I’m Jim. I’m going to be taking over the Couch Avocados column.

Here’s a little bit about myself before we dive into the shows that are on our minds this week. In the comments section, I post under “Accidental Star Trek Cosplay.” It’s the name of my Tumblr, a blog I haven’t had much time to update in the last couple of years because of a strict book writing schedule from Wednesday to Friday or whatever day I finish the chapter I assigned myself to work on that week. (The book is TV-related.) But I recently found time to update my Tumblr—there are still two or three meteorologists on TV who have no idea that they sometimes look like they beamed down from the Enterprise-D—as well as visit other people’s Tumblrs again, and I said, “Wow, Tumblr is like the only place where Star Trek: Prodigy is as big as Friends.”

I recently posted in the comments section about the Beverly Hills Cop flicks. The Avocado annually asks, “If you could have a fictional character for your friend, which would you choose?” I picked any character played by Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, whether it was the Black militant he played on The John Larroquette Show or the dancer whose body caused the record to skip in the original House Party. Someone in the comments section told me to watch 10 Things I Hate About You, which I never watched before, because Mitchell stole the movie’s classroom scenes. I did watch 10 Things on Hulu a few months later, and, of course, he was fantastic as the snarky English teacher who, at one point, calls the villain of the movie “Chachi.” For the next time the Avocado asks that question about fictional characters as friends, I’ve been thinking of saying, “Any Filipino character from Trek,” because I’m Pinoy, but, nah, I’ll stick with my answer: any character played by Mitchell. There will be a lot more details in the answer this time—they have to do with Mitchell losing the ability to dance like he did in House Party and walk—and it might make you sob.

I have a Serializd account. Serializd is to TV what Letterboxd is to film. My favorite part of Serializd is the diary of TV viewing the app forms out of the episodes you rate or review. My diary goes as far back as 1985, when I first watched on Saturday morning the very first screen depiction of Thomas and Martha Wayne getting murked. I like Serializd even though the users over there can’t spell, and if you put a gun to one of those folks’ heads and said, “Spell ‘scherenschnitte’ or I’ll shoot your toe off,” they’d say, “Fine, shoot it off. Well, there goes my future as a foot double on the set of a Tarantino movie.”

Thank you to Fandompost/Blue Adept, the previous weekly TV column writer, for directing me to the process of becoming an Avocado publisher. I’m glad to finally have a weekly spot where I can discuss something TV-related, and people will actually read it. Neither Accidental Star Trek Cosplay—my readers over there doze off any time I don’t post accidental cosplay or reblog some gifset of a scene from Star Trek: Lower Decks—nor my Serializd account has been an effective place for me to talk about, for example, the Toby Danger episode of Freakazoid! or Sam Waterston’s final Law & Order episode. Nobody on Serializd is interested in reading my 586-word discussion of Waterston’s swan song, and the app’s UI kind of sucks: You can’t insert images or video clips in your posts on Serializd. Meanwhile, you can do that here.

Before retiring at a really early age from the rat race and becoming a film and TV blogger and a book author, I worked in journalism, and during that period, I hosted on college radio a show where I played music from film and TV scores. It evolved into an internet radio station I ran for about 14 years. I tend to talk a lot about instrumentals in the comments section. My interest in the world of film scoring is why I’m kicking off a series I’m calling the Original TV Score Selection of the Week.

This first week, it’s Henry Mancini’s warm main title theme from the not-so-warm Newhart, a show I always thought of as “Green Acres, but a bit meaner, so it’s Mean Acres.” One of the reasons why I like Mancini’s 1967 main title theme from Two for the Road is because it sounds like the one he wrote for Newhart 15 years later.

R.I.P. Bob Newhart, the master of deadpan delivery, even though as an Asian American comedy nerd, Newhart’s racist joke about Vietnamese gangbangers from the later years of his stand-up act really let me the fuck down. The following is from my 2020 book, If You Haven’t Seen It, It’s New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later:

I found out about that joke after I read a comment Nathan Rabin made in an AVQ&A entry about how he would be utterly disappointed if he heard the racist joke a colleague of his said they heard Newhart deliver in concert. (I wish I could link to the AVQ&A entry, but it appears to have gotten lost during Paste Magazine’s recent heroic rescue of the A.V. Club from the villainous G/O Media, so it’s no longer online.) Long before I found out about that shit, I primarily knew Newhart as uptight author/innkeeper Dick Loudon. I sometimes watched Newhart on CBS when I was a kid. That was my first exposure to Newhart.

Most of Newhart‘s entire run is currently streamable on Prime Video. The most famous episode, the 1990 series finale, is currently not part of Prime’s collection of Newhart episodes. Newhart‘s first season was the only season that was shot on videotape instead of film, and that season looks horrible. It has the video quality of the multiple Vermont TV talk shows Dick hosted in subsequent seasons. It’s mostly why I’ve never watched that first season. Also, Julia Duffy and Peter Scolari weren’t regulars yet. Newhart had such a rough start creatively that it went through a retool—the addition of talk show hosting to Dick’s work as a how-to author and an innkeeper—and a few cast changes, and Duffy and Scolari’s brand of crazy in their scenes together was the last essential piece to the puzzle of Newhart finally finding its groove.

Jaime Weinman, the author of Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes and a TV critic whose Blogspot blog I was a fan of, wrote in 2005 that Newhart‘s switch from tape to film was because “[Bob] Newhart preferred working on film, which allowed for a softer kind of comedy than the hard lighting of tape: tape, he says, is more appropriate for broad sketch comedy.”

Weinman added in 2008 that “He really doesn’t come off well on tape. I don’t know why, but it might be that tape seems to demand faster and louder comedy and film is better suited to Newhart’s style.”

This leads me to today’s prompt: Is there a show you skipped or quit watching because you couldn’t vibe with the cinematography?

Bonus prompt: Which of Mancini’s TV themes are you fond of? I love “Laura’s Theme,” Remington Steele‘s first-season opening title theme, the most out of all of them, and I still laugh whenever Joel, Crow, or Tom Servo whistle Mancini’s classic NBC Mystery Movie theme because they see on the theater screen an actor waving around a flashlight in the dark.

Or, of course, talk about what you watched recently while you sat next to or on top of JD Vance’s mistress. Here is a file photo of his paramour: