Genre Mashup: This is a combination of the Detective Drama + Sitcom formats.
• Genre Savvy: Even as a stockbroker, Lionel dreamed of being a private detective and living out the novels he reads. His knowledge of genre tropes that were cliches even in the 1940s is more of a hindrance than a help when applied to turn of the '80s cases, though.
• Girl of the Week: Three episodes in a row (the ones right after the Pilot Movie) have one for Lionel, and E.L. has one in the very next episode "The Sixteen Byte Data Chip and the Brown-Eyed Fox". Most of them get an in-universe reason to not be there the next week, save for the one in "The Robin Tucker's Roseland Roof and Ballroom Murder". Zig-zagged with Lionel's fiance Bunny, who disappears after the Pilot Movie only to return in the final episode "Diamonds Aren't Forever" hoping to win him back, with no mentions of her in the interim. Lampshaded in the last scene of "The Robin Tucker's...": It seems this trope also turns up in the Mark Savage novels on a regular basis, with the first-person narration of the one Lionel's reading noting that the Damsel in Distress Savage has just rescued may or may not be around with the turn of a page.
• Healthcare Motivation: E.L. steals the Briefcase Full of Money from the mob in the Pilot Movie to pay the hospital bills of a relative who was beaten up by them. This nicely serves to establish E.L. as a Lovable Rogue.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Lionel lives to help the helpless (especially women and children) and has great respect for the law...which frequently strains his partnership with E.L., who is a lot more pragmatic. Reconstruction in that he comes to accept that saving the day sometimes means bending the law, and he does have a point in being a stickler for the rules otherwise, since E.L.'s schemes cause as much trouble as they solve if not more.
• Leitmotif:
  • Whenever E.L. is about to pull one of his masquerades, a bicycle bell rings twice. This is also heard in the theme music.
  • Whenever Lionel (and in one episode, a curious E.L.) is reading a Mark Savage novel, the voiceover narration is accompanied by a smoky sax theme fit for a film noir.
• Little Miss Con Artist: E.L.'s nephew turns out to be one of these in "It's Easier to Pass an Elephant Through the Eye of a Needle Than a Bad Check in Bel Air"; he successfully fools Lionel into thinking he's a Boy Scout who has been separated from his troop. He's actually run away from home so he can live with E.L., whom he admires — much to E.L.'s frustration, as he doesn't want him to follow in his footsteps. The Book Ends of an earlier episode involve Lionel dealing with a pickpocket kid in a park and getting scammed himself for his trouble.
• Lovable Rogue: E.L. Turner, who came from a poor background; once he's a partner in Lionel's agency he finds it hard to shed his old Con Artist ways — especially when they're living case to case. But when push comes to shove, he usually does the right thing.
• Meaningful Name: Lionel Whitney is a perfect name for a would-be hero who's too idealistic for his own good but also braver than he appears.
• Mineral MacGuffin: In the aptly titled "Diamonds Aren't Forever", the office E.L. "arranges" for Lionel to temporarily use to impress his visiting parents turns out to have a stolen, extremely valuable diamond hidden in it.
• Motor Mouth: Lionel is prone to speaking quickly, particularly when he's flustered — which is often!
• Name and Name (really Nickname and Nickname)
• One-Word Title: Episode 12 is simply titled..."Untitled". This turns out to be a pun (see Royal Blood below).
• On the Next: Several episodes have this at the end, which sometimes double as "Next on Tenspeed and Brown Shoe..." pre-credit sequences, likely for the same time-killing reasons as the occasional use of Credits Montage (see above).
• Perpetual Poverty: As with Cannell's previous show The Rockford Files, the heroes struggle with actually making money solving cases. Quite a few episodes have E.L. slipping back into his old con artist ways to counteract this, often with results that help or hinder solving the dilemma of the week. In some episodes, such as "The Millionaire's Life" and "Diamonds Aren't Forever", it causes the crisis of the week!
• Purple Prose: Played for Laughs — the first-person narration of the Mark Savage novel excerpts the audience hears via Lionel's voiceover drips with this.
• Royal Blood: In "Untitled", E.L. learns that the elderly Russian lady who cleans their office has this — so he brokers a quickie marriage between her and an egotistical movie producer who just wants a title, and pockets a fee from the latter. Unfortunately, this makes the papers, and Russian mobsters take notice. It turns out the cleaning lady also owns a valuable MacGuffin due to her heritage — a jeweled dagger.
• Short-Runners: One season of 14 episodes (13 if you count the Pilot Movie as a double-length episode).
• Smooch of Victory: Lionel is granted one by the Girl of the Week right after he and E.L. rescue her in "The Robin Tucker's Roseland Roof and Ballroom Murder". E.L. can only roll his eyes at the sight.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Lionel's past as a stockbroker occasionally comes in handy. It's why his agency is consulted by his old co-worker's wife in "Savage Says: What Are Friends For?" and in "The Sixteen Byte Data Chip and the Brown-Eyed Fox", the fact that he has experience using computers (remember, it's 1980) helps their investigation of a programmer's disappearance.
• Title Montage: The regular episodes all have one. The clips are drawn primarily from the Pilot Movie and "The Robin Tucker's Roseland Roof and Ballroom Murder", the first regular episode; the latter's montage solely uses clips from the pilot and has a different arrangement of the theme music.
• Unique Pilot Title Sequence: The Pilot Movie runs the opening credits over World War II footage as a lead-in to introducing some of the villains.
• White Bread and Black Brotha: Lionel is a white stockbroker turned wannabe detective. E.L. is a black con artist who's constantly embroiled in get-rich-quick schemes. The former's almost naïve idealism and the latter's skill for subterfuge both help and hurt them throughout the series.
• Wunza Plot: One's a black ex-con, one's a white ex-stockbroker — now they're private detectives! The Mill Creek Entertainment DVD release straight up called it "The Odd Couple of detective shows!"

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