R.I.P., James Earl Jones. His terrific performance as wrongfully convicted cop Gabriel Bird in the 1990 pilot for Gabriel’s Fire—a pilot I watched for the first time only two weeks ago via YouTube—was discussed by me last week. That performance, his guest spots on L.A. Law as Black radical lawyer Lee Atkins (both those L.A. Law episodes are streamable on Hulu), his guest spots on Everwood as gruff piano teacher Will Cleveland (all three of those Everwood episodes are streamable on Freevee), and—of course—his deadpan readings of the Top 10 Lists on Late Show with David Letterman are among my favorite small-screen performances of his. The EGOT-winning legend and CNN station ID announcer (“This is CNN”) copped an Emmy for his lead role on Gabriel’s Fire, a one-season critical darling that never hit DVD or streaming. Because Jones is gone now, Gabriel’s Fire deserves to be rediscovered. There are 21 more episodes of Jones’s fire I would love to watch for the first time.

This is the weekly TV thread.

School is back in session, so the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the arrangement of Jerry Goldsmith’s Room 222 main title theme from the show’s first three seasons.

The Star Trek: Voyager main title theme is my favorite theme the late Goldsmith wrote for TV. It’s what we ’90s kids call a bop. Coming in a close second is his Room 222 main title theme, particularly the version from the first three seasons—before Room 222’s opening titles were reshot (it wasn’t a good revamp), and the show, set at fictional Walt Whitman High School in L.A., became another example of that old Jump the Shark website complaint “They changed the theme music.” The Room 222 theme was a staple of Goldsmith’s concerts.

“Goldsmith’s amiable title theme remains one of his most memorable compositions for television,” wrote Jeff Bond, a film music historian I frequently interviewed over the phone in my college radio days, in the liner notes for a 2001 Film Score Monthly CD that bundled Goldsmith’s scores from the only two Room 222 episodes he worked on together with his score from the 1973 barnstorming movie Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies. “The 7/4 meter and back-and-forth contour of the melody imparts a perfect sense of precociousness, while the solo trumpet and recorder excellently convey the notion of individual personalities at the school.”

7/4 time? Hey, that’s the “Solsbury Hill” time signature. Goldsmith loved his odd time signatures. His main title theme from Capricorn One, which, like Room 222, featured Denise Nicholas in the cast, is in 11/8 time. I’m not a musician, so I have no idea what the groovetastic Escape from the Planet of the Apes main title theme’s time signature is, but that’s another Goldsmith joint with a crazy time signature.

Goldsmith was perhaps my favorite versatile film composer who’s neither Black nor Italian. He was at home in the epic universe of Star Trek as he was writing romantic melodies for Branford Marsalis (whose soprano sax solos are the biggest reason why my favorite non-Trek Goldsmith film score is from The Russia House) or roaming the halls of Whitman High.

The late Norman Lear still gets a lot of credit for bringing subjects like racism, homophobia, women’s lib, and the friction between the counterculture and authority to sitcoms on CBS’s All in the Family in 1971, but James L. Brooks beat him to the punch with Room 222 on ABC in 1969. Brooks’s creation gets overlooked because it didn’t have a huge afterlife in syndication—All in the Family was also a flop in syndication, but unlike Room 222, it has stayed in the public eye, like when Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei starred as Archie and Edith in a series of live re-stagings of All in the Family for ABC—and its absence from syndication when I was a teen was why I never really watched Room 222 until I borrowed Shout! Factory’s box set of the show’s first season from a public library in the late 2010s.

The first season was alright. That entire season is on YouTube. However, some of the first-season episodes were incorrectly labeled. The copy of “Seventeen Going on Twenty-Eight”—the episode Room 222 staff writer Allan Burns based on a real-life incident where a teacher went out on a date with a female stranger he later found out was a student from another teacher’s class who pretended to be older—was given the wrong episode title.

Room 222’s other seasons have been posted by the YouTube account @sfinthecity, one of many accounts that post tons of obscure TV shows, but I’ve only watched 2% of those seasons. The copies of Room 222’s episodes from the third, fourth, and fifth seasons that were posted by @sfinthecity are unfortunately syndication prints from the show’s late 2010s run on aspireTV, Magic Johnson’s cable channel, and 20th Century Fox Television chopped off about three minutes from each episode so that cable channels or local stations could squeeze in more commercials. But these YouTube accounts are the only way any of us can watch Room 222 right now. Shout! Factory’s box sets of Room 222’s first two seasons are out of print, and the company lost interest in releasing the rest of the show’s run.

In the only season of Room 222 Brooks was involved in, he was more like Brooks the CBS News copywriter using his journalistic skills to do amiable, mostly non-comedic stories based on teen issues of the day than Brooks the future co-creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Tracey Ullman Show, and The Simpsons. As a drama, Room 222 is low-key and life-affirming. As a comedy, it’s not quite a laugh riot like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Tracey Ullman Show, and The Simpsons.

Room 222’s first few episodes contained a laugh track. Like Sledge Hammer! really early in its first season, Room 222 wisely got rid of it. The humor on Room 222 is much gentler and tamer than the foul-mouthed antics on English Teacher. That new FX show stars series creator Brian Jordan Alvarez, whom I first saw in M3GAN, as Evan Marquez, a gay teacher who struggles to make sense of Gen Z and handles problems—whether it’s a complaint filed against him by a former student’s homophobic parent or a vow to stop dating other faculty members, which complicates his attraction to a new physics teacher played by stand-up comic and former high-school teacher Langston Kerman—with very little grace at fictional Morrison-Hensley High School in Austin, Texas. (English Teacher is also one of several shows where, like what happened with Chicago Hope and Penny Dreadful, the second episode outshines the pilot, although English Teacher’s pilot is a very good one. “Powderpuff”—written by cast member Stephanie Koenig, who plays Gwen Sanders, Mr. Marquez’s best friend and a history teacher—is a lot of fun. It features an amusing B-story about a powder-puff practice Ms. Sanders morphs into a women’s self-defense class, as well as a great guest spot in the A-story by Trixie Mattel—not as herself but as Shazam, a kleptomaniac drag queen and an old friend of Mr. Marquez’s who introduces the art of drag to Morrison-Hensley’s football team.)

Despite Room 222’s age (and the lousy image quality of almost all the episode prints), several of its episodes are timely in 2024. “Adam’s Lib,” a charming 1970 episode from the era after Brooks’s departure from Room 222, is about a girl who’s a skilled free-throw shooter, and both the leader of a group of feminist Whitman students and a member of Whitman’s basketball team talk her into trying to become the team’s first female member. The episode plays quite well in the year of Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink’s much-talked-about transition to the WNBA.

The casting on Room 222 nicely reflected the diversity of L.A. and was bold for its time. There were tons of student characters of color. The student character who made the most appearances on the show was Heshimu Cumbuka’s Jason character, a rebellious Black kid with a talent for drawing. The two leads were Black folks: Lloyd Haynes as Pete Dixon, a compassionate history teacher whose composure through every campus problem of the week would cause Mr. Marquez to say, “Why can’t I be perfect like Pete was on Room 222?” and Nicholas as Liz McIntyre, Whitman’s guidance counselor and Mr. Dixon’s girlfriend.

Karen Valentine as klutzy and idealistic Alice Johnson is the purtiest white teacher ever. She’s also at the center of one question about Room 222 that bugs me: When Ms. Johnson, a student teacher and Mr. Dixon’s protégé, accidentally drops all of her books on the floor at the end of the second version of the opening titles, why doesn’t Mr. Dixon, Ms. McIntyre, or Principal Kaufman run up to help her with her books? All of them just stand there. Ms. McIntyre and Principal Kaufman laugh at her. If I were Ms. Johnson, I would say to them, “Fuck you. Fuck you. And fuck you. Good morning, Jason.”

The subject of Room 222 is why today’s prompt is: Which fictional teacher character from TV do you wish you had as a teacher?

English Teacher is only two weeks old, but its funny and rapid-fire scenes at an extracurricular book club led by Mr. Marquez already make me wish I had him as an English lit teacher just so I could be in his book club. The book club scenes have the same rapid-fire comic energy that made A.P. Bio’s classroom scenes between the students and Mr. Griffin—who didn’t teach anything to his students, except how to plot revenge as they helped him take down every adult who wronged him—a highlight of Glenn Howerton’s hilarious show.

Most of my English lit teachers were boring. Mr. Marquez, whose book club discussions always end up never being about the books he assigned, definitely isn’t.

I wouldn’t say a word during these book club discussions between Mr. Marquez and his mostly nonsensical students. I would just sit in the back and be that GIF of Steph Curry eating popcorn.

I would have also liked to have been in Ms. Johnson’s class because her enthusiasm during class assignments like investing in stocks is infectious. However, 15-year-old me would have had a hard time concentrating on classwork at first because of Ms. Johnson’s beauty. In the first few days of her class, whenever she would have asked me a question to see if I was learning anything, my answer would have always been “Duh-duh-doy-doy.”