Surfside 6 was an ABC television series which aired from 1960 to 1962. The show centered on a Miami Beach detective agency set on a houseboat and featured Troy Donahue as Sandy Winfield II; Van Williams as Kenny Madison; and Lee Patterson as Dave Thorne. Diane McBain co-starred as socialite Daphne Dutton, whose yacht was berthed next to their houseboat. Margarita Sierra also had a supporting role as Cha Cha O'Brien, an entertainer who worked at The Boom Boom Room, a popular Miami Beach hangout at the Fontainebleau Hotel, directly across the street from Surfside 6. Surfside 6 was in fact a real address in Miami Beach, where an unrelated houseboat was moored at the time; it can also be seen in the sweeping aerial establishing shot of the Fontainebleu in 1964's Goldfinger.
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Episode 1
An ex-con moves to Miami from New York with his muscle man. No one believes he's gone straight, especially when a yacht club commodore turns up dead after denying him access to the yacht club.
Episode 2
A woman, who identifies herself as a ""boring stenographer on vacation"", shows up at the houseboat with three thugs after her. After Sandy and Ken fend off the men, Sandy takes the woman for a drink -- and she promptly disappears on him. He's out to find out where the ""boring stenographer"" went and why men were tailing her.
Episode 3
A hated dictator, living in exile in Miami, is murdered during a birthday party for his son. Lt. Snedigar thinks he has an open-and-shut case against Pepe the Clown, who performed at the birthday party, but Pepe insists he was not at the party. Dave has to prove to the skeptical policeman someone else went to the party in Pepe's costume.
Episode 4
Bearer bonds have been missing for seven years while the man convicted of their theft has been in prison. An insurance agent asks Sandy to try to recover the bonds before his company has to pay on the insurance policy. One problem: every lead in the case turns out to be bad.
Episode 5
A woman is on the run with $20,000 that was intended as a bribe. She hires Ken as a bodyguard to accompany her back to her hometown, unaware that the brother of the man the bribe is intended to free is on their tail.
Episode 6
Daphne goes to visit her horse, Par-a-kee, at the stable the night before a race. She interrupts a man trying to inject the horse with a fatal virus. Daphne's father hires Dave to investigate, while a bookie begins spreading rumors about the Dutton stable to have Par-a-kee disqualified.
Episode 7
A woman, having an affair, turns up dead after her lover attempts to blackmail her. The woman's husband, who suspected the affair, is the prime suspect, and asks Dave to find the truth.
Episode 8
The girl in a mind-reading act hires Dave to look after her because she feels that the star of the show has given her a post-hypnotic suggestion to kill someone.
Episode 9
Ken is paid $2000 to meet a business executive in Fort Lauderdale. En route he is kidnapped by men posing as police officers. He escapes and arrives at the hotel to meet the businessman, discovering someone else posing as Ken Madison has already contacted the businessman.
Episode 10
A theatrical producer's wife receives a note implicating her husband as a killer. He intercepts a second note and asks Ken and Sandy to find who sent the message. A man the producer hated, a former love rival, turns up dead, and there are no shortage of suspects.
Episode 11
An obnoxious comedian makes advances toward a nightclub singer friend of Sandy's. She publicly embarrasses him after he beats her boyfriend up, so he seeks his revenge with threats and harassment.
Episode 12
A diver discovers five boxes of gold coins in a shipwreck while on a dive for a museum. He goes to ask for a percentage of the find. The next day he turns up dead, an apparant drowning victim. Sandy thinks it was murder, so he enlists Ken to find out what happened and if it is related to a woman the diver reported seeing in the sunken ship the day before his death.
Episode 13
Dave is asked by a woman to find her missing husband. While investigating he discovers he's not the only one looking for the missing man -- and the woman who hired him isn't really the bride she claims to be.
Episode 14
When a beautiful starlet finds out she is adopted, her old friend Sandy tries to keep her from being duped by someone claiming to be her real mother.
Episode 15
Dave and Ken are dropped into a criminal's hunt for $70,000 after Dave refuses the job of protecting a closed-mouth man who leaves behind a letter with a fake address and blank paper inside.
Episode 16
A woman has an unusual request of Ken: she wants him to prove that she's guilty of murdering her husband, although she was cleared of wrongdoing by an inquest. Before he begins investigating in earnest Ken is beaten up by some ""admirers"" of the dead man and ordered to make certain his investigation does prove her guilty. The more Ken digs, the more he uncovers that makes it appear that the woman did murder her husband.
Episode 17
Dave has wounds from the past opened up over his best friend from the Korean War. The man was reported to have been executed by a dictator for aiding revolutionaries, but his widow shows up and claims she wired him money long after the alleged execution. Dave tries to find his old buddy while controlling his feelings for his friend's wife and dealing with the suspicious exiles.
Episode 18
No overview available.
Episode 19
A former USO singer who knew Dave in Korea is trying to make a name for herself. To help, she gets a ""gimmick"" - $130,000 worth of jewelry to attract publicity. The ""gimmick"" indeed attracts publicity -- thieves, who rob the nightclub during the show.
Episode 20
Dave is poisoned while flying back to Miami. Ken and Sandy have five hours to find what poison was used in order to save Dave's life. That task is complicated by uncooperative passengers from Dave's flight and the accidental death of the prime suspect, a man Dave once prosecuted.
Episode 21
Barbara Page, a friend of Sandy's, invites him to Jamaica to celebrate a carnival. While there, a friend of Barbara's father dies from a snake bite. Since there are no poisonous snakes on Jamaica, one of the plantation workers, often accused of importing poisonous snakes for voodoo rituals, is the prime suspect. Both Barbara's father and the plantation worker ask Sandy to investigate.
Episode 22
Dave Thorne aids a murder witness.
Episode 23
A Treasury Department engraver retiree disappears from Bass Creek on his honeymoon. A federal agent thinks he's being forced to work with conterfeiters so she hires Ken, who vacations frequently at Bass Creek. When they arrive, posing as newlyweds, Ken discovers that his old friends have been replaced by new, unfriendly owners.
Episode 24
No overview available.
Episode 25
A man suspects that his bank is going to be robbed because he has seen the pattern before. The police cannot act on hunches, so the man hires Dave to gather information and to possibly infiltrate the group planning the robbery.
Episode 26
A young woman feels she is being blackmailed to keep an accident from making headlines and ruining her father's chance at political office. To prove her case Sandy poses as the wild son of a millionaire who is in danger of having his inheritance cut off if he gets into trouble.
Episode 27
The manager of a baseball team hires Ken, a one-time aspiring pitcher, to keep tabs on a rookie pitching sensation who may be involved with a bookie.
Episode 28
Sandy meets a beautiful tourist, a woman who has a strange obsessive interest in a local mobster.
Episode 29
A performer in a water ski show is blackmailing her former boyfriend. He will lose a multi-million dollar inheritance if he gets married before the age of 30, but she discovers he secretly got married to a rival in the water ski show. When the woman turns up dead, Cha Cha's nephew, who had an almost obsessive crush on her, is implicated in the murder.
Episode 30
No overview available.
Episode 31
No overview available.
Episode 32
No overview available.
Episode 33
Kevin Flanagan is a famous, profane novelist vacationing in Miami. He has a love of women and drink, which causes his wife to hire Dave as a bodyguard ""to protect him from himself"". Dave has much more to protect Kevin from: while on a drinking binge he witnessed a murder. The criminals are not sure whether Kevin's alcohol fog will allow him to remember what he saw, so they make arrangements to kill him.
Episode 34
No overview available.
