Tenspeed and Brown Shoe

Most of the show's creative staff, including Stephen J. Cannell, Juanita Bartlett and Gordon T. Dawson, were veterans of The Rockford Files, which ended its run only about two weeks before Tenspeed and Brown Shoe premiered.

This was the first series produced by Stephen J. Cannell Productions as an independent company, and it is the only one that does not carry the famous Cannell logo in its credits, since that logo was not introduced until 1981 with The Greatest American Hero.

The character Brownshoe was obsessed with a fictional series of hard-boiled crime novels called 'A Mark Savage Mystery,' with quoted passages actually written by Stephen J. Cannell himself, even though no real novels existed; Jeff Goldblum read excerpts from them in voice-over each episode.

Stephen J. Cannell later reused the basic premise of the show — a lawful crime-solver working with and rehabilitating an ex-criminal — for his later successful series Hardcastle and McCormick.

The series shares broad similarities with later shows like Simon & Simon and Moonlighting, being a lightly dramatic program built around two mismatched detectives solving cases together.

Despite strong early ratings that made it the 29th most-watched program of the 1979-80 U.S. television season, viewership dropped sharply after the first episodes and the show was cancelled after one season.

When Mill Creek Entertainment released the series on DVD in Region 1 on March 9, 2010, the pilot episode had to be excluded because CBS, which owned the rights to the pilot, would not agree to its use; the full pilot was however included on the German and French DVD releases.

Ben Vereen later reprised his role as Tenspeed in five episodes of another Cannell production, J.J. Starbuck, in 1988.