Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

January is Cannell-ary. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month is a Mike Post instrumental from a Stephen J. Cannell production. They’re my top five themes Post wrote or co-wrote for the late Cannell, and they’re being spotlighted in chronological order.

In the comments section last week, DarylLiedecke said, “Cannell and Post raised me! Not really, but I watched a lot of TV they put out as a kid. Cannell’s typing the page and then throwing it is second to ‘Sit UBU sit. Good dog! Ruff!’ in my mind for 80s tv.” I feel the same way.

None of my uncles are white. Cannell was like my white uncle whose favorite thing at family gatherings was to tell stories about heroic ex-cons, extremely abrasive FBI agents, and shootouts between helicopters and cars that never escalate into physical harm because everyone is a lousy shot for some reason.

When I was a kid, I didn’t catch every Cannell show—I never watched The A-Team until 2006, and I didn’t get into The Rockford Files until 2007—but I watched a lot of The Greatest American Hero and 21 Jump Street (one of several later Cannell productions where Cannell had nothing to do with the writing), so the image of Cannell tossing the page into the air in his office at the end of his shows is a staple of my childhood as well. On an ’80s Cannell action show, you can expect two things to be flipped over in the air: that page during his vanity card and way before that, a bad guy’s car. A ton of cars were flipped over on Hardcastle and McCormick, the Cannell production whose most memorable contribution to pop culture is “Drive,” Post and songwriter Stephen Geyer’s main title theme for the show.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Post and Pete Carpenter’s instrumental version of “Drive” from the end of 1983’s “Rolling Thunder,” Hardcastle and McCormick’s two-hour pilot.

One thing that amazes me about Post and Carpenter’s work on Hardcastle and McCormick is this: Because the end credits sequences for most Cannell shows were never the same in length (they tended to be longer than the ones at the end of other ’80s TV moguls’ shows), Post and Carpenter composed many different variations on the end title theme in the first two seasons. That wasn’t a common thing on network TV at the time. You saved money by recording one end title theme variant per season or sticking with the same damn recording for the entire run. (Hardcastle and McCormick’s final episode ended with an instrumental version of “Tea for Two,” but otherwise, they were all different instrumental versions of the main title theme.) I counted within the space of two seasons six different recordings of the end title theme that were either shortened or stretched out to fit whatever length the end credits sequence was that week. I found that out because there are so many Hardcastle and McCormick end credits sequences on YouTube.

Bonus track: Here’s another one of those sequences, from “The Crystal Duck,” the 1983 Hardcastle and McCormick episode that guest-starred a young Joe Pantoliano in a non-villainous role as the former cellmate of ex-con “Skid” Mark McCormick.

Another bonus track: The Hardcastle and McCormick end credits sequence that was originally under the below paragraph about “She Ain’t Deep, But She Sure Runs Fast,” the show’s third-season premiere, was from 1985’s entertaining “What’s So Funny?” The YouTube account that posted it was terminated. I always hate seeing dead embeds in my blog posts or articles, so every time an embed is dead, I substitute a live one instead.

“What’s So Funny?” was one of the episodes I watched for the first time on YouTube a few hours before I posted this header. In that episode, Milton “Hardcase” Hardcastle sends McCormick to go undercover as a stand-up comic to take down a murderous mobster. Joey Bishop guest-starred as a fictional stand-up who trains McCormick and explains to him that “eggplant” is a funnier word than “celery,” and Mary-Margaret Humes, one of Hardcastle and McCormick’s prettiest guest stars (and one of the few women on the show whose hairstyle isn’t outdated in 2025), was cast as a woman who dates only stand-ups. Humes, who later played Dawson’s mom on Dawson’s Creek, landed the part probably because of her role as a Vestal Virgin who falls in love with Mel Brooks’s “stand-up philosopher” character in the Roman Empire segment of History of the World: Part I.

The Bishop/Humes episode concluded with the show’s most frequently used recording of Post and Carpenter’s end credits version of “Drive.” This really short version ends with one of my favorite closing drum fills ever. But because the account that posted the end credits from “What’s So Funny?” was ixnayed, I replaced the video with the end credits from “She Ain’t Deep, But She Sure Runs Fast,” a Deliverance-inspired wilderness episode that used the exact same end credits music.

