Simon DelMonte said in the comments section last week that he has zero interest in Christmas (he’s Jewish). But he loves A Charlie Brown Christmas, the two times Hugh Wilson parodied A Christmas Carol (I like The Famous Teddy Z’s take on Scrooge, but I never watched WKRP in Cincinnati’s equally amusing take on Scrooge, which won WKRP its only Emmy, until a few days ago, even though I have the WKRP complete series box set because I’m a WKRP fan), some of modern Doctor Who’s Christmas specials, and Timmverse-era Batman’s only two Christmas adventures.

(I almost wrote down “Timmverse-era Batman’s three Christmas adventures.” I forgot that Kevin Conroy’s Batman was absent from “Comfort and Joy,” Justice League’s really good Christmas episode from the last five years of the Timmverse era. I haven’t watched “Comfort and Joy” since it first aired in 2003.)

Those are all superb viewing choices. The late Wilson is a mad underrated writer. The Christmas/Hanukkah episode Wilson wrote for Frank’s Place is also enjoyable, and it contains a rare non-comedic performance by the late, great John Witherspoon as an uncle Tim Reid’s title character never knew he had.

Though I was raised Catholic (my two siblings and I are all lapsed now), my favorite short from SNL’s Saturday TV Funhouse series of animated sketches is the 2005 stop-motion short Christmastime for the Jews, which was directed by David H. Brooks. Robert Smigel and a trio of writers that included future Difficult People star Julie Klausner drew from their Jewish upbringings to come up with “Christmastime for the Jews” as a wry anthem for ordinary Jews like Simon (“Now they really get the party going after dark/Circumcising grateful squirrels in the city park”). I always liked Saturday TV Funhouse’s baller move of getting Darlene Love to sing “Christmastime for the Jews,” a perfect recreation by producer Steven M. Gold of ’60s Wall of Sound Christmas songs like Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”

Maybe someone should create a similar animated short called New Year’s for the Folks Who Don’t Care About New Year’s.

While Simon, as well as filmcricket and The Iron Age of Comics co-host Justin Zyduck, pointed out last week a few Christmas episodes or TV projects that aren’t dreadful, I have zero affection for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and the only New Year’s episode I like is a segment from a Halloween episode: the “Treehouse of Horror X” segment where Tom Arnold makes fun of himself.

You know those Instagram and LinkedIn posts that say, “The new year is not just another change in the calendar, but a fresh opportunity to blablabla”? I hate that shit. The new year is just another change in the calendar to me.

I have a female friend who watches Syfy’s Twilight Zone New Year’s marathon every year. Though I like the original Twilight Zone, and each of the three Twilight Zone reboots had some standout episodes, a Twilight Zone marathon on December 31 isn’t my thing. It’s the type of show I’d rather marathon on Halloween, not New Year’s Eve. (In the Bay Area, KOFY-TV 20 did an annual Twilight Zone Halloween marathon when I was a kid, and that marathon was how I first got into The Twilight Zone.) But if you need to watch a bunch of episodes of an anthology show on the last night of the year, I can’t think of anything better than the original Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt. I’ve never been into New Year’s programming ever since I was a teen. I prefer to either watch a bunch of movies that have nothing to do with New Year’s or sleep all night.

On New Year’s Eve 1994, I was still in high school, and I talked a friend into driving me to the theater so that I could rewatch Pulp Fiction, which was still in theaters at the time, at around 10pm so that I didn’t have to watch Dick Clark’s balls droop at midnight on TV.

Even though I soured on Tarantino a long time ago, my third viewing of Pulp Fiction in a theater was the best New Year’s I ever had because it was the first time I created New Year’s counterprogramming for myself. New Year’s counterprogramming is my way of saying that the overrated holiday and anybody who says, “The new year is gonna be wonderful! Ooh, tell me what your resolution’s gonna be. I’ll tell you mine,” can go eat a sappy American Beauty plastic bag of dicks.

