Theme Song X 2

I was waiting for this one to turn up on YouTube: this is one of my favourite theme songs for a flop show, and one of my favourite Mike Post themes (though not quite in the class of Rockford). I doubt most people remember Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, a show that lasted all of 13 episodes in the 1979-80 season, but it was a great show and I wish there were clips available online. It was one of the first shows Steve Cannell did after forming his own studio, and it was kind of like a buddy-comedy version of The Rockford Files. Through a series of wacky mishaps in the pilot, two guys are thrown together and wind up defeating the bad guys and solving a mystery: a con man and thief (Ben Vereen) and a nerdy accountant who has read too many bad private-eye novels (Jeff Goldblum). At the end of the pilot they open a detective agency together, and every week they solve mysteries and have lots of odd-couple banter. It was what Cannell did best: comedy, action, strange plots and knowing self-parody of the TV genre it belonged to. And of course, a great theme song. It’s not necessarily a great tune, but it just somehow seems to sum up the tone of the show perfectly in the way that a good instrumental theme song should.

And since I was talking about the DVD release of Blossom, I guess I’m required to note that that theme song was Mike Post’s, too. It may actually be one of his last really iconic themes; you can make a case for NYPD Blue and NewsRadio, but other than that, he started going downhill even before the networks started phasing out theme songs.