US police officers Lou Telano and John Sepe were the inspiration for which TV detective show?

Hit 1970's TV show "Starsky and Hutch" was inspired by two real-life New York cops.

In the '60s and '70s Lou Telano and John Sepe went undercover – dressing as women, Hasidic Jews, hippies and even as a gay couple – to bag murderers, muggers, rapists and drug dealers. They tore around in a bright red sports car and had eccentric informants on every street corner. The decoy detectives disguised themselves as sanitation workers emptying bins to keep tabs on a rapist and borrowed an ice cream van to watch drug deals.

"Starsky & Hutch" is an American action television series, which consisted of a 70-minute pilot movie and 92 episodes of 50 minutes each. The show was created by William Blinn, produced by Spelling-Goldberg Productions, and broadcast from April 1975 to May 1979 on the ABC network.

The series' protagonists were two Southern California police detectives: David Michael Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), the dark-haired, Brooklyn transplant and U.S. Army veteran, with a street-wise manner and intense, sometimes childlike moodiness; and Kenneth Richard "Hutch" Hutchinson (David Soul), the divorced, blond, Duluth, Minnesota, native with a more reserved and intellectual approach.