Longstreet

Title card, yanked from a fansite.

I love detective shows and murder mysteries, in fact it's almost like the seventies were sort of a golden age of television murder mysteries- Columbo, McMillan and Wife, Ellery Queen.

I wasn't familiar with Longstreet until fairly recently- it's not on dvd and doesn't show up in reruns that often.

James Franciscus plays Mike Longstreet, a blind insurance investigator.  He lost his eyesight when a bomb exploded, killing his wife as well. 

He spends the pilot learning to deal with his blindness and figuring out who was behind the bomb.

It actually works well as a comic book style origin story- his training involves not just blind navigation and echo locution, but a workout montage as well.  He gets a radar cane and a sidekick- Pax, a white German shepherd.

I'm going to follow up with episodes later because he even gets a mentor- a self defense instructor played by Bruce Lee!