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 Cannell, and they’re being spotlighted in chronological order.

The Rockford Files is Cannell’s masterpiece. (Sometimes it’s Juanita Bartlett’s masterpiece.) The A-Team is junk food that tastes good but has little substance. Hardcastle and McCormick is a delivered pizza, occasionally classed up by a glass of wine (a.k.a. the occasional moments of depth when co-creator Patrick Hasburgh dealt with Hardcastle’s long-ago loss of his son or McCormick’s complicated feelings about the father who abandoned both him and his mother).

As for Stingray, it’s a McDonald’s Happy Meal in an all-black box designed by Kenneth Cole.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Post and Pete Carpenter’s main title theme from Stingray, not to be confused with Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Stingray. The first Cannell show where Walter Murphy (Seth MacFarlane’s regular composer), not Post and Carpenter, was the regular composer, as well as the first of many Cannell shows that were filmed in Vancouver because it’s cheaper to shoot in Canada, Stingray starred Canadian actor Nick Mancuso—the uncredited voice of the obscene phone caller in the original Black Christmas—as a dashing vigilante who goes only by “Ray.” He uses skills he picked up from his past life in the intelligence field to help out anyone who requests—through an ad he posts in the Friday classified section—his services, which he does for free.

“The world runs on money. Everybody walks around with this invisible number in their heads. You hit the figure close enough, the penny drops, you own the man… I take money out of the equation. My hands don’t sweat because I’m never at the pay window,” says Ray to his client in Stingray’s two-hour pilot.

The ex-spy who uses a pre-Craigslist classified ad to get clients sounds like the original version of The Equalizer, but Stingray actually existed before The Equalizer (the Stingray pilot premiered two months before The Equalizer’s debut), and it was a lot more Zen than the other show. The calm and collected Ray isn’t shouty (except when he’s undercover as an asylum inmate or a stressed-out movie director) and very pissed off about the things he did for his old agency like the Edward Woodward version of Robert McCall often was on The Equalizer.

Ray’s favorite thing is to request a favor from a past client to help him save a current client. He prefers barter systems over currency. Ray is basically a one-man Leverage team. His martial arts expertise, his hacking skills, his photographic memory, and his Derek Flint-esque ability to slow his heart rate would have annoyed the fuck out of Jim Rockford—I can see his eyes rolling now over that list of Ray’s abilities—if he had to join forces with Ray like in the Rockford Files episodes where he had to partner up with much more glamorous private eyes like Louis Gossett Jr.’s Marcus Hayes and Tom Selleck’s Lance White.

I can also picture Jim’s Okie-accented reaction to Ray’s barter system, especially because Jim immediately charges clients $200 a day, plus expenses: “He doesn’t accept cash. That makes as much sense as eating a taco with a fork.”

Because Stingray was created by Cannell, Ray drives around in a sports car: a black 1965 Corvette Sting Ray.

Stingray was one of many shows where I tuned in just to hear the theme and then changed the channel. Its fast-cutting opening title sequence, combined with Post and Carpenter’s terrific theme, was dazzling.

The opening titles landed title designer Betty Green, who created the opening titles for Murder, She Wrote and Airwolf, an Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Design. (Green’s most famous title sequence came about four years later. That was the original Law & Order’s opening title sequence, which also featured original music by Post.) The Stingray intro’s memorable shot of a drug kingpin’s cane handle in the shape of an eagle’s head comes from the pilot, a movie-of-the-week that looked so damn good because its cinematographer was Ron García, who went on to be the cinematographer for both the Twin Peaks pilot and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (two things a lot of David Lynch fans must have been replaying in the last few days because of Lynch’s death).

The original broadcast version of the Stingray pilot was different from the version of the pilot that’s currently accessible on the Shout! TV streaming service and Shout! Studios’s YouTube channel. When 90-minute Rockford Files episodes were split by MCA TV, Universal’s syndicated TV division, into two parts for syndication, MCA TV inserted interminable “Previously on…” recaps and tedious driving scenes. Stephen J. Cannell Productions did something stranger: It removed an entire subplot from the Stingray pilot when it split the movie-of-the-week into two parts. That’s not all that’s missing from the pilot.