If you love car crashes, Hardcastle and McCormick had two or three of them every week, and they always resurfaced in the end credits sequence. When I was a kid, I was more into the sick, sad world of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, ABC’s lead-in to Hardcastle and McCormick, than the car crashes on Cannell’s show, so I watched only one episode of Hardcastle and McCormick during its three-season run on ABC. It was “Just Another Round of That Old Song,” which centered on Henry Willard, an elderly bank robber who was recently released from prison after a 25-year sentence. His only priority is to track down an armored car full of cash he hid in an unfinished Los Angeles subway system before he was tossed into the clink.

“Just Another Round” was the first place where I saw veteran character actor Keenan Wynn, who was best known for his role as Colonel “Bat” Guano in Dr. Strangelove and his villainous roles in a bunch of live-action Disney comedy movies. I best remember the late Wynn from his non-comedic guest spot as the lone Italian agent in Eliot Ness’s nascent team of Untouchables in Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse’s two-part 1959 backdoor pilot for The Untouchables and his guest spot as Willard on Hardcastle and McCormick.

Wynn was amusing as a man out of time. When Willard is shocked by the price of a sandwich in 1983, he quips that he has to take out a loan just to get that sandwich. But the thing I remember the most about “Just Another Round,” which I rewatched in its entirety on YouTube during Thanksgiving weekend, is the chemistry between the late Brian Keith as Hardcastle, a retired L.A. County Superior Court Judge who, instead of reporting Willard to the cops, decides to help him find his buried loot, and Daniel Hugh Kelly as McCormick.

Hardcastle and McCormick was about the mismatched duo of 66-year-old Hardcastle—the type of judge who preferred to wear a Hawaiian shirt, gym shorts, and old sneakers under his robe because he’s an avid pick-up basketball player who loves the Lakers and their rivals, the Celtics—and the much younger McCormick. “Skid” Mark was a former race car driver who was sentenced to two years in San Quentin for grand theft auto by Hardcastle a few years before. Early on in the pilot, McCormick was incarcerated again for stealing an experimental sports car called the Coyote X in an attempt to return the car to the adult daughter of his murdered best friend and racing mentor, the Coyote’s designer.

The ex-judge would rather spend his retirement days running around in a Yankees cap and tracking down 200 criminals who, back during his time on the bench, escaped conviction due to legal technicalities. (His new free time also forces him to revisit some of his wrongful rulings, so in episodes like “Third Down and Twenty Years to Life,” he helps out the innocent people he hurt.) But he needs help finding criminals, so in the pilot, he offers McCormick a deal: Help him in his crusade or go back to prison. The deal also requires that McCormick is remanded to Hardcastle’s custody, so he has to live at Gull’s Way, Hardcastle’s mammoth Malibu estate, which Hardcastle and Nancy, his wife, inherited from Nancy’s family about a couple of decades before their son was killed in the Vietnam War and Nancy died of an unnamed illness.

Hardcastle and McCormick abandoned the “200 criminals” gimmick after ABC received complaints that the show was glorifying vigilante justice. It changed gears—1985’s “The Birthday Present” sides with McCormick’s distaste for vigilante tactics, which a young cop who was mentored by Hardcastle resorts to after Hardcastle is shot in court by a killer played by future Wiseguy regular Jonathan Banks—and it evolved into a show where either the duo would stumble into criminal activity wherever they go or one of them had to protect a friend or relative from mobsters or crooked businessmen who threatened their life.

Created by Cannell and Patrick Hasburgh, the same duo that later created 21 Jump Street, Hardcastle and McCormick was like a remix of both The Rockford Files (what if Rocky was an ex-judge who, unlike Rocky, loved getting into danger and Jim wasn’t his son and was—instead of being a P.I. who hurts his hand whenever he punches out somebody—a car thief who works for him and hurts his hand whenever he punches out somebody?) and Magnum, P.I., a non-Cannell show Post and Carpenter composed music for while juggling multiple Cannell shows. The arguments between Hardcastle and McCormick over Hardcastle’s all-night Dixieland band jam sessions at Gull’s Way and McCormick’s preference for Iron Butterfly over Dixieland jazz in “Just Another Round” bring to mind the squabbles between Higgins and Magnum at Robin’s Nest, Robin Masters’s estate.

