Lost '70s Show - Found! Tenafly

During my ongoing review of the 1970s prime time schedules, I've kept a list of the shows I’ve never seen. It’s always fun when I get to cross a series off that list, and I can now do so with Tenafly, thanks to a kind soul who uploaded the first episode to YouTube a few months ago.

From 1973, Tenafly was introduced as a new entry in the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie wheel. It debuted on Oct. 10 and lasted just one season. James McEachin played Harry Tenafly, a happily married, middle class family man who gave up being a police officer to work as a private investigator for a large L.A. detective agency.

The corporate approach to this profession is one rarely covered on television – most TV private eyes are lone wolfs, operating out of rundown offices and working the streets for clues. Tenafly was one of many investigators in an upscale building in a fancy office park. He has a desk and a secretary, and a grouchy boss who hands out assignments.

In the first episode, however, the client comes directly to him. Ted Harris (Ed Nelson) is a popular but controversial radio talk show host who returns home from work to find his wife dead in their home. He calls Tenafly because Harry is one of his most frequent callers and on-air sparring partners.

Harry takes the case and quickly tracks down the man with whom the victim was having an affair – but did he really do it, or was it someone else? A coat hanger turns out to be the key to unravelling the case.

Tenafly was created by Richard Levinson and William Link, the creators of Columbo, Mannix and Murder, She Wrote. Obviously that’s a positive sign, and you can see the level of professionalism in every aspect of production. I enjoyed the episode I watched and would gladly sample more – so the question is why didn’t it last longer?

I don’t have an easy answer. I do know that the ratio of hits to misses for the Wednesday and Sunday Mystery Movie wheels is likely not as impressive as you might remember. For every McCloud and Columbo there was an Amy Prentiss and Lanigan’s Rabbi. If there wasn’t an intriguing enough hook to bring viewers back, NBC wasted no time dropping some concepts and replacing them with others.

Even outside the Mystery Movie universe, the most successful 70s detective shows all had some unique feature to separate them from the crowd. Cannon was a portly fellow, Barnaby Jones a senior citizen. McCloud was a country boy in the city. The only special feature one could associate with Tenafly was that he was black – and that was enough in 1973.

To its credit – and I’ll choose my words carefully here – while this was a show with a black leading man, it wasn’t a show about a black leading man. At least from the episode I watched race was not a factor in any aspect of the story or his character. Contrast that with Shaft, which also debuted that October with Richard Roundtree reprising his iconic film role, in which the African American experience was intrinsic to its authenticity. That series was likewise canceled after one season.

It's too easy to say audiences were not ready for a show with a black leading man – not after Greg Morris’s contributions to Mission: Impossible and Lloyd Haynes in Room 222. Maybe fans of the Shaft films found the TV version too watered-down, and Mystery Movie viewers found Tenafly too generic.

Whatever the reason, at least in the latter case, it was our loss. But happily, James McEachin remained in demand as an actor, working steadily for the next three decades. You may remember him best as Lt. Brock in the series of Perry Mason TV movies that aired throughout the 1980s. He was also a Korean War veteran who according to IMDB, earned several medals for valor including the Silver Star. He died in 2025 at the age of 94, after a life well lived.