Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

R.I.P., John Amos (who actually died in August—damn, damn, damn!—and his son didn’t reveal his death until earlier this week), John Ashton, Maggie Smith, Kris Kristofferson, and Dikembe Mutombo, the Congolese NBA veteran who was fond of wagging his finger at opponents after he blocked their shots. The seven-foot-two Mutombo’s 1998 attempt to do an impression of Curly, one of his favorite Stooges, via helium resulted in one of the three times Conan O’Brien laughed the hardest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. The other two are when Norm Macdonald roasted the Carrot Top/Courtney Thorne-Smith movie Chairman of the Board in front of Thorne-Smith by saying, “I bet the Board is spelled B-O-R-E-D,” and when Helen Martin, the grandma on 227, said, “I love reefer!” Yeah, I watched a shit-ton of LNWCOB in the late ’90s. Mutombo’s helium voice is one of my favorite moments from LNWCOB.

A new month means a change in account names. This is my first post under my new account name on WordPress and Disqus, “Jim on the Move.” (However, my URLs at WordPress and Disqus are still the same: blah-blah-blah-accidentalstartrekcosplay.) I used my Disqus account name as an excuse to plug my blog Accidental Star Trek Cosplay because I couldn’t think of anything to call myself on Disqus. Then when I created a WordPress account to take over the weekly TV thread, I went with the ASTC name for that as well. But I’ve been spending less time on the blog—I’m not really into trying to plug it anymore—and there will come a day when I will have to say on Tumblr, “I can’t find any more pics of accidental cosplayers, and I’m tired of reblogging my own pics. It’s time for me to bounce. But I won’t be terminating my Tumblr. Enjoy my Tumblr’s archives.”

I want to work my first name into my new account name on WordPress and Disqus, so I chose the title of one of my favorite Lalo Schifrin instrumentals. For one of the two albums of instrumentals he based on themes he wrote for the original Mission: Impossible, Schifrin made a banger of a track about team leader Jim Phelps. It’s called “Jim on the Move.” I first heard the 1967 tune when the Wiseguys looped it in “Ooh La La” in 1998. Better Call Saul, whose title character’s real name is Jimmy McGill, introduced “Jim on the Move” to a new generation in the sixth-season episode “Nippy.” I haven’t gotten to that later episode yet—I lost interest in Better Call Saul at some point in its fourth season, and I haven’t found the time to resume watching it, so I guess that means I’m stinge-watching it—but I was delighted to find out that the show used Schifrin’s instrumental as a theme for Jimmy.

Because it’s October, every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month will be an instrumental from a show that’s either perfect for watching (or marathoning) on Halloween or is just plain creepy.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “Night Life in Twin Peaks” by the late Angelo Badalamenti.

I watched all of Twin Peaks‘s first season when it first aired on ABC and then in 2020, I borrowed all of the Showtime-produced third season from a public library. But I skipped most of the second season when it first aired on ABC because I got bored with it (and I never watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a prequel that, though it was poorly received when it was released, now has a passionate fanbase, but despite that, I’m not much interested in it because I just don’t have the stomach for its scenes of Leland abusing Laura). David Lynch wasn’t involved in a huge chunk of the second season, so I’ve never watched all the second-season episodes I missed. I’m glad I skipped them. I’m an Asian American writer. Piper Laurie in yellowface is unwatchable dogshit. Man, I would love to hear Yo, Is This Racist? co-host Andrew Ti’s reaction to all those episodes where Catherine Martell disguised herself as a Japanese businessman.

Some of the scariest moments in TV history were found in Twin Peaks‘s first and third seasons and one of the few second-season episodes I did see—the revelation of Laura’s killer—which leads me to today’s prompt: What are some of your favorite moments of horror on the small screen?

If you say, “The birth of the lizard baby in V: The Final Battle,” you’re definitely Gen X.

A lot of disturbing moments can be found in made-for-TV movies. I just named one. Sometimes these disturbing moments took place in shows that were non-horror. A Hill Street Blues rerun on TV Land—the last cable channel I expected to acquire Hill Street because Nick at Nite first marketed the channel as a new home for squeaky-clean ’60s sitcoms and Ed Sullivan Show reruns—ended with a pair of loan sharks blindsiding Detective Buntz by kicking him to his knees, pinning his hand to a desk, and cutting off his finger, and it shocked me even though the episode cut to black right when the knife swung towards Buntz’s finger. And a St. Elsewhere rerun on TV Land ended with a post-coital Dr. Caldwell—the Mark Harmon plastic surgeon character who later died of AIDS—getting a massage to the tune of a generic ’80s rock instrumental (Caldwell’s stereo blasted the Alan Parsons Project’s “Eye in the Sky” when the episode first aired on NBC, but MTM Enterprises, just like it annoyingly did with almost all the songs in WKRP in Cincinnati reruns, replaced it in syndication) from a coke-addicted woman he just fucked. When her mouth suddenly slipped out a razor blade to slash him in the arm and the face, I got the fuck out of TV Land.

It amuses me how MTM, the studio that started out making warm and fuzzy sitcoms Jaime Weinman referred to as shows that were “so determined to be the thinking person’s sitcom,” went slasher-flick in the mid-’80s.

Way before Hill Street and St. Elsewhere on TV Land, the 1986 Twilight Zone episode “Gramma” disturbed me when I was a kid—I saw that episode when it first aired on CBS—but my favorite moment of small-screen horror comes from the ’70s. It’s a highlight of a horror series that was only rarely scary.

Neither Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis, who produced The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, the two smash-hit TV-movies that spawned Kolchak: The Night Stalker, nor Richard Matheson, who wrote both TV-movies, had anything to do with Kolchak. The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler were great atmospheric horror flicks, and Curtis and Matheson’s absence was evident on Kolchak because the series version wasn’t as atmospheric (and was impacted by budget cuts as its season progressed). Meanwhile, Darren McGavin, the series lead and an uncredited executive producer, wasn’t happy with the monsters of the week and a bunch of scripts he referred to as “totally unproducible” when Fangoria interviewed him in 1983, which is funny because one of the staff writers was David Chase, before he wrote for The Rockford Files and created The Sopranos. But when Kolchak had a moment like the hearse scene in “The Zombie,” an episode Chase co-wrote, goddamn, it was tense.

In “The Zombie,” investigative reporter Carl Kolchak—wonderfully played by McGavin, whose sense of humor and argumentative banter with Simon Oakland as editor Tony Vincenzo were the things I missed the most when I caught Night Stalker, X-Files veteran Frank Spotnitz’s underwhelming Kolchak reboot, on ABC in 2005—attempts to kill a zombie while the creature is sleeping in a hearse. The only way Kolchak can kill him is by pouring salt into his mouth and sewing it shut. The hearse scene is a masterclass in suspense.

“Kolchak feels like a distinct product of ’70s cynicism, from its sleazier touches to the fact that our hero is armed only with his camera and his wits rather than being a cop or federal agent who can gun down any troublesome critter,” wrote Mark Hill last month in a good Inverse piece about the 50th anniversary of Kolchak‘s series premiere on ABC. “The police of Kolchak’s world tend towards incompetent goonery, a portrayal that would’ve been impossible to pull off 20 years prior and would prove quite challenging today, to say nothing of his chosen profession.”

I first saw “The Zombie” not on ABC—I wasn’t alive yet when it first aired—but on the Sci-Fi Channel, before NBCUniversal renamed it Syfy. The era when the Sci-Fi Channel carried Kolchak reruns was the best. I love the hearse scene—and I’m not even a horror fan.