Velma was the smart one in Scooby Doo, although Fred wasn’t stupid.
Kim Possible isn’t a detective, I guess.
TV mystery series starring a pair of detectives in which the genius detective is not the white male.
Apparently my suggestions don’t count?
How about Alien Nation? It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I seem to recall that George (the alien) was pretty smart, and the white male cop was more of an impulsive kind of guy (though he wasn’t stupid either).
Does a white alien male with a spotted head count as “white”?
The powerpuff girls. Their genius dad/maker is mostly outsmarted by either the three girls, or by the mayors secretary.
Oh hell no.
Her dad was fairly above “competent” and I always got the impression that any “aw-schucks” that he did was just to get people thinking he was able to be easily fooled. He was a skilled investigator and Veronica learned most of what she knew from him, and coupled it with technology and the younger perspective.
I didn’t have a problem with any of your suggestions, except that the Angie Dickinson character on Police Woman didn’t strike me as being a genius–she was simply the viewpoint character. Which isn’t to put her down. Lennie Briscoe and Spenser, just to name two, aren’t supposed to be geniuses either.
Not detectives. Not a pair.
What does the “TV!” mean here?
In the Heat of the Night, a mediocre, dull, and toothless television series from the 1990s, was based on In the Heat of the Night, an outstanding, engrossing, and provocative movie of the 1960s. Movie!Tibbs is smart, angry, righteous, magnetic, and about fifteen other laudatory adjectives I don’t feel like typing right now, and was played by Sidney Poitier, whom everyone knows to be a demigod. TV!Tibbs was boring and feckless, had had his balls snipped off so Carol O’Connor’s character could get all the cool mystery solving mojo, and was played by some Etruscan whose name I am blocking out via hysterical amnesia.
Oh, and I didn’t mean to write “TV!Tibbs is supposed to be a genius.” I meant “TV!Tibbs is not supposed to be a genius.”
Fricking typo fairies.
ETA: Although, looking at the OP, I see that the way you cut & pasted what I’d written changed the meaning. I don’t mean to accuse you of doing so deliberately, though; I’m sure it was an accident and that I’ve done worse.
True, but *I Spy! *was groundbreaking. Not only did it have a Black man as a major character, he was definitely the smarter of the two.
I said I didn’t have a problem with it.
Terse. “They call me Mr. Tibbs”.
There are so many ways that line could have been lost or overplayed, but Poitier got it just right.
Blue’s Clues?
I mean, we knew Steve wasn’t the brains in that outfit. (Neither was Joe)
Would Moonlighting count? Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis as a model and a private eye (respectively) who co-owned a detective agency.
The OP didn’t require that the other detective be incompetent, just that the non-white male one be the smarter of the two. And of the two, Veronica is definitely the “genius”, ( somewhat eye-rollingly so, in some cases).
Would the X-files count?
I always considered Scully the more capable one.