TVholic I remember being intrigued by this series before its premiere back in 1988. I also remember I quickly lost interest after a few episodes, although I couldn't remember why until now. Seeing this again, I can understand why I did. The show is rather like "Monk," with its eccentric, supposedly brilliant, antisocial, iconoclastic, grumpy lead character minus the OCD quirks, but still with the spunky female personal assistant and with worse writing. Austin James always sees tiny details that we the audience could not. To make it seem more intelligent, the writers peppered the scripts with scientific trivia and pseudo-scientific babble. The latter was especially embarrassing considering Isaac Asimov was listed as co-creator and scientific adviser. A supercomputer that can make neon signs explode and rupture gas lines at specific places? That has continuous speech recognition and natural language processing -- a goal that still eludes computer scientists today -- but not the much simpler speech synthesis? That can turn the dial on a cheap radio or an old TV set as if they came with motors installed on the knobs? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that most of the "science" in this show was nonsense.Subsequent episodes were little better. The "smartest man in the world" keeps saying "nukular" and "nukulotides." He does burnouts when he has to get somewhere fast, instead of knowing that less smoking rubber means more traction and a faster start if you're not in a Top Fuel dragster. You can target a virus at a specific human by inserting that human's DNA into it??? Good grief. Some of the situations are painfully obvious and clichéd, like the hoary "videotape was substituted for live video but Austin noticed items on the tape didn't match." That was old when Mission: Impossible used to do it twenty years previous. Episodes mixed these shopworn plot devices with supposed scientific concepts but each time proved that the writers knew barely more than the names of those concepts. It was as if Asimov had no hand in the show after co-creating it.The show seemed to rely mostly on the charisma of former "Hardy Boys" star Parker Stevenson, but that couldn't compensate for the contrived scripts. It wasn't even as good as an average Columbo episode from the original NBC run. Sometimes, information in the climax would just come out of the blue, rather than foreshadowed for the audience. The concept had promise, but was undercut by mediocre writing. But I guess scientific geniuses generally don't become television writers. What a waste. It could have been science fiction of the hardest kind, but instead turned out to be science fantasy folded into run of the mill murder mysteries.If you want to see what TV mystery and suspense writers can really do with the science fiction genre if they really put their minds to it, watch "Earth II," the 1971 pilot movie from the writers/producers of "Mission: Impossible," or "Prototype," the 1983 TV movie from Michael Levinson & William Link, who created and wrote the classic "Columbo" and later "Murder, She Wrote." (Although inexplicably, Link served as executive story consultant for this series. I guess they took his advice only sparingly.)

unityco-1 I remember this show fondly... it's one of my all-time favourites. I still have the entire series on Beta (recorded off-air during a bad thunderstorm, but what can you do?) I agree with the other posters about it probably being "too smart" to be successful, but I think it was further harmed by the writers' strike that year. The network kept repeating the only 7 episodes (I assume) because there was nothing else in the can. By the time the dispute was resolved, the damage of endless repeats had been done. Too bad. I was in high school when the series debuted, and I loved the fact that the show made me look things up. It really made me want to understand the topics being featured. (And it was a lot harder to look things up back then... no internet!)

lancer525 By proving that the average TV viewer isn't smart enough to get a show like this. This, and other shows like it that depend on sheer intellectual ability, sharp thinking, and complexity never survive on American television. This series proves that. Asimov was an absolute Genius, and almost all of his products were light-years above the quality necessary for commercial success. No flash, no high-tech machine or vehicle, no stupid gimmicks, no buffoonery, no T & A, and nothing but sheer brain candy. You have to be smart to get a show like this.What a shame that programs which require audiences to be intelligent never make it. Asimov created a series that had nothing more than a smart main character, who used his wits and abilities to move through the world. The series itself only lasted for seven episodes.

blaackbird This was one of an annoying number of shows I liked as a kid that were each run for a season and then promptly cancelled. I liked shows that varied from the norm, especially ones about eccentric geniuses. But I guess it was just too smart (or weird) to be popular. People prefer shows about inept housewives, bigots, idiots stranded on islands, barrooms, rotten families, and just about anybody who makes everyone else look smarter by comparison.