Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “Pukey Christmas Music/Christmas with the Joker/Game Show Music” from Shirley Walker, Lolita Ritmanis, and Michael McCuistion’s score to the 1992 Batman: The Animated Series episode “Christmas with the Joker.”

Because “Christmas with the Joker” is an AKOM episode of Batman: The Animated Series—the animation in AKOM episodes just pales in comparison to the animation in episodes that were done by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, Spectrum Animation, Dong Yang Animation, and Sunrise (the same studio behind the Gundam franchise and Cowboy Bebop)—I’m more partial to The New Batman Adventures’s “Holiday Knights” episode, a collaboration between Dong Yang and another Korean studio, Koko Enterprise Co., that has better animation. (In 1997, “Holiday Knights” had a mixed reception from BTAS fans because it introduced the New Batman Adventures character redesigns, which divided fans.) But “Christmas with the Joker”—written by Eddie Gorodetsky and directed by Kent Butterworth and an uncredited Eric Radomski, who took over when Butterworth quit in the middle of production to work on a project for Universal Cartoon Studios—is still kind of fun. It contains one of my favorite BTAS background paintings: background painter John Calmette’s depiction of the exterior of the abandoned toy factory where the Joker holds Commissioner Gordon, Detective Bullock, and Summer Gleeson hostage for a live Christmas special that will climax with their execution.

Enjoy the holidays. Put on your favorite Christmas episode. I rewatched “Christmas with the Joker” and “Holiday Knights” on Blu-ray last Christmas Eve to see how they looked without any dirt on the cels. (They look fantastic.) I also rewatched the Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas special and my DVD copy of one of Wings‘s Christmas episodes (the one where Joe accidentally gets an elderly video store employee fired) while wrapping gifts last Christmas Eve. Or put on a Shane Black movie. I do that almost every Christmas.

Black said to Empire in 2022 that Three Days of the Condor’s Christmastime setting inspired him to frequently turn to the holiday season as a setting and that he was attracted to how “[Christmas] can be used as this unifier, where you see the beauty of a city decked out in Christmas splendour, or you can use it as this bleak landscape against which those same festive decorations seem to belie something else, when the streets are deserted, the wind is blowing, and it feels like you’re the last person on Earth staring in at the happy family having their dinner.”

It’s really strange how the studios that released the Christmas movies Black either wrote or directed never put them out during Christmastime in America like the broadcast networks do with the Christmas episodes of their shows. Warner Bros. dropped the original Lethal Weapon in March. Both The Long Kiss Goodnight and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came out in October. (They both tanked, but Long Kiss—which had a fan in one of Biggie Smalls’s mistresses, who renamed herself after Geena Davis’s character—and Kiss Kiss are now cult favorites.) Marvel Studios released Iron Man Three in May. (It didn’t tank.) The only Black Christmas movie that hit theaters during the holiday season was the only pre-Iron Man Three Black Christmas movie I saw in the theaters and the most mean-spirited Black Christmas movie ever, the Tony Scott-directed The Last Boy Scout, which Warner Bros. released on December 13, 1991.

In 2016, The Nice Guys was Black’s first action flick—outside of The Monster Squad—that wasn’t a Christmas movie, but it ended with a time jump and showed Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling’s characters drinking together on Christmas. (I hate how The Nice Guys never became a franchise.) I don’t know if Black will go back to setting his movies during Christmastime, but I would like to see a live-action sitcom or an adult animated sitcom pay tribute to Black’s Christmas movies. American Dad!’s violent Christmas episodes—2009’s post-apocalyptic “Rapture’s Delight” is my favorite one of those—are the closest thing to a half-hour Black Christmas movie on TV.

Meanwhile, Abbott Elementary’s Christmas episodes are as violent as The Lawrence Welk Show. Abbott did something unusual this season: It did two consecutive Christmas episodes—one that takes place before the school’s Christmas break and one that takes place in the middle of it—probably to make up for not doing a Christmas episode last season, due to the season being shortened by the 2023 strikes in Hollywood.

I saw both of Abbott’s 2024 Christmas episodes last week, and “Winter Break” was so damn predictable. I knew that the A-story about Melissa’s racist and homophobic uncle, whom Caleb thought had died in the middle of Melissa’s stressful Italian Christmas Eve dinner party, was going to end with the old bigot actually being alive, and I knew that the “North Pole” Mr. Johnson said he was going to head off to later that night was going to turn out to be a Philly strip club. However, I got a kick out of both William Stanford Davis’s episode-closing delivery of “And to all a good night. On Vixen! On Dancer! On Dancer! On Dancer!” as Mr. Johnson excitedly marched towards the strip club in his Santa costume (Mr. Johnson is my favorite character on the show) and Caleb’s remark to his big brother Jacob about having pissed off Melissa’s family after he said something lukewarm about the Rocky movies—especially because Teresa Schemmenti, Melissa’s mom, was played by Rocky alum Talia Shire.

Abbott’s Christmas episodes are farcical and optimistic instead of gory and dark-humored like the American Dad! ones. And they’re definitely not downbeat like the hour-long “ALF’s Special Christmas.”

I recently read a piece on the making of ALF’s mostly non-comedic 1987 Christmas episode about Gordon Shumway’s friendship with a terminally ill girl—the story was based on a real-life nine-year old leukemia patient who was an ALF fan who wanted to meet Gordon—but I’ve never seen the episode. If “ALF’s Special Christmas” was too much of a heartbreaker and a bummer for ALF fans, I don’t know how they would have made it through the first of L.A. Law’s annual Christmas episodes, 1986’s “Sidney, the Dead-Nosed Reindeer,” which I watched for the first time on Hulu last December. “Sidney, the Dead-Nosed Reindeer” addresses the depression many folks experience during the holiday season. Do not put on “Sidney, the Dead-Nosed Reindeer” at a Christmas party.

The courthouse on L.A. Law had the shittiest security this side of CTU Headquarters. Guns were fired so often inside that courthouse in episodes like “Sidney, the Dead-Nosed Reindeer” that if I were Jonathan Rollins, I would hire the Fruit of Islam to accompany my dapper ass to court.

I never looked at Afropig’s reviews of Hallmark Channel original Christmas movies for this site, but I assume that 2022’s A Big Fat Family Christmas, whose depiction of a Chinese American San Francisco Chronicle photojournalist and her parents divided Asian American viewers, and the 50 gazillion other Hallmark Christmas movies are the tonal opposite of “Sidney, the Dead-Nosed Reindeer.” Today’s prompt is: Recommend to me a Hallmark Christmas movie. 

Is there a Hallmark Christmas movie that you think doesn’t stink? Is there a masterpiece out of the 15 Hallmark Christmas movies that star Lacey Chabert? I never watched a Hallmark Christmas movie. The only Hallmark Christmas movie I’d watch is one that was written and directed by the writer/director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.