The entrance music for the villainous drug kingpin—played by Gregory Sierra, fresh off his departure from Miami Vice after its first four episodes because he hated working in Miami—was originally a Top 40 hit nobody in forums about Stingray is able to remember because the pilot’s original broadcast version is nowhere to be found anymore. A couple of YouTube commenters claimed it was a Phil Collins track. It’s highly unlikely that it was “In the Air Tonight,” the most memorable part of the Miami Vice pilot.

Cannell’s indie studio refused to pay for the rights to recognizable rock songs that were used in the original broadcast versions of episodes of its shows, so after the ’90s, they were replaced with generic music by unknown bands. Sierra’s entrance music was changed to an extended version of the Stingray main title theme, which makes no sense because it’s Ray’s theme. God, I wish there was some way to watch the Stingray pilot before it was butchered.

The pilot was burned off by NBC in the summer of 1985. But its Nielsen ratings were so high that NBC changed its mind about rejecting Stingray and added it to its schedule. Future Nowhere Man creator Lawrence Hertzog showran Stingray’s first season, and then The A-Team co-creator Frank Lupo replaced Hertzog in the second and final one.

Eleven years after Stingray’s cancellation, ABC’s dark-humored Vengeance Unlimited had a premise that was similar to Stingray’s. A show I watched instead of Friends, the time-slot rival that caused its demise (I hate Friends), Vengeance Unlimited starred Michael Madsen as the mysterious Mr. Chapel. It remains my favorite role of his. Chapel’s business is carrying out vengeance on behalf of ordinary people whose lives have been ruined by greedy millionaires, crooked cops, or sexual predators, but he never uses guns, and he never resorts to murder.

Chapel runs cons on the bullies who escaped punishment or conviction. For instance, the villain in “Legalese” is a devious lawyer who buried evidence that a fertilizer made by his client, a corporation, causes respiratory illness to kids. In the funniest of the dirty tricks Chapel plays on the lawyer and his accomplices, Chapel kidnaps one of the corporation’s complicit lab workers and the lawyer’s tight-lipped investigator and forces the uncooperative investigator to talk by making him think he’s chainsawing the lab worker to death in another room (Chapel is actually chainsawing a slab of raw beef in front of the frightened lab worker).

“Legalese” is stolen by the late James Avery—best known as a dad who’s a judge on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—as an impatient judge who despises lawyers who defend inhumane corporations. Like Vengeance Unlimited’s other 15 episodes, “Legalese” is preserved in its entirety on Internet Archive. (A Warner Bros. Television production that was murdered in the ratings by Warner Bros. Television’s biggest show at the time, Vengeance Unlimited has never been released on disc by Warner Archive.)

If the villain of the week has a group of associates, Chapel is fond of sowing dissension in the group or repeatedly punching out the biggest dog in the yard. Chapel’s fee is $1 million, but if his client can’t afford it, he will, like Ray, call on them later to do him a favor that will help him destroy the life of another evil bastard. After a favor was completed, Chapel’s favorite thing to say was “We’re even. I’m out of your life. Forever.”

Vengeance Unlimited was created by former Lois & Clark staff writers John McNamara (who, prior to Vengeance Unlimited, co-created Profit for Cannell’s indie studio) and David Simkins. I prefer Vengeance Unlimited over Stingray. That’s because most of Post and lyricist Stephen Geyer’s original songs for Stingray haven’t aged well, and I hate the scene where the very Caucasian Ray goes undercover as a Mexican in a food truck to eavesdrop on lunchtime chatter between cops in “Sometimes You Gotta Sing the Blues.”

The taco truck scene is as terrible as Hannibal’s racist disguises on The A-Team. (However, in “Ancient Eyes,” Ray’s disguise as a Mexican migrant worker at an exploitative marijuana farm fails to convince Marco Rodríguez’s character—a Mexican deputy sheriff who fought in Vietnam