Premise:
After retiring from his bench with the Los Angeles Superior Court, Judge Milton C. "Hardcase" Hardcastle decided not to completely withdraw from his fight against injustice. Instead, Hardcastle, who served on the police force before becoming a judge, decided to track down two hundred defendants who walked out of his court room on technicalities. For his fight against injustice, the judge recruited the aid of ex-convict Mark McCormick. Mark, a former race car driver, was paroled into the judge's custody after serving a prison sentence for grand theft auto. (Mark had gone to prison after a misunderstanding revolving around a car he had been foolish enough to register in his flighty girlfriend's name.) The two men operated from Gulls Way, the palatial Malibu estate the judge inherited from his late wife, and pursued criminals in the Coyote X, an experimental race car Mark received as a gift. Harper (played by Joe Santos, the actor who portrayed the police contact on Cannell's Rockford Files) and Delaney were two of the many police officers that Hardcastle turned to for information. Sarah was the judge's housekeeper.
Comments:
From the outside, Hardcastle and McCormick seems like a routine "shoot-em up" macho, cop show. (After all, almost every episode included an obligatory car chase.) However, this light action adventure show actually spent a great deal of time developing the relationship between the two lead characters. While the two men constantly bickered, it was quite clear that they deeply cared for and respected each other. (In many ways, Hardcastle filled the void left by McCormick's barely seen father while Mark replaced the son Hardcastle had lost.)