I’m not looking forward to 2025. Even after I purged all news and politics from my phone for my mental health (I’m fucking done with politics, and the only news I want to read or watch for the next 10 years is stuff about the Golden State Warriors, the scripted TV shows I watch, and Kendrick Lamar’s verbal takedowns of grown men who text 14-year-old Stranger Things actresses) and then muted a ton of politics-related names and words from my Bluesky timeline, there’s nothing for me to celebrate about the change from 2024 to 2025.

I wish there was a device that allowed you to sleep through all of December 31 and January 1 and then wake up on January 2. This is just my long way of saying that I finished writing the first 10 Couch Avocados headers of 2025, and I can’t wait to post the first five of them, starting on January 2. One of the upcoming headers will be a long piece about Hardcastle and McCormick’s two different theme songs.

I don’t feel like saying to anybody, “Happy New Year,” this year, so I’m going to replace those three words with a lyric from one of my favorite Mike Post tunes—“Drive” from Hardcastle and McCormick—and tell you to keep your wheels on the straight and narrow if you want to survive, and while you’re at it, run over a Nazi.

Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is The Brothers Sun composers Nick Lee and Hunter Rogerson’s recap music from the beginning of each episode of author Charles Yu’s surreal Hulu adaptation of his own 2020 hit novel Interior Chinatown. Both the book and the miniseries, whose first episode was directed by Taika Waititi, are parodies of copaganda, but because I fucking hate the overused word “copaganda,” and I refuse to take seriously an extremely online word that sounds like the title of the B-side of Los Del Río’s “Macarena” cassingle, I will call it “macarena” from this point forward.

I’m Filipino, not Chinese, but I relate to Yu’s miniseries about Willis Wu, a lowly waiter at a Chinese restaurant in the fictional city of Port Harbour. Willis’s obsession with the mysterious disappearance of his older brother—a martial arts expert named Jonathan, played by Chris Pang from Crazy Rich Asians—leads him to notice that something’s off about Chinatown and Port Harbour. For instance, at the steps of the police precinct Willis tries to enter to look for evidence of Jonathan’s whereabouts, an invisible entity continually blocks Willis from entering the precinct.

What Willis doesn’t know is that he’s just another Asian side character in a teleplay for a crappy police procedural where Asians are always “the other,” and strange elements in this reality like the invisible force at the steps of the precinct are there to keep them in their place. Willis and a few other Asians in Port Harbour—including Kamran, a South Asian tech guy at the precinct, and a biracial police detective named Lana Lee, who also wants to find Jonathan, but her efforts and her presence at the precinct are continually derided by the precinct’s most popular cop, a blond, Olivia Benson-esque white woman played by Lisa Gilroy (whose dead-on Lisa Simpson impression is a highlight of the Dropout game show Make Some Noise)—either adjust to roles they’ve been forced to play or they do what the tagline on Interior Chinatown’s key art says and break out of their roles to find Jonathan.

I never read the original novel. Before it became a bestseller, Yu wrote for the HBO dramas Westworld and Here and Now—two shows I never watched—and the screen version of Interior Chinatown was his first project where he was the showrunner. Yu’s miniseries doesn’t need a second season. What Yu ought to do is bring back the same cast from Interior Chinatown for a completely different project with a premise unlike Interior Chinatown’s because this cast is terrific.

As Willis, Jimmy O. Yang, a regular on Silicon Valley—another HBO show I never watched—is one of the few stand-ups who can actually act. It’s nice to see Chloe Bennet, in the role of Lana, expanding her range and playing an underappreciated workaholic instead of the Marvel Comics superhero Quake (whom she played in both live-action and animation) or some greasy white guy’s hot Asian girlfriend. And as Fatty Choi, a waiter who attracts tons of white customers because they love to be insulted by him, but he immediately hates how they dehumanize him, Ronny Chieng does his usual—but really enjoyable—Ronny Chieng thing of cursing about what a fucked-up world this is.

