A couple of weeks ago, Only Murders in the Building’s “Valley of the Dolls” was the most star-studded bottle episode ever. My favorite moment wasn’t the raucous fight scene between Meryl Streep as Loretta and Melissa McCarthy as Doreen, Charles’s sister with a thing for short kings like Oliver. It was Selena Gomez trying not to laugh in the middle of Molly Shannon’s big drunk scene and ultimately failing. Because of Gomez cracking up over her antics (you can see her start to lose it right when Shannon kisses her on the cheek), I slapped “Valley of the Dolls” with a tag I call “corpsing on camera” on my Serializd account.

McCarthy’s scenes with Martin Short made me want to revisit Short’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! interview with her. When Short guest-hosted Kimmel in June, he brought back his hilarious Jiminy Glick alter ego for his interviews with McCarthy and Nick Kroll. I wanted to rewatch what McCarthy said to Glick about guest-starring on OMITB.

I forgot that McCarthy didn’t say much about OMITB that night. She didn’t give away that she was cast as Charles’s sister from Long-uh Island. I can imagine the blood oath OMITB showrunner John Hoffman made McCarthy sign to keep her character a secret.

If OMITB ever gets a Blu-ray release from Disney, Glick’s chaotic chat with McCarthy would be the perfect extra on the disc that would carry “Valley of the Dolls,” even though the episode was barely discussed. OMITB fans who missed Kimmel’s Glick episode or don’t watch Kimmel would get to see how great Short and McCarthy’s improv skills are in a late-night setting. A bunch of YouTube commenters said that they were astounded by how McCarthy was able to keep up with Glick’s unscripted shtick and cause Short to corpse a few times. Well, duh, McCarthy was a Groundling for 13 years. Of course she can do all that shit.

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 Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s extended version of their immensely popular Stranger Things main title theme.

Early on in Stranger Things‘s run, I knew the Stranger Things theme was a big deal as an instrumental when I was listening to a Golden State Warriors away game on the radio, and the coliseum DJ put on the theme because a wedgie occurred.

I don’t have anything else to say about Stranger Things other than a couple of the cast members suck now because they’re Zionists. Also, the fourth-season episodes needed an editor. Thelma Schoonmaker should have stepped in and chopped each episode into two, and we could have had a longer season—remember those? I miss those—instead of longer episodes.

Oh, yeah, and there are things I dislike about Stranger Things—former film critic Emily Yoshida, who co-wrote a couple of episodes of Shōgun, was right when she said that the Duffer Brothers’ show is “a really slickly executed ganache without any cake inside” in a 2016 tweet that no longer exists—and there are things I like. For instance, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, and Sadie Sink were great finds, and Dixon and Stein’s synthwave scores for the show are enjoyable. But you know what was a better “a group of kids face off against a supernatural menace in a suburb that’s oblivious to the threat” show than Stranger Things? The first season of Chucky, which was canceled a few weeks ago by Syfy.

I haven’t watched Chucky’s second and third seasons yet, but that first season was brilliant. It resulted in Chucky being my favorite sequel show to a big-screen horror franchise since Ash vs Evil Dead.

Up until 2021, the only Child’s Play movie I saw was the very first one, which I watched on VHS in 1989. Brad Dourif ruled that movie, even though he only appeared in the first scene and then spent the rest of the movie off-screen as the voice of a possessed talking doll. Then in the summer of 2021, Netflix carried all the Child’s Play flicks except the first one, and I decided to watch them all for the first time after TV Guidance Counselor host Ken Reid, a horror fan who interviewed Child’s Play 2 star Christine Elise on his podcast several years before I was a guest on his pod, made me more curious about those flicks. I ended up enjoying Child’s Play 2 and Bride of Chucky, even though I’m not a horror fan.

Child’s Play 2 is my favorite installment, mostly because of Elise’s performance as the movie’s teen heroine. She has an enjoyable arc where she starts out as indifferent regarding her adoptive little brother, one of the survivors of the first movie, and becomes the greatest big sister in movie history. Child’s Play 2 also contains the best climax in any Child’s Play movie: an inventively staged confrontation between the final girl and Chucky at a toy factory. The sequel is superior to the first movie.

I finally understood in 2021 why the late Bushwick Bill was as much of a fan of this franchise as Three 6 Mafia frontman DJ Paul, Sarah Sherman, and John Waters, who played a sleazy paparazzo in Seed of Chucky, are.

“Bill responded to Chucky’s size, while I imagine DJ Paul and company got a kick out of Chucky’s satanic antics and gleeful Fuck-You-Pay-Me attitude,” wrote Nathan Smith in the 2019 Outline essay “Chucky hates capitalism even more than you do.” In that piece, Smith discussed how the franchise that screenwriter Don Mancini built is “gay as hell” (Mancini based the openly gay Jake’s conflict with his homophobic dad in Chucky’s first season on his experiences with his own dad) and “remarkably consistent” in its combination of slasher thrills and anti-capitalist satire.

Then when the Child’s Play flicks moved to Peacock that fall, I finished off the rest of the franchise and saw Seed of Chucky, Curse of Chucky, Cult of Chucky, and Chucky’s first season on that streamer.

I like how Mancini has stayed attached to this franchise and made it his life’s work. It’s funny how Chucky got axed (no pun intended) after three seasons just like Ash vs Evil Dead did. I wish Ash vs Evil Dead had a longer run, but it ended at a good point. (Also, Bruce Campbell wanted to retire from the role of Ash.) Even though I haven’t watched Chucky’s second and third seasons yet, I wish Mancini’s show had a longer run as well.

I don’t have a prompt this week. In the meantime, I recommend Chucky’s first season. It’s more than just fan service for the Child’s Play fanbase (it unites characters from three different eras of the Child’s Play movies). The show is full of depth about fully out LGBTQ teens with troubled home lives and, in the second season, the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church (which will interest me when I get to Season 2 because I was raised Catholic, I’ve distanced myself from Catholicism, and I moved back in with parents who are devout Catholics, but they’ve accepted that none of their three adult children, including me, are ever going to be as devout as they are).

Stranger Things isn’t as deep and, like KQED-FM reporter Carly Severn said in the 2016 article on Stranger Things’s fetishization of the ’80s I linked to above because it’s the only online evidence of Yoshida’s dead-on tweets about the show, “It borrows its characters, plots and atmospheric beats wholesale from the 1980s supernatural classics that inspired it—but instead of creating something fresh and surprising, produces only a perfectly-smooth pastiche supercut of those movies.” And in terms of small-screen horror, Chucky’s first season is more disturbing—and more funny—than Stranger Things. The most frightening thing on Stranger Things is Noah Schnapp’s bowl cut wig.