Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month is 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 Vic Mizzy’s 1965 re-recording of his theme for Gomez from The Addams Family.

My favorite Gomez is Raul Julia. Luis Guzman looks the most like Charles Addams’s Gomez on Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s Wednesday, while John Astin, who has outlived Julia, only mildly resembles him. Astin was a great Gomez. I grew up watching Addams Family reruns on TBS, and some of my favorite memories of the show are the themes Mizzy wrote for each character. Astin’s Gomez had the best theme out of everyone in the cast. However, my one problem with Astin is that he’s white, and Gomez ought to always be played by Latino actors, a tradition that hasn’t always been followed (at one point, Nathan Lane played him on Broadway), but it started with a bang when Julia, who was Puerto Rican, was cast as Gomez in the Barry Sonnenfeld-directed Addams Family movies.

I love what Jeffrey playwright Paul Rudnick did with those Addams Family movies. Rudnick, whom I best remember as the writer of fictional columnist Libby Gelman-Waxner‘s film reviews in Premiere magazine, was pissed off about Reagan/Bush-era America. He took the Filmways sitcom version’s admiration of non-conformity and its rebuke of the lily-white and squeaky-clean suburbia from ’50s and ’60s sitcoms like Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show and used them to mischievously take aim at Reagan and Bush’s America, particularly in his screenplay for Addams Family Values. Their America hasn’t died. It regained power and has gotten worse, and it’s largely why Wednesday and Pugsley’s entertaining uprising at the Republican-run summer camp in Addams Family Values still holds up well.

There are a lot of juicy essays about the Addamses, whether they’re the Sonnenfeld version, the Filmways version, or the Wednesday version. “The Monster Within: The Munsters, The Addams Family and the American Family in the 1960s,” Laura Morowitz’s 2007 essay for Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, looked at how the Filmways version’s writers “consistently parody the sitcoms of the 1950s” and how “they deal repeatedly with the issue of mistaken identity to call into question the artifice of the 1950s ideal.” My favorite is Izzy C’s 2021 “Comparing The Addams Family Sitcom and 90s Movies” essay for her Be Kind Rewind YouTube channel. It goes into why the sitcom was bold for its time (while also critiquing its othering of non-white cultures the Addamses emulated), and it points out how politicized the Sonnenfeld movies became.

Nicole Froio felt the same way I do about Wednesday in her 2022 Refinery29 piece “There’s a Major Issue with Latina Representation in Wednesday“: Jenna Ortega is terrific as Wednesday, but the show surrounding her is—like a lot of other Gough/Millar projects based on established IPs—underwhelming.

Froio was disappointed with how Ortega’s Latine identity is hardly discussed or shown in the first season. She also wrote, “At the end of the show, the tally is clear: white characters are the victims of colonisation, Black people are bullies, and settlers and Indigenous people simply do not exist beyond rhetorical tools for white victimhood.”

The 2013-15 webseries Adult Wednesday Addams—created by future Santa Clarita Diet and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law writer Melissa Hunter, who starred as Wednesday—was a better show than Wednesday, and it was only three to four minutes long. My favorite Adult Wednesday Addams episode, which guest-starred Anna Akana, pitted Wednesday against a conceited starlet from a genre I hate more than Drake‘s boring-ass discography: reality TV.

There’s no prompt today. I’ve got nothing. Enjoy this 2022 Joe Ramoni essay where he praised The New Addams Family, a Canadian-made Fox Family Channel original show I was never interested in watching, but during Ramoni’s essay, I laughed out loud when he showed a New Addams Family clip of Pugsley and Wednesday scaring Gomez, Morticia, and Uncle Fester on Halloween because they’re dressed up as Siskel and Ebert.