Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is my favorite theme Law & Order composer Mike Post wrote for TV: the main title theme from The White Shadow, the 1978-81 CBS basketball drama that was created and showrun by the late Bruce Paltrow, Gwyneth Paltrow’s dad and the future showrunner of St. Elsewhere. Post co-wrote the theme with the late Pete Carpenter. The themes from The Rockford Files, Magnum, P.I., and The A-Team are a few other instrumentals Post and Carpenter wrote together. Post re-recorded the White Shadow theme with jazz fusion guitarist Larry Carlton for his 1982 Elektra album Television Theme Songs, but I prefer the original version.

Labels like Film Score Monthly and La-La Land Records haven’t released any of Post’s original scores. As someone on the FSM message board wrote in 2014, “It’s always been [Post] theme compilations, with various levels of re-recordings (some just awful),” while another FSM message board regular pointed out that Indiana Records’s 1984 soundtrack album for The A-Team is a re-recording that was conducted by the late Derek Wadsworth, a.k.a. Daniel Caine, in the U.K.

Bonus track: Because there’s never been a White Shadow soundtrack album—and there ought to be one because late ’70s funk instrumentals like the ones that accompanied the team practice scenes and the game sequences on the show are irresistible—someone on YouTube compiled Post/Carpenter score cues from White Shadow episodes and did some noise reduction on the sound effects. The score suite includes two different versions of the White Shadow end title theme and the cue from the scene where the teammates drive to their coach’s new apartment to help him move in early on in “Here’s Mud in Your Eye” (the underage drinking episode).

I’m a sucker for funky TV themes like Quincy Jones’s “The Streetbeater” from Sanford and Son and the White Shadow theme. I wouldn’t be surprised if Post and Carpenter were influenced by the synth bass line from the 1974 Stevie Wonder jam “Boogie on Reggae Woman” when they composed the White Shadow theme. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

Speaking of steals, The White Shadow starred the late Ken Howard, who played college hoops at Amherst College, as Ken Reeves, a forward who stole and rebounded the ball for the Chicago Bulls. Reeves’s NBA career was cut short by a knee injury, so he took a job as the coach of the basketball team at George Washington Carver High in inner-city L.A. (The team’s name was never mentioned, but its rarely seen mascot was, of course, a giant peanut.) Coach Reeves often ends up trying to help each of his mostly Black players out of the social problem of the week. That means that, yes, this fish-out-of-water drama that means so much to Gen-X basketball fans like Bill Simmons—the Boston Celtics-loving Simmons considers The White Shadow to be his favorite show of all time—is, ugh, a white savior show.

But during the one or two times I caught The White Shadow on TV Land in the ’90s, this white savior show actually wasn’t dreadful. Most of the Star Trek shows—whether it’s the original or Star Trek: Lower Decks—have a problem of the week. Sometimes on The White Shadow, the white savior himself was the problem of the week, and in those episodes, Coach had to figure out how to fix his own mistake. As Nell Beram pointed out in a 2016 article about The White Shadow for The Awl, Coach was sometimes seen making tactical errors outside the court—a realistic touch.

“He doesn’t want to touch the team members’ personal problems,” wrote Beram. “When he reluctantly does, he gives wretched advice — he tells one player to marry his pregnant girlfriend, since this was how it was done in his day — and later hates himself for it.”

Beram added that “Throughout the first season, Reeves is called out, albeit in 1970s wording, for his white privilege, especially by the school’s black [sic], female vice principal — the show’s reliable feminist voice — and he’s not always deferential. ‘I’m a little tired of going around here having to apologize for everything,’ he tantrums at one point.”

The cast of hoopsters included Thomas Carter as Hayward (a shooting guard and the conscience of the team), Kevin Hooks as Thorpe (a short point guard and the team’s resident trash-talker), and Timothy Van Patten—who had zero basketball skills and was a wrestler in high school, so there was an in-joke in the second episode where Coach quipped to Van Patten’s character that he shoots like a wrestler—as Salami. (One of the team’s few white players, Salami was the White Shadow character Simmons related to the most because, like Salami, he “was undergoing a little bit of a racial identity crisis.”) To me, Carter and Hooks are the standout actors during the teen half of the show, but they became much more interested in working behind the scenes. After The White Shadow’s run, Carter, Hooks, and Van Patten—just like Coach after he wrecked his knee—found new careers, not as lead actors on hit shows, but as prolific directors.

Carter cut his teeth directing White Shadow episodes and went on to helm one of the greatest pilots of all time: the Miami Vice pilot. The classic “In the Air Tonight” sequence where Tubbs loads his shotgun and Crockett calls his ex-wife from a pay phone because he thinks he’s a goner and he wants to hear her voice one last time? Carter shot that. His most popular directorial credit is Save the Last Dance, but his most noteworthy feature film has to be Coach Carter, which brought Carter (no relation to Coach Carter’s real-life subject, Ken Carter, who coached basketball at Richmond High School in Richmond, California) back to the world of high-school hoops. I’ve never seen Coach Carter. Nathan Rabin Draymonded the movie in 2005 for being “a grim love letter to discipline and accountability, which makes it the perfect sports film for W.’s second term.”

Hooks is a name I’m familiar with from watching Human Target, which he co-produced and directed a couple of episodes for, but he gets a lifetime pass for directing Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57. Outlaw Vern called Passenger 57 “a solid, no-frills tribute to the abilities of Wesley Snipes” in his enjoyable 2012 review of the film, whose fight scene choreography really impressed me when I saw it in the theater in 1992. (“I mean, it’s no BLADE obviously,” added Vern, “but it’s better than ART OF WAR 1-2.”)

Van Patten, the late Dick Van Patten’s half-brother, was a busy dude during HBO’s golden age of prestige TV, and he continues to direct during HBO’s current not-so-golden age. He helmed episodes of HBO dramas ranging from The Sopranos (the episodes where Ralphie and Adriana got whacked were Van Patten ones) to Perry Mason.

Compared to the 12 actors who learned to direct at Paramount’s Star Trek film school during the Rick Berman era, three guys aren’t a lot. But the body of work from just those three White Shadow alums is incredible.

The White Shadow was, like St. Elsewhere, an MTM Enterprises production, and although the MTM shows are now owned by Disney, The White Shadow is missing from streaming. Like a few other classic MTM shows, it hasn’t been reintroduced with a lot of fanfare to a new generation like Moonlighting and L.A. Law (two non-MTM ’80s shows that also now belong to Disney) recently were for Hulu subscribers (although when Beram did her piece on The White Shadow, it was available on Hulu at the time). That’s why every White Shadow episode is now up on YouTube, thanks to the efforts of an unknown White Shadow nerd who’s as fond of Hayward, Thorpe, Salami, Coolidge, Reese, Jackson, Gomez, and Goldstein as Simmons is.

I’m watching a few White Shadow episodes for the first time on YouTube, and I can see where Friday Night Lights showrunner Jason Katims got some ideas on how to use high-school sports as a springboard for hard-hitting stories about underage drinking, racism, at-risk youth, and teen sexuality. However, it still doesn’t explain what Katims was thinking during the FNL arc about Landry killing Tyra’s stalker. What a shitshow.

Speaking of shitshows, David Zaslav’s asinine bullshit is why TNT’s Inside the NBA, which has a big fanbase because of the chemistry between Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith, and Ernie Johnson, will be licensed to ESPN—the channel that’s responsible for unleashing the smugness of Skip Bayless, an analyst Barkley famously despises—starting next season.

There’s no prompt today. I can’t think of any. In the meantime, the NBA’s new season began on October 22. I don’t watch any sports. However, basketball is the only sport I kind of follow.

I’m based in Northern California, so I’m a Golden State Warriors fan. But I’m a Dubs fan in a quiet way, much like how I’m a fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Lower Decks who grew up watching many—but not all—episodes of the original Trek, the Filmation version, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I’ve never cosplayed or attended any Trek cons as an adult. The Steve Kerr-era Dubs’s first season without Klay Thompson, who jumped ship to the Dallas Mavericks, has so far been an interesting one. Buddy Hield, a former Philadelphia 76ers guard, is a great fit for the Dubs.

However, I kind of miss the paper airplanes Captain Klay built at post-game press conferences every time the Dubs won. His return to Chase Center as a Mav last week (as part of the NBA Cup) received a standing ovation from Dub Nation. Many of the fans inside Chase enthusiastically welcomed home Thompson, an avid boating enthusiast, by wearing boat captain hats that were handed out by Chase, a sartorial move that couldn’t escape the mockery of Ray Ratto, Defector’s entertainingly sarcastic Bay Area sportswriter, who, on the phone to his former KNBR co-host Tom Tolbert during Tolbert’s final KNBR broadcast, said, “I never thought that the Skipper hat would come back into fashion, and now it’s a 19,000-seat giveaway. I think everybody’s high now. They’re trying to cope with the future by simply just cramming edibles into their mouth like they’re Skittles and just hallucinating their way through the day.” (Folks like Denzel Washington consider being insulted by Don Rickles to be an honor. Rickles was too racist for my tastes. I would rather be insulted by Ratto, who never resorts to racism when he disses you.) The emotional Dubs/Mavs game ended with Steph Curry leading the Dubs to victory. Curry was just as animated as he was in the fourth quarter of the Paris Olympics game against Team France that landed him a gold medal, and his late-game heroics resulted in an equally exciting fourth quarter. Like Thompson once said, holy cannoli.

Meanwhile, this NBA season is the final season for Inside the NBA as an exclusive to TNT, which lost NBA broadcast rights. But because of the unusual arrangement the NBA and Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery agreed to last week (which keeps the band—Barkley, Shaq, Smith, and Johnson—from breaking up) after settling WBD’s breach of contract lawsuit against the NBA, TNT Sports will still produce Inside the NBA even though it will be part of the Disney/ESPN/ABC family. (It hasn’t been announced yet if TNT will continue airing Inside the NBA after this season.)

I don’t watch Inside the NBA, which began in 1989 and added Barkley as an analyst in 2000 (while Shaq was added to the show in 2011). I stopped watching linear TV a long time ago, so my only awareness of Inside the NBA has been through Twitter clips of fill-in analyst Candace Parker schooling Shaq—he’s always an ass towards WNBA stars—on modern basketball or Desus & Mero’s segments on clips of Shaq and Barkley good-naturedly roasting each other. The banter between the former rivals resulted in a lot of equally funny unscripted quips from Desus Nice, like when he said, “In a fight, I feel like Charles Barkley would beat the brakes off of Shaquille O’Neal, only for the fact that I know Charles Barkley grew up when you could legally ride Black people as horses.”

Earlier this week, I watched four full episodes from the 2015-16 NBA season that an Inside the NBA fan archived on YouTube—I ended up laughing during every “Shaqtin’ a Fool” segment, in which Barkley, Shaq, Smith, and Johnson watch the week’s biggest NBA gaffes and most bizarre plays—and afterward, I thought, “Yeah, breaking that band up in 2025 would have been a big mistake.” I hope the stars of the show go out with a bang before the start of Inside the NBA’s ESPN era by repeatedly insulting Zaslav—the king of inane streaming-era programming moves like purging beloved animated shows, not thinking that diversity makes money, and causing TNT to lose NBA rights—because I would like to see clips of them not giving a shit about having to be nice to Mr. Zsasz anymore. Barkley already started clowning Mr. Zsasz in May for losing NBA rights when he revealed to Dan Patrick that morale among the Inside the NBA staff was low and then added, “My two favorite wines are Inglenook and Opus. And these clowns I work for, they turned us into Ripple and Boone’s Farm and Thunderbird.”

The addition of Inside the NBA, the most popular and acclaimed studio show in sports media history, to ESPN is good for the channel because its NBA coverage is underwhelming. Inside the NBA fans who were worried that their favorite show would croak can rest easy now. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be some behind-the-scenes fights between Barkley and ESPN brass. ESPN is known for interrupting its NBA coverage with too many commercials, and I can see it driving Barkley crazy. But the new deal calls for TNT Sports to have creative control over Inside the NBA, so maybe those constant commercial breaks won’t happen.

There aren’t a lot of beloved shows that, after they changed networks, either maintained their quality or got even better. Taxi, which moved from ABC to NBC in its final season, is the only show I can think of that was consistent despite cast changes and a switch to a new network. The writing on Scrubs was reinvigorated by the show’s move from NBC to ABC (but that second and final season on ABC should never have happened). After the poorly received second-season arc about Landry resorting to murder, FNL moved from NBC to DirecTV’s The 101 (although NBC continued to carry FNL and aired its episodes several months after they premiered on The 101), and it acted as if the homicidal Landry arc never happened. Its third, fourth, and fifth seasons on The 101—the most memorable supercouple in the fourth and fifth seasons was Vince and Jess, played by, respectively, Michael B. Jordan and Jurnee Smollett—were superior to the second season.

I’ll be amazed if Inside the NBA on ESPN doesn’t turn out to be a disaster like the 2015 moment—a viral thing I had never seen before until earlier this week, and it cracked my shit up—when Shaq tripped and fell in Studio J and lost his shoe like Aunt Bunny.