On The Rockford Files, Jim drove around in a gold Pontiac Firebird and perfected the J-turn (a.k.a. “the Rockford”), a dope-ass driving maneuver Jim turned to whenever he had to escape from thugs. He would put his car in reverse and make a 180-degree turn. James Garner was one of Hollywood’s best stunt drivers, so he did all those J-turns himself. Then on Magnum, P.I., Magnum had access to the unseen Masters’s red Ferrari 308 GTS. Hardcastle and McCormick had to have a sleek ride as well, and that was the Coyote, which was bequeathed from its designer’s daughter to McCormick. The red sports car—which was actually a kit car built on a Volkswagen Beetle chassis in the first season, while a revamped Coyote in subsequent seasons used a DeLorean chassis instead—was a staple of every episode, particularly in the first two seasons.

“Driving was a major interest of Hasburgh’s,” wrote authors Deb Ohlin, Cheri deFonteny, and Lynn Walker in their 2009 BearManor Media book Hardcastle and McCormick: A Complete Viewer’s Guide to the Classic Eighties Action Series. “From Cannell came the idea that their unlikely hero would be in the custody of a judge. From Hasburgh there was the enduring notion that it was really a show about fathers and sons.”

This season, we’re witnessing the re-emergence of the “don’t underestimate senior citizens” genre in the form of both the new Matlock and A Man on the Inside. Hardcastle and McCormick was the Cannell studio’s entry into that genre. When the “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming” episode of The Simpsons made fun of lowest-common-denominator TV by imagining the casting of Vanessa Redgrave (voiced by Tress MacNeille) as a biker grandma who says, “Now I’m gonna haul ass to Lollapalooza,” it was also a jab at geriatric life-of-the-party characters like Cannell and Hasburgh’s creation of Hardcastle.

The macho ex-judge was written as a geriatric superhero (however, the only thing he couldn’t do was drive like a racer, and that’s where McCormick came in), and the dad from The Parent Trap—a.k.a. the uncle on Family Affair—looked the part. Hardcastle and McCormick was a weekly Brian Keith gun show. I forgot how swole Uncle Bill looked on Hardcastle and McCormick. Keith—a Marine who served in World War II before he became an actor—was 62 when he first played Hardcastle.

Though Hardcastle was an old dude, Hardcastle and McCormick wasn’t an elderly-ish show. Instead of opening with a plinky theme like the one The Seven-Per-Cent Solution composer John Addison came up with for the elderly-ish Murder, She Wrote (which premiered a year after Hardcastle and McCormick’s series premiere opposite Cannell and Hasburgh’s series in the Sunday night ratings race and ended up being way more popular despite containing zero car chases), Hardcastle and McCormick opened with the high-octane sounds of “Drive.”

One last bonus track: “Drive,” which was never released as a single, was sung by Three Dog Night vocalist David Morgan. One of the funniest moments of MST3K’s final Comedy Central-era Joel Hodgson episode was Tom Servo singing “Drive” while he and Crow were hopping on pogo sticks.

In 1981, Post, Stephen Geyer, and country singer Joey Scarbury struck gold with “Believe It or Not”—the theme from The Greatest American Hero, Cannell’s comedic mishmash of a superhero show and Welcome Back, Kotter—when Elektra released it as a single. It flew as high as #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and George Costanza loved it so much that he sang his answering machine greeting to the tune of it.

“Believe It or Not” is an example of the genre that’s known today as yacht rock (it wasn’t called that back then). I grew up listening to hip-hop and R&B, so I like yacht soul, but I’m not so much into yacht rock. (However, Hall & Oates, Toto, and Michael McDonald were great at yacht rock, and I can do an impression of McDonald singing incomprehensible lyrics if you get me a couple of Jack and Cokes.) It’s why “Believe It or Not” isn’t one of my 10 favorite Post themes from Cannell shows. However, “Believe It or Not” was perfect for The Greatest American Hero. Ralph Hinkley wasn’t afraid of his thuggish remedial students—in the pilot, he held his own against one of them in a boxing match at the high-school gym—but otherwise, he was a soft rock type of guy who didn’t want to fly around like Superman and fight crime. “Believe It or Not” was soft rock to the core.

