By Eric Grigs | January 17, 2022

Cagney & Lacey. Starsky & Hutch. Crockett & Tubbs. There are a lot of crime-fighting duos who made a big impression on the small screen over the years, becoming part of our collective lexicon across generations—even for those who haven’t seen a single episode of those shows.

How about Diamond & Sisko? Great names, but this team didn’t exactly make their way into our pop culture consciousness as a shorthand way to describe a ride-or-die partnership. It’s a shame because the show Double Dare had such potential.

No, I’m not talking about the popular Nickelodeon kid’s game show where teams completed physical challenges and dodged green slime. This Double Dare involved Billy Dee Williams playing a suave cat burglar living the high life from the spoils of his profession. Suddenly caught in the act, he’s forced to bargain his way out of a jail sentence by leveraging his criminal knowledge and underworld connections in the service of the San Francisco Police Department. Oddly enough, he’s granted the request to spring from jail a trusted partner, Ken Wahl’s character Ken Sisko, to work the cases thrown his way. The charm of both actors is clearly what sent this into production, not the scripts.

At this stage of his career, Williams had built an impressive resume of TV and movie credits, recently coming off of well received and high profile gigs in the two Star Wars sequels and a recurring guest role on Dynasty. Ken Wahl’s star was on the rise, but it wouldn’t be until a few more years later that he would hit big with Wiseguy.

Double Dare only lasted six episodes on CBS, with a seventh unaired, before it got the chop. (I’ve seen the six, but cannot locate that seventh!) Up against established Wednesday night shows like The Fall Guy and Highway to Heaven didn’t help this buddy vehicle find a new audience.

I was determined to track down this lost-to-history show, because it feels like a male counterpart to the likewise canceled-too-soon Partners in Crime from one year prior in 1984, starring Loni Anderson and Lynda Carter—also set in San Francisco with a similar duo bumbling their way through the mystery of the week. And like Partners in Crime, it’s got sweet synth theme music for its credits sequence, which immediately drew me to the show in the first place. It’s impossible not to be hooked! (Check it out in the video below.)

While there was a lot of potential in the few episodes produced, it took too long to set up the characters starting to enjoy being on the right side of the law. And for any chance of success, these types of shows rely heavily on the chemistry between the leads. It may be a cliché, but these buddy shows work best when they dig deep into the “opposites” dynamics of the team-up. When Billy leans into his rich and sophisticated charmer archetype and Ken is written as the common, no frills brawn of the operation, it all starts to click a bit more. Just a few episodes too late.

Some great character actors that you’ll no doubt recognize pop up in regular supporting roles; yet, they’re mostly underused. Joe Maher, who appears in a ton of short-lived sitcoms and doomed pilots, is Billy’s butler. Janet Carroll, who also has dozens of movie and TV credits (you’ll recognize her as Tom Cruise’s mother from Risky Business from this 80s era), appears as Lt. Warner who doles out the assignments each week to the pair (replacing Jennifer Warren in the role from the pilot).

Highlights from the episodes: We see the guys pose as a gay couple of interior decorators allowing them to infiltrate the home of the head of a Japanese crime syndicate. Arguably the best entry of the series, they take on gold commodities traders who are swindling old people out of their savings with a bait-and-switch operation.

While the show is built on a partnership, this clearly was meant to be a star vehicle for Billy Dee Williams. It’s a shame this dare didn’t pay off. I wish this project had been stronger, because as I finished the last episode, I wanted to watch more of Williams developing this character and listen to his smooth voice all day. Oh well, I guess there’s his partnership with Diana Ross in Mahogany that’s always worth a re-watch.

Eric Grigs is a pop culture writer, artist, and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.

Double Dare (1985)