Basehart appeared in the pilot episode of the television series "Knight Rider" as billionaire Wilton Knight. He is the narrator at the beginning of the show's credits. He accepted the lead role in the 1962 film "Hitler". He appeared in "Probe 7, Over and Out", an episode of "The Twilight Zone", "Hawaii Five-O", and as Hannibal Applewood, an abusive schoolteacher in "Little House on the Prairie" in 1976. In 1972, Basehart appeared in the "Columbo" episode "Dagger of the Mind", in which Honor Blackman and he played a husband-and-wife theatrical team who accidentally kill Sir Roger Haversham, the producer of their rendition of Macbeth.