I prefer the roguish “Drive” as a Post/Geyer song over the soft rock sounds of “Believe It or Not.” I especially like how the drum beat during Morgan’s “Slow-motion man, iron and steel in the palm of your hand” verse is the same drum beat from Prince’s “When You Were Mine.” But ABC network execs weren’t into “Drive.”

The suits wanted another “Believe It or Not,” so they ordered Post and Geyer to write a kinder, gentler theme song for Hardcastle and McCormick’s second season. The duo brought back Scarbury for “Back to Back.” Instead of kicking off with a bang (“Drive!/Push it to the floor till the engine screams”), “Back to Back” kicked off with a whimper (“Two people in two different worlds/Millions of light-years apart”). This is why I kind of resent “Believe It or Not” even though Scarbury sang it well. It’s responsible for the defanging of the Hardcastle and McCormick opening titles.

Jaime Weinman, an expert on the writing styles of Cannell and the writers he surrounded himself with, called the second-season theme “one of the wussiest theme songs of all time” in 2006. Geyer didn’t agree with the suits’ demands for “Drive” to be replaced and wrote in a 2011 email interview with the now-defunct blog Kickin’ It Old School that “I thought from the start that it smacked of network (nitwit?) desperation. So many network executives–so few balls (did I write that out loud?). It seemed to me like trying to keep the Titanic from sinking by replacing the first violinist in the ship’s orchestra. Mike and I wasted no time in writing ‘Back To Back’ and while I thought it was up to our usual high standards as a theme song, I thought the impetus behind replacing ‘Drive’ was misdirected and misguided.”

“Back to Back” was the wrong opening title theme for the type of buddy comedy Hardcastle and McCormick was. Neither Hardcastle nor McCormick were soft rock type of guys like Ralph. They were adrenaline junkies who drove like the demon that drives their dreams.

The switch from “Drive” to “Back to Back” was like if Knight Rider (one of Hardcastle and McCormick’s initial time-slot rivals) suddenly decided to ditch its beloved instrumental theme—a sinewy synth jam everyone from Busta Rhymes to Timbaland has sampled—for a Perfect Strangers-style adult contemporary sapfest about how KITT is always there for Michael. Viewers preferred “Drive” over the two different vocal versions of “Back to Back” Hardcastle and McCormick alternated between in the main titles—however, Post and Carpenter’s instrumental version of “Back to Back” during the end credits was way better than the two vocal versions—so halfway through the second season, Stephen J. Cannell Productions restored “Drive” to the main and end titles.

“Back to Back” wasn’t why Hardcastle and McCormick’s ratings fell hard like Ralph in his red tights. Ohlin, deFonteny, and Walker’s book on Hardcastle and McCormick points out that a combination of Cannell Productions’s need to cut costs—hence the Coyote’s diminished presence in the third season, which alienated fans of the car crashes—and ABC’s decision to pair the show with Monday Night Football brought about its cancellation in 1986.

“Following a summer of preemptions by Monday Night Baseball and preseason football games, and the irregular ending times of the games, the series was hard to find. Its ratings suffered accordingly,” wrote Ohlin, deFonteny, and Walker.

Shout! Studios currently runs 24-hour YouTube streams of Cannell shows like The Greatest American Hero, 21 Jump Street, Wiseguy, and Renegade. Unfortunately, Hardcastle and McCormick isn’t part of the Shout!/Cannell deal because it’s owned by Sony, and the corporation’s Rapid Response YouTube channel, which posts full episodes of Sony-owned hour-long dramas and lots of clips of Barney Miller, Drop Dead Diva, and Justified (three other Sony properties), has posted only a few terrible-looking clips of Hardcastle and McCormick. Its absence from Rapid Response means that the only way for me to watch a bunch of Hardcastle and McCormick episodes for the first time is to click to bootlegs of them in their entirety on Dailymotion, Internet Archive, and YouTube. On YouTube, I watched for the first time 1984’s “D-Day,” the episode where an empty speedboat spectacularly crashes through a shed, which is my favorite Hardcastle and McCormick moment involving an out-of-control vehicle because it reminds me of the speedboat crashing through the LAPD boat in Face/Off.

One of the episodes I watched for the first time over on Dailymotion was 1985’s “Games People Play,” in which McCormick becomes a contestant on a rigged game show. “Games People Play” and the 1986 Sledge Hammer! episode “To Live and Die on TV” have the same gimmick: A real-life game show host plays an evil version of himself. On Hardcastle and McCormick, Tom Kennedy from Name That Tune went homicidal because he was tired of game shows getting whupped in the ratings by sitcoms and action dramas like Cannell’s, while on Sledge Hammer!, David Rasche faced off against Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall. The two episodes are fascinating precursors to the casting of Family Feud host Richard Dawson as my favorite villain in a Schwarzenegger movie in 1987’s The Running Man.

Hardcastle and McCormick wasn’t as great as The Rockford Files. In “The Birthday Present,” which Cannell wrote, he rehashed a lot of his own 1978 Rockford Files script for “White on White and Nearly Perfect”—there’s even a line where McCormick complains to Hardcastle’s handsome and upstanding protégé from the LAPD about how his character flaw is that he doesn’t have any, which is reminiscent of Jim saying, “Lance [White] is perfect. It’s his only flaw”—and the episode doesn’t get interesting until it stops being like one of Tom Selleck’s Rockford Files guest spots as Lance White and turns serious during the courtroom hearing where Hardcastle is shot.

But Keith and Kelly were an entertaining duo—unlike most of the regulars on The A-Team, Keith and Kelly got along well on the set, and their friendship shined through in front of the camera—and they were allowed to ad-lib some of their banter. Kelly came from the worlds of theater and daytime soaps right when soaps were being revitalized by General Hospital executive producer Gloria Monty’s taste for faster-paced storytelling and the ad-libs by Anthony Geary, Kin Shriner, and Tristan Rogers during General Hospital’s comedic scenes. When Kelly started to ad-lib on the set of Hardcastle and McCormick, the crew loved it, and Keith, who was very improvisational on the set of Family Affair, took to Kelly’s unscripted moments as well. Any moment when Kelly broke into song—like when he sang, “Here he comes from out of a nightmare,” to the tune of the Mighty Mouse theme in the scene that’s featured in the above ABC promo for “The Birthday Present”—was clearly unscripted.

One of the show’s best bits of slapstick was McCormick trying to jump onto the rear deck of the Coyote and nearly slipping off the front hood at the start of a car chase in 1984’s “You Would Cry Too, If It Happened to You,” a moment that was added to the opening titles in the third season. That was unscripted.

“It was a deliberate fall on my part (I had warned Brian I was going to do something before they called ‘action’),” said Kelly in Ohlin, deFonteny, and Walker’s book. “I did not know he was going to say, ‘Who do you think you are, Errol Flynn?’ It was the perfect line, very typical for him and the whole crew was laughing—everyone was on the floor.”

As a gung-ho action hero who was over 50, the tongue-in-cheek and scruffily dressed Keith was more fun to watch—and a bit more three-dimensional—than much more solemn older action heroes like Liam Neeson in the Taken movies or Denzel Washington’s violent take on Edward Woodward’s not-as-violent Robert McCall in the movies based on The Equalizer. Weinman was right that “[The A-Team, Hardcastle and McCormick, and Riptide] had one thing going for them that most cheesy action shows didn’t, and that was Cannell himself… no matter how cheesy or derivative the setup, he usually manages to raise the tone of the show with his smart, terse dialogue, balance between humor and seriousness, and ability to make even stereotypical characters interesting. Every character on a Cannell show seems a little more three-dimensional and fleshed out when Cannell is writing for them.”

That shit was true, whether Hardcastle and McCormick were introduced in song as slow-motion men, iron and steel in the palms of their hands, or as—ick—two people in two different worlds millions of light-years apart.