The show centers on a Miami Beach detective agency set on a houseboat, and features Troy Donahue as Sandy Winfield II, Van Williams as Kenny Madison (a character recycled from Bourbon Street Beat), and Lee Patterson as Dave Thorne.

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 Fontainebleau in 1964's Goldfinger.

Plots, scripts (changing the names and locales), characters, and almost everything else crossed over from one series to another, not a difficult feat since they were all actually shot on the studio's backlots in Los Angeles.

In its first season, Surfside 6 was aired opposite the CBS sitcoms Bringing Up Buddy and The Danny Thomas Show and NBC's Western Tales of Wells Fargo starring Dale Robertson.

[3][4] According to one critic, Surfside 6 "was one of TV's weakest shows; for the most part it was poorly written and not exactly endorsed by the Actors Studio, but the teenagers loved it.