This show might've been a major hit if it came outn6 or 7 years earlier. By then the airwaves were loaded with detective series with one word titles, the name of the main character. You had Kojak,Columbo, McCloud, Cannon, Bannchek, Bronk, Mannix, that one with Robert Blake playing with a bird and the few multi word titles also based on title characters like Barnaby Jones and McMillan and wife.
Detective dramas like that were just about everywhere in the early to mid 70s but by 1979 they were all gone and the most successful of them had JUST ended. Then came Eischied when these dramas were morphing into near night time soap opera fare but retaining a gritty hard edge to them. This show debuted just before Hill Street Blues and not long before Miami Vice. The viewing audience was moving away from shows like this. The one hour dramas were much more heavy on action. The A Team and Hunter retained an audience but not Tue Devlin Connection or Eischied.
But being removed from the time this neglected show aired, it stands up well. Joe Don Baker is an underrated actor. He succeeds at bringing his characters across well to the point where you don't think it's Joe Don Baker as a cop, Joe Don Baker as a hit man, Joe Don Baker as a private eye,Joe Don Baker as Senator McCarthy,Joe Don Baker as the fictionalized Babe Ruth in The Natural. Watch Framed and Charley Varrick some time to see what I mean. The first two parter mini series is excellent and Eischied debuts as a very rare made for TV antihero. American television did not make main characters like that. It would be about 20 more years before American TV dramas started having antihero main characters. That also makes this show a product of the wrong time. It was either too late or too soon. They did strip away the antihero aspect of the character for the series as the other reviewer noted and they turned it into a typical cop drama for the early to mid 70s.
It still had some good shows and the mini series that started it is great. Revolutionary for American television at the time.. Britain started having antihero main characters 12 years earlier with Callan but the US was far far behind them on that until Dallas and that initial miniseries. The network or producers decided to not continue in that direction but it probably wouldn't have helped considering when it aired. The interest in the viewing public then wasn't what it is 10 years earlier or what it is now with just about every character in dramas doing good, bad or very bad things.
Tracking these down to watch might not be so easy but maybe they're hiding on a streaming site.