I’m an Asian American TV nerd who watched a shitload of cop shows in high school and college—these days, I wish I hadn’t watched so many of them, although a lot of episodes from Homicide: Life on the Street’s earlier seasons have aged well—so Interior Chinatown is a lot of fun because it skewers four different eras of macarena I experienced while it comically looks at Willis, Lana, and Fatty’s frustrations with being dehumanized. One of those eras is the Law & Order franchise’s period from 1995, the year when the original L&O became a hit show, mostly because of the 1994 addition of Sam Waterston, to 2011, which marked the end of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a show that was better than Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

The franchise is mediocre and unwatchable now. But in the ’90s, before the launch of SVU—a terribly written spinoff I dumped after only two episodes, and I hate how SVU, which once brought in, ugh, Central Park Five prosecutor Linda Fairstein to advise Mariska Hargitay and Stephanie March on how to play their characters, is now the flagship of the franchise—the original L&O, the creation of former Miami Vice showrunner Dick Wolf, was a solid procedural that was half cop show, half courtroom drama.

Sure, the late Jerry Orbach was always funny as the sardonic Lennie Briscoe in the NYPD half of the show, but whenever Lorraine Toussaint guest-starred as defense attorney Shambala Green, the show went from good to great. In its earlier seasons, the original L&O, a.k.a. “the Mothership,” was like if Sidney Lumet, one of my favorite filmmakers, directed every week an hour-long film about a crime in Manhattan, but it didn’t have Lumet’s skepticism regarding the police. Both John Oliver’s 2022 Last Week Tonight indictment of the Wolf Entertainment franchise’s countless forms of macarena and showrunner Rick Eid’s clunky, not-so-Lumet-ian approach to the current version of the Mothership caused me to quit the franchise.

Interior Chinatown takes me back to L&O’s mid-’90s transformation into a glossy franchise that barely resembles the grittiness of the Mothership’s first five seasons and is now as sprawling as Star Trek. The miniseries also pokes fun at the gaudy, anti-Lumet CSI era of procedurals—CSI alum Archie Kao, who recurred as one of Gil Grissom’s tech guys in his Vegas lab, has a central role here, not as a tech guy who is repeatedly told by a sexy female investigator to “Enhance” but as Willis’s uncle and restaurant boss—as well as the True Detective era and a strange beast Better Luck Tomorrow actor Roger Fan and playwright/blogger Philip W. Chung referred to as “the Chinatown episode.”

In a no-longer-online 2009 post for You Offend Me You Offend My Family, an Asian American pop culture blog Fan and Chung wrote for, Chung said that almost every TV series has a Chinatown episode, and he pretended to give screenwriting tips on how to write one. They included “In order to create maximum tension, you must include a scene where your white lead has to confront a character who speaks no English but holds the key to the whole plot” and “Make sure the gangsters are either dressed all in black or if it’s a period piece–in headbands, bandanas and Members Only jackets.”

My first encounter with a Chinatown episode was when Stephen J. Cannell’s The Commish did in 1992 its Chinatown-ish episode, which wasn’t mentioned in the comments section under Chung’s post, but it took place in the Vietnamese section of The Commish’s fictional setting of Eastbridge, New York instead of Chinatown. Dustin Nguyen from an earlier Cannell cop show, the original 21 Jump Street, guest-starred in “Charlie Don’t Surf” as a world-weary Vietnamese American cop Commissioner Scali turns to for help in protecting from extortion a Vietnamese restaurant owner played by Oscar winner Haing S. Ngor, who was Cambodian, not Vietnamese.

“Charlie Don’t Surf” had none of the “mystical, exotic vibe” Chung said was a requirement in a Chinatown episode, and none of the Vietnamese gangsters were dressed all in black. The Commish’s depiction of the Vietnamese American community was grounded and well-rounded, whereas the last Chinatown episode I saw, iZombie’s “Liv and Let Clive” in 2015, had as much dimension as a sheet of paper. A then-unknown Manny Jacinto briefly appeared in “Liv and Let Clive” as the corpse of a Triad gang member whose kung fu skills Liv acquires after she eats his brain.

“Not every Asian gang member is going to be an expert in martial arts. Seriously, writers, you can do better,” wrote Catherine Wignall in her mixed review of “Liv and Let Clive” for the I’m with Geek blog in 2015.

