Murder, She Wrote.
TV mystery series starring a pair of detectives in which the genius detective is not the white male.
I don’t believe The Avengers (1965) would qualify, because Mrs. Peele, though no idiot, was primarily tougher rather than smarter than Steed.
And Belker may not have been human.
Currently on the air (US)
The Bridge (white female, hispanic male)
Rizzoli & Isles (both women)
Continuum (arguably more SciFi than detective - but it does have a police/case-of-the-week structure)
Frank Pembleton. While his (eventual) partner, Tim Bayliss, isn’t a bad cop, he plays the thicker Baltimore ‘hillbilly’ to Frank’s Jesuit educated, cultured genius.
Inspector Gadget.
And a somewhat more toned down example of the same thing, Veronica Mars
That was one of my favorite shows, and I remember the language fluency (he pulled some Swahili out of his ass for one episode), but I don’t remember him being strait-laced. He sounded almost exactly the same way he did on his comedy albums.
“Book, not TV”: but, Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma series of thrillers, set late in the first millennium AD. I’ve read only one of these, but I get the picture as follows: the sleuth Fidelma is an Irish princess and lawyer and all-round intellectual prodigy. Her male sidekick, Eadulf, is Anglo-Saxon (resulting in much by-play from their belonging to these two different groups who mostly hate each other). Eadulf is not stupid as such, and furnishes some useful input, but he’s definitely the less bright of the two.
(Incidentally, something I had trouble getting straight – Fidelma, as well as all the above, is a member of a religious order; as is Eadulf, of a male ditto; nonetheless, they seem to be sexual partners, maybe actually husband and wife; and to be mutual parents of a child. One gathers that the ancient Celtic Church was idiosyncratic in its approach to a number of things; but the described situation seems a bit hard to swallow. Oh, well…)
There have been a few television adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes universe where the title character is something other than a white male. For example, there’s the Japanese animated series Sherlock Hound, where Holmes and Watson are Japanese-speaking anthropomorphic dogs, and The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, where modern-day mysteries are solved by Sherlock’s great grand-niece and her sidekick.
Scooby Doo! If we consider Velma as being the genius. Fred was usually pretty clever, though.
I don’t think Scooby Doo counts, since the OP was asking for a setup which paired a brilliant detective with a sidekick. Scooby Doo was more of an ensemble of mystery-solvers, and neither of the most prominent pair in it (Scooby and Shaggy) were particularly smart.
He watches it with his girlfriend Wanda Bodine when she gets home all tuckered out after her Aerobic Rockabilly Glamorcize class. Cherry Dilday likes the show, too.
Neither of the detective pair in Charlie Chan was white. (ETA: the characters, that is, not the actors.)
I’m not looking simply for non-white genius detectives. I’m looking for pairs of detectives including a white male in which one is a genius, and that genius is not the white male.
Not a pair.
Hot though Kristen Bell is, I never watched a complete episode of Veronica Mars. Did the title character have a white male sidekick?
But Purdey was smarter than Gambit in The New Avengers.
I’m ashamed to admit you had me thinking the cheerful kid from KING OF THE HILL was secretly a genius sleuth using sheer damned handsomeness to solve crimes.
Incidentally, they did a TV series of TOMMY & TUPPENCE, where (a) she’s roughly as likely to solve the crime du jour as he is, and (b) if it’ll make the difference, I could go back and re-watch to see which one figures it out slightly more often. (Of course, the point is that if they’re both on the case, someone will come up with the solution.)
Swedish/Danish crime series The Bridge pairs together Saga Noren and Martin Rohde. Both are pretty good homicide detectives, but Saga is the autistic savant.
She “helped” her (white, male) father solve crimes, which usually involved her doing most of the solving. (her father wasn’t particularly incompetent, but Veronica was definitely the “genius” of the pair).
Her sidekicks were usually her black male friend Wallace and her white female friend Mac. But sometimes she took Logan along with her (it didn’t usually end well.) Well worth a full watch, but it doesn’t really lend itself to individual episodes. You sort of have to commit to watching from the start.