Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Frederik Wiedmann’s main title theme from Batman: Caped Crusader.

I’m familiar with Wiedmann from the original scores he wrote for Green Lantern: The Animated Series, which had Batman: The Animated Series co-creator Bruce Timm dabbling in 3D animation and was way better than director Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern, the Ryan Reynolds flick that was so underwhelming and maligned that it’s largely to blame for GLTAS‘s demise. Wiedmann made GLTAS sound like a really expensive sci-fi epic each week even though it looks cheap by today’s standards. A lot of early 2010s 3D-animated shows do. But the Lanterns’ constructs were better suited for 3D animation than live-action. At the end of the (brightest) day, GLTAS was charming and occasionally moving. I particularly loved Kevin Michael Richardson as the voice of Kilowog.

On Batman: Caped Crusader, Wiedmann is working for Timm again, and I like his new main title theme, while a lot of BTAS fans do not. I’m digging how it’s basically Jerry Goldsmith’s score from Basic Instinct crossed with Goldsmith’s score from The Shadow. (In fact, Timm has cited the Shadow and other pulp magazine heroes like Doc Savage and the Avenger as his influences for this Caped Crusader revamp, which takes place in the ’40s.)

As for this new Prime Video animated series, the animation—due to a slashed budget—is rarely as impressive as Tokyo Movie Shinsha and Spectrum Animation’s work in some of my favorite BTAS episodes. The spin kick Batman did in the Spectrum-animated “Heart of Ice” is the first thing that comes to my mind regarding what Spectrum did to elevate BTAS, and that spin kick was a moment I loved rewatching when I was a teen who was into Batman comics, the Tim Burton Batman movies, and BTAS.

But the animation isn’t as awful as BTAS‘s atrocious-looking AKOM episodes, although Batman’s walk—taken from the scene where he finds Harley Quinn’s secret lair in “The Stress of Her Regard”—in the Caped Crusader opening titles looks really awkward. (Both Studio IAM, a South Korean studio that worked on Velma and did uncredited subcontract work on several Studio Mir shows, and Studio Grida, another South Korean studio, are behind Caped Crusader‘s animation.) The first season’s first couple of episodes made me kind of sleepy (although I like the ’40s Universal horror vibe of Greg Rucka’s Clayface revamp), and the show’s reimagining of the Gordons as a ’40s Black family that strangely never encounters at work any microaggressions or overt racism proves that the Twitter thread New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie posted in 2019 about ideas he has for a Black Batman was way better than Caped Crusader at showing how Blackness would affect everything the racebent character does.

I expected more out of the depiction of Barbara—voiced by Krystal Joy Brown, who voiced Netossa on She-Ra and the Princesses of Power—and Jim since Rucka and Ed Brubaker, who served as Caped Crusader‘s head writer for just the first season and isn’t involved in the second one, are among the Caped Crusader writers. Rucka and Brubaker’s Gotham Central, which was told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives, is the only Batman-related comic I have every single issue of, and it was my favorite title out of DC’s countless Batman spinoffs. The two writers were Homicide: Life on the Street fans, so Gotham Central drew a lot from Homicide. The Major Crimes Unit’s board in Gotham Central was exactly like the board from Giardello’s squad room, and the characters of color were as well-drawn as the ones on Homicide.

But even when you racebend the Gordons and not do enough with it, the right-wing chuds who dominate YouTube come crawling out, and one of these infants did their crying underneath the Warner-owned WaterTower Music label’s YouTube posting of Wiedmann’s Caped Crusader main title theme:

(Mild spoilers ahead for Caped Crusader Season 1’s fifth, seventh, and 10th episodes.)

While the scenes between Commissioner Gordon and his daughter make me wish they had been written by Bouie (whose Unclear and Present Danger podcast I frequently listen to because it focuses on ’90s blockbuster thrillers), and the animation is mostly average, here are the elements of Caped Crusader that work for me: The show’s take on Catwoman as a screwball comedy heiress is better than BTAS‘s often bland take on her. (Christina Ricci voices this revamped Selina Kyle, who wears Catwoman’s green cape and purple outfit from the Golden Age Batman comics.) Hamish Linklater, a regular on Gen V next season, is a long way from the first role I saw him play—a nebbishy technical writer from the Midwest who finds romance in the San Francisco underground rave scene in the 2000 indie movie Groove. He’s good as a dickish year-one Batman. But he’s even better as Bruce Wayne—he was hired because of how he voiced Bruce in the audition he submitted—and he plays Bruce as an alien from outer space who watched a bunch of Cary Grant flicks and thought, “This is how I’ll pass myself off as a businessman,” without ever being aware that, like Jason Isaacs said when he promoted Archie, the ITV limited series where he starred as Grant, “Cary Grant didn’t exist. Cary Grant was someone that a man invented because he was so tortured.”

Caped Crusader‘s decision to make Barbara—a librarian in the “New Look” Batman comics and the third and final season of Batman ’66, while she’s a public defender in this revamp—Batman’s biggest ally instead of her dad is a nifty change. (Timm, please don’t get these two to fuck.) Barbara becomes Batgirl in other animated incarnations—her gold collar pin and purple business suit on Caped Crusader are a reference to the Batgirl suit—but for now on Caped Crusader, she’s most passionate about defending the wrongly convicted in the courtroom. (She might not even become Batgirl on this show. The season ends with the possibility that she’ll switch from being a public defender to working for the D.A.’s office.)

The alliance between this Batman and this Barbara develops due to both her being targeted by criminals she either opposes or has defended—she relies on a gun to protect herself from them—and Batman becoming an unofficial investigator for her. Earlier this week, I watched Jasmine Crockett deliver an emotional and witty Democratic National Convention speech about both Kamala Harris’s empathy towards her (when she cried in front of her due to the stress of being in Congress) and why the GOP’s worship of a convicted felon who “helped his daddy in the family business: housing discrimination” is so inane. My favorite line of hers that night is “Will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision for a better America or not? I hear alliteration is back in style.” I kept expecting Crockett to add that he’s a “pudgy purveyor of perfidy,” which was how a pre-The Mary Tyler Moore Show Ted Knight described the Penguin in the opening titles of every episode of Filmation’s The Adventures of Batman. (Crockett was playfully ripping apart MAGAt weirdness before Tim Walz went viral for leading the charge in pointing out how weird all the bullies from the Republican Party are. She’s fearless—and a joy to listen to—whenever she claps back at these bullies on the House floor.) I learned from her speech that she was a public defender before she became a representative for Texas. Her speech made me realize that the Caped Crusader version of Barbara is basically Crockett with a gun.

On the villainous side, as villains Rupert Thorne and Waylon Jones (a.k.a. Killer Croc) and the not-villainous Linton Midnite, a character I’m only familiar with from Constantine (the Keanu Reeves version, not the Matt Ryan version), Reno 911! alum Cedric Yarbrough is Caped Crusader‘s best voice actor. I’m surprised by his range on this show. I know Yarbrough only for his comedic roles. He stole Black Dynamite‘s pimp meeting scene as Chocolate Giddy-Up, the pimp who said the movie’s most quoted line—”But Black Dynamite, I sell drugs to the community!”—and he was hilarious as the voice of Tom Dubois on The Boondocks. Yarbrough’s funniest moment on The Boondocks was the sequence where Tom, who mistakenly thought his wife was cheating on him with Usher, sang out loud Usher’s “Burn” off-key to himself. (I always wondered if that sequence was a parody of Blackpool, the BBC One musical limited series where David Morrissey, David Tennant, and the show’s other leads sang along—and danced—to classic pop songs instead of doing new covers of them. The “Burn” sequence was nicely voice-directed by legendary BTAS voice director Andrea Romano, who retired a long time ago and isn’t involved with Caped Crusader.) Though Yarbrough was cast as Thorne, the character wasn’t racebent, and Yarbrough’s “if late ’60s-era George C. Scott played a mob boss” approach to Thorne is enjoyable. And I like how all the cops on Caped Crusader are corrupt, except for the commish, Detective Driver (a character from Gotham Central), and Detective Montoya, who has a subplot where she goes out on a romantic dinner date with Bruce’s therapist—Dr. Harleen Quinzel.

Speaking of Dr. Quinzel, I especially love The Last of Us Part II co-writer Halley Gross’s “The Stress of Her Regard,” not just because Dr. Quinzel is Asian American on this show (she’s voiced by Jamie Chung from Lovecraft Country, Big Hero 6, and, of course, both Gotham and the direct-to-video Batman: Soul of the Dragon), but because of the show’s decision to reverse the two sides of Dr. Quinzel’s personality. It’s a brilliant move: She’s bubbly when she’s a psychologist, but when she suits up as Harley Quinn, who has no ties to the Joker in this revamp, she’s her true self and completely cold, which mirrors both BTAS and Caped Crusader‘s idea that Bruce is the mask, and Batman is the man. It makes more sense than Timm and Paul Dini’s The Batman Adventures: Mad Love depiction of Dr. Quinzel the brainy and reserved intellectual transforming permanently into Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday.

Dr. Quinzel despises the cruelty of her billionaire patients, and she uses psychology as her weapon in her “Eat the Rich”-esque vendetta against them. Her brainwashing of all of them (except Bruce) to do her bidding and torture each other is amusing—if you hate billionaires like I do. (God, I would love to see what she would do if her patients were present-day tech billionaires.)

DC is never quite sure if Dr. Quinzel is a psychologist or a psychiatrist. The company frequently confuses the two fields. DC is just like all those viewers of The Bob Newhart Show who mistakenly refer to Dr. Hartley as a psychiatrist. Nope, he was a psychologist because Newhart didn’t want to play a psychiatrist. He said to an Archive of American Television interviewer that “a psychiatrist kind of deals with much more seriously disturbed people, and I don’t think we should be making fun of schizophrenics and manic depressives and bipolar people.” Even Hi Honey, I’m Homo! Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture author Matt Baume, who did a good video essay about The Bob Newhart Show‘s empathetic treatment of Howard Hesseman’s Craig Plager character and his coming-out process, mistakenly referred to Dr. Hartley as a psychiatrist in his essay.

The “Dr. Hartley was a psychiatrist” flub fucking bugs me as much as people who refer to the sketches in sketch comedy shows like Saturday Night Live and A Black Lady Sketch Show as “skits”—”skits” are amateurish shit that kids do at summer camp, which is why Robin Thede didn’t call it A Black Lady Skit Show—and people who refer to the Starship Enterprise as “the Startrek Enterprise.” All the kids on the playground who disliked Star Trek always said, “the Startrek Enterprise.” The host of a late ’80s PBS show about modelmaking did an episode about AMT-Ertl’s 1986 Enterprise-A model kit—which I had in my bedroom closet, but I never built it because I’m not into building models—and he kept fucking referring to the ship as “the Startrek Enterprise.” All that shit was why I hated Enterprise‘s title change to Star Trek: Enterprise.

Another ridiculous thing that bugs me is the way the Englishman who runs the Serum Lake YouTube channel, which does pretty solid video essays on BTAS, pronounces “BTAS” as “bee-tass.” I’ve always pronounced “BTAS” as “bee-tee-ay-ess,” as if it’s radio station call letters. I’m not sure if he’s aware that he sounds like he’s saying “beat ass.”

But then again, “beat ass” is fitting because it’s Batman.

Anyway, Linklater admitted to the press at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con that when he started developing his Batman voice, he was doing too much of an imitation of the late Kevin Conroy’s Batman voice, so he tried to avoid doing that. This leads me to today’s prompt: What are some of your favorite celebrity impressions you saw on a TV show?

Make Some Noise, an improv game show on Dropout, a streaming service born out of the ashes of CollegeHumor, is full of amusing celeb impressions. I love actress/TikToker Mary Elizabeth Kelly’s Drew Barrymore impression.

Mega-prolific voice actor SungWon Cho, who voiced a couple of characters in Caped Crusader‘s Nocturna episode, busted out his Werner Herzog impression on Make Some Noise and hilariously imagined Herzog as Spider-Man.

A couple of my favorites both took place during Late Night with Seth Meyers. From her home, Melissa Villaseñor did funny impressions of Dolly Parton, Owen Wilson, Natalie Portman, and Ana Navarro from The View, but her Kristen Wiig impression at 6:32 is perfect.

And I find myself often replaying the moment in Meyers’s 2021 interview with Eddie Murphy when Murphy busted out impressions of John Witherspoon and Paul Mooney hassling him at the Comedy Store in L.A. after he broke Comedy Store etiquette during his early days as a stand-up. Murphy nailed those legendary comedians’ voices. The whole second part of the two-part interview is worth watching, but if you don’t have time to watch the eight-minute video, Murphy’s funny anecdote about Witherspoon and Mooney begins at 6:15.

Finally, to tie it all back to Batman, Pete Holmes as Christian Bale as Batman has forever ruined the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight movies for me.