Chan Is Missing, Wayne Wang’s 1982 indie flick, amusingly tackled the complexities of Asian American identity by parodying Charlie Chan movies. That black-and-white film, which Wang shot on location in San Francisco, was, like Interior Chinatown, about the disappearance of a Chinese man the lead character knew. (In Chan Is Missing’s case, it was the lead character’s business partner.) Interior Chinatown does the same thing regarding Asian American identity. But it shifts between the different visual landscapes of L&O, CSI, True Detective, and even Nguyen’s big-haired late ’80s era as the heroic Ioki (a Vietnamese American undercover cop whose origin story and theft of a dead Japanese guy’s name were revealed in the groundbreaking 1987 21 Jump Street Christmas episode “Christmas in Saigon”), and it imagines how much better all those cheesy Chinatown episodes would have been if they were about the ordinary folks in Chinatown instead of the gwailos who drop by once in a while to take down a bunch of Chinatown thugs who are dressed in headbands, bandanas, and Members Only jackets.

In addition to challenging Asian stereotypes and riffing on the history of cop shows where Asians are never the leads, Interior Chinatown reunites Diana Lin and Tzi Ma from director Lulu Wang’s The Farewell. They played the parents of Awkwafina’s character in that excellent film, and in Interior Chinatown, they play Willis and Jonathan’s estranged parents. Like Kao, Ma is another Asian American actor who’s no stranger to procedurals. He had a regular role as a Hong Kong cop on the short-lived ITV procedural Yellowthread Street in 1990. I remember watching Ma portray Detective Harold Ng in three Chinatown episodes of NYPD Blue, where, because Detective Andy Sipowicz was a big-time racist, Ng’s accent made Sipowicz uncomfortable. I always wished for Ng to tell Sipowicz to shove all that xenophobic shit up his pasty Polish ass.

Bonus track: The musical side of Interior Chinatown is also worthwhile. Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh was one of Interior Chinatown’s composers, and he and Albert Fox, whom he worked with on Regular Show, clearly had a lot of fun composing music for Black & White: Impossible Crimes Unit, Interior Chinatown’s show-within-the-show, as well as the flashbacks to Jonathan’s kung fu fights. The older brother’s action scenes feature a theme that was inspired by the funky Alan Silvestri version of John Parker’s theme from CHiPs. The songs music supervisor Angela Asistio obtained for Interior Chinatown are eclectic—they range from Ol’ Dirty Bastard to, in the final episode, Cantopop star Frances Yip—but she won me over when she procured the Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Behind the Mask,” a banger that recurs as a musical motif throughout the miniseries. Its vocoderized lyrics (“Is it me, is it you/Behind this mask, I ask/Is it me, is it you/Who wears another face”) fit right in with Interior Chinatown’s theme of Asian Americans wanting to break out of unsatisfying roles.

One more bonus track: I first encountered “Behind the Mask” when legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Yellow Magic Orchestra member who composed the 1979 synth-pop track, died in 2023. It’s even better live.

Interior Chinatown is one of my favorite new shows of 2024, and that leads me to today’s prompt: What are some of your favorite new shows of 2024, and what was the year’s biggest TV-related letdown?

A lot of viewers in this space and other spaces are probably going to pick Shōgun, X-Men ’97, The Penguin, or Bad Monkey (I’ve watched none of those shows, although I watched the 1980 version of Shōgun when I was in high school) and grumble about The Umbrella Academy’s final episode for being the biggest letdown (I’ve never watched The Umbrella Academy). As for me, in addition to Interior Chinatown, I enjoyed A Man on the Inside, and I experienced two letdowns. Vulture writer E. Alex Jung’s recent investigation into Brian Jordan Alvarez’s past misdeeds and cult leader-like behavior (in addition to Stephanie Koenig’s behavior) soured me on English Teacher, which sucks because Enrico Colantoni, Sean Patton, and Andrene Ward-Hammond were great on that show (and so was the show’s depiction of culture wars), and I was kind of heartbroken by the cancellation of Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Like Interior Chinatown, Lower Decks deconstructs a long history of a certain kind of TV from the point of view of people from the bottom: the crew of the Cerritos, a California-class starship that’s less prestigious than the Enterprise-D. Because the Cerritos is one of Starfleet’s engineering support ships, its crew has to do the kind of work that was too mundane to be the A-story on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn’t expect the best of the streaming-era Trek shows to be an animated workplace sitcom that reminds me a lot of my two favorite workplace sitcoms: Taxi and WKRP, especially its initial “the suits vs. the dungarees” premise. (Aboard the Cerritos, “the suits” are the senior staff, while “the dungarees” are the lower deckers.)

As a Lower Decks fan, the Paramount+ adult animated sitcom’s demise is the year’s biggest TV-related letdown for me because Lower Decks wasn’t expensive to make, and I would have liked to have seen the show continue for one more season. Because I’m Pinoy, Eugene Cordero’s role as Rutherford is a delightful bit of Pinoy representation. (Even though Lower Decks was never going to show Rutherford getting from the food replicator a plate of sisig, it’s still thrilling to see a Pinoy main character on a Trek show.) Cordero and the other cast members adore each other—even though they never recorded their dialogue together, and they only saw each other at Trek cons, season premiere screenings, and birthday parties—and they adore the show’s writing.

Jack Quaid wrote on IG that he could play Boimler, the purple-haired, easily scared Starfleet fanboy who prefers starship labor over having to work at his family’s raisin farm in Modesto, for 17 more seasons. (I wonder if Quaid wants to surpass Michael Dorn, who has appeared in more Trek episodes than any other Trek actor. He even appeared as Worf in a fucking clip show episode of Webster, man. Worf is the John Munch of Trek. Dorn has played Worf on and off for 37 years now, and he’s still a compelling character, even though Martok is, to me, a cooler Klingon than Worf.) The mismatched friendship between Boimler, a stickler for Starfleet rules and regulations, and Tawny Newsome’s rebellious Mariner evolved into one of the all-time great platonic relationships on TV. Whether in 2D or live action, Mariner and Boimler were less like Kirk and Spock and more like Jo and Blair from The Facts of Life.

One of the best descriptions of the appeal of Lower Decks I’ve ever seen is something Bird MILF wrote below Crooked Paul’s recap of “The Stars at Night,” the third-season finale about the Cali-class ships’ resistance against AI, two years ago at this site.

“I’ve read Lower Decks [sic] as a kind of loving piss-take on being young and liberal in California. Life hasn’t been what you were promised, you’re not exactly respected, and frankly things are a little (or in some cases a lot) shabby… but you still believe in ‘the dream’ and… are trying to make it work,” wrote Bird MILF. “And what better representative of the ethnically diverse California experience than the main cast featuring a black woman, a white guy, a Filipino guy and a straight-up alien immigrant?”

The outpouring of love for this very California show (and the cascade of fan art) from the show’s fans (and people who worked on the show, which was animated in Vancouver) both before and after the release of “The New Next Generation,” its satisfying series finale, is the most love I’ve seen for a Titmouse, Inc. show ever. (Lower Decks had so many sublime moments of Titmouse animation.) But I’ve seen a few viewers say that Lower Decks should have ended when Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford were promoted to lieutenants who no longer sleep in the hallway bunks on the Cerritos’s lower decks. At that point in its run, I felt that Lower Decks should have taken a cue from A Different World, the sitcom where Dawnn Lewis—who voiced Captain Freeman, Mariner’s mom—got her big break. (Lewis also wrote A Different World’s theme song!) Because Whitley and Dwayne graduated from Hillman College at the end of A Different World’s fourth season, the show added to the cast three underclassmen—one of whom was played by Jada Pinkett Smith—to see what Hillman is like from a younger student’s point of view. (A Different World continued for two more seasons.)

I thought Lower Decks should have done a similar thing by introducing a group of new transfers who now call Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford’s old bunks home while still focusing on the tempestuous Mariner (“I did get mad and set my bed on fire”)—a character Newsome once said she views as a breath of fresh air because she was tired of being cast in other comedy projects as Black women who are the voices of reason—and her circle of friends. But it didn’t do that—hence all those viewers who say, “Why’s it still called Lower Decks if we’re not even spending time down there anymore?”

Those Lower Decks fans who think that the show should have called it a wrap when Mariner and her pals moved out of the hallway bunks might have a point there. But then we wouldn’t have gotten Tendi’s entertaining fourth-season return to her family’s planet. Or the welcome addition of T’Lyn, a Vulcan who was kicked out of the Vulcan High Command for her tendency to act on instinct instead of logic, and Ma’ah, an ambitious Klingon, as straight men to the excitable personalities of Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford (because without the presence of T’Lyn, their personalities can sometimes be a bit much).

Both the emotionless T’Lyn, an immediate fan favorite nicely voiced by Gabrielle Ruiz, a.k.a. Valencia on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Ma’ah, voiced by Jon Curry, first appeared in the show’s finest half-hour, 2021’s “wej Duj,” an episode that pointed out that the lower deckers aboard Vulcan and Klingon ships experience the same kinds of workplace problems Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford deal with aboard the Cerritos. T’Lyn and Ma’ah didn’t get to interact with Cerritos crew members until much later in the show’s run. If Mariner and her pals are stand-ins for Trek fans, T’Lyn and Ma’ah are like characters from a much more serious Trek show who encourage these nerds to let go of their neuroses and become the best versions of themselves, except T’Lyn is more patient with them than Ma’ah.

Had Lower Decks’s run ended in 2023, we also wouldn’t have gotten to see the self-destructive Mariner’s non-comedic revelation that she knew Ensign Sito—one of the principal characters in Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan’s favorite TNG episode, “Lower Decks,” which first aired in 1994—and that she self-sabotages her own career so that she never has to make the same kind of command decision that led to Sito’s death. Or the character growth Mariner finally goes through after that non-comedic scene inside yet another one of the Trek franchise’s countless caves (the subject of the funny and heartwarming “Caves,” the “Memories of Cab 804”-style episode that preceded the pivotal episode where Mariner told Ma’ah about her connection to Sito). Or standout fifth-season episodes like “A Farewell to Farms,” “Fully Dilated,” “Fissure Quest,” and “The New Next Generation.”

Unlike what Rick Berman and Brannon Braga did when they returned to Star Trek: Enterprise to write “These Are the Voyages…,” the much-maligned final episode of a show that improved so fucking much in its final season because Berman and Braga were no longer creatively involved, McMahan, who wrote “The New Next Generation,” wisely did the final animated adventure of the Cerritos crew (their adventures will continue in the form of IDW’s Lower Decks comics) as an episode that was strictly about this crew and some of the friends they made in the last two seasons. McMahan didn’t give way too much screen time to a couple of legacy characters from an earlier Trek show or stuff the final episode with the variants of legacy characters who dominated “Fissure Quest.”

Had there been an additional season, I would have been really interested in what Matt Ferguson—who designed the fifth-season Lower Decks posters that wrapped up the annual tradition of Lower Decks key art riffing on Bob Peak’s posters for the first five Trek movies—would have done with the sixth-season posters that would have been based on John Alvin’s teaser and main posters for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Ferguson’s artwork always looks great.

But as a guy who’s been reviewing since 2022 every episode of Lower Decks for an in-progress book project about animated Trek shows, the cancellation means I don’t have to review any more Lower Decks episodes, which is a bit of a relief. Lower Decks is a blast to watch, but it’s difficult to review. The episodes that juggle four storylines instead of two or three tend to be the hardest to review.

Whether or not I’ll ever finish writing the book project, I have a feeling “The New Next Generation” won’t be the last time we’ll see any of the characters from Lower Decks on TV. Instead of ending “The New Next Generation” with a cliffhanger, McMahan closed a five-year chapter for Freeman, her daughter, and the Cerritos crew (while also opening a new chapter he could easily resume if he revisits these characters, and maybe next time, Rutherford/Tendi shippers will finally get what they want).

If the final scene had been a cliffhanger, I would have gotten mad and set my bed on fire.

Again, what are some of your favorite new shows of 2024 (this isn’t The Pits, which has different criteria; I don’t want to see answers like “Somebody Somewhere, yay!” and “House of the Dragon rulz” because Bridget Everett’s show and the Game of Thrones prequel both premiered in 2022), and what was the year’s biggest TV-related letdown? I must not be the only one who is saying in honor of one of our favorite fallen shows, “Cerritos strong!”