Welcome to the weekly TV thread. Happy Halloween.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Vince Guaraldi’s “Graveyard Theme (Trick or Treat) (2nd Reprise)” from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Nothing says Bay Area like E-40. Or Hieroglyphics. Or any of the artists who emerged from HBK. Or the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

I love Guaraldi’s instrumentals from the animated Charlie Brown specials. (Charles Schulz hated the title Peanuts, which was foisted on him by a United Feature Syndicate editor, and so do I. I never call them the Peanuts specials.) Charlie Brown, Sally, Snoopy, Woodstock, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty, Marcie, and Franklin may live in a suburb that appears to be near Minneapolis—the birthplace of Schulz, who later called Santa Rosa, California home from 1969 until his death in 2000—but their CBS specials were made by Bay Area people who gave the specials a chill Bay Area vibe. One of those folks from the Bay was Guaraldi, the San Francisco jazz pianist whose trio’s Latin jazz style was, as Troubled by Nouns said in a 2016 Avocado piece on Guaraldi, perfect for the ragtag-misfit feeling of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

“The executives weren’t a fan of any of this jazz music,” said Sean Mendelson, the son of the late Lee Mendelson, the San Francisco producer of the Charlie Brown specials, to SFGate in 2022. “They specifically said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ And even Charles Schulz was skeptical. He said, ‘Classical music is more my thing.’ Even the animators, when they were done, they were like, ‘I don’t know, we just kind of ruined Christmas.’ ”

But the snappy rhythms won over viewers, and they continued in Guaraldi’s scores to 14 subsequent Charlie Brown specials.

“Graveyard Theme (Trick or Treat) (2nd Reprise)” marks the end of a series of Original TV Score Selections of the Week that were all instrumentals from shows that are either perfect for watching on Halloween or are just plain creepy. The last four Original TV Score Selections of the Week were Angelo Badalamenti’s “Night Life in Twin Peaks,” Vic Mizzy’s “Gomez” from the original Addams Family, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s Stranger Things main title theme, and Mark Snow’s “Eaten by Light” from The X-Files’s “Soft Light” episode.

If you watch an episode of Twin Peaks, The Addams Family, Stranger Things, The X-Files, or Kolchak: The Night Stalker (I used to be in journalism, so I dig any hour-long drama where a journalist like Kolchak is the hero instead of an antagonist) today, you have good taste in Halloween programming. Do I have any recommendations for what to watch today? In honor of the late Teri Garr—whose bridge-burner of an A.V. Club “Random Roles” interview in 2008 (nine years after her multiple sclerosis diagnosis) is perhaps my favorite AVC Q&A—I recommend Young Frankenstein, which features my favorite Garr performance and is a movie I’ve sometimes rewatched on Halloween.

Or go watch an old Halloween special that’s been preserved in its entirety on YouTube. Paul Lynde and Kiss were in a Halloween special together? [Dana Carvey as Johnny Carson voice] I did not know that.

J. Michael Straczynski’s nighttime Real Ghostbusters special about Halloween being erased by an Electronic Positronic Anti-Halloween Machine, which I remember watching when I was a kid, is currently in its entirety on YouTube. The most recent Halloween specials I liked were Solar Opposites’s 2022 and 2024 Halloween specials and Marvel Studios’s entertaining Werewolf by Night, which featured fun performances by Gael García Bernal and Harriet Sansom Harris and was both directed and composed by Michael Giacchino. This leads me to today’s prompt: Do you have a favorite animated or live-action Halloween special, like Great Pumpkin or that one where Judd Hirsch starred as Dracula?

I don’t have a favorite. The scariest network TV special I ever saw was Kathie Lee Gifford… Looking for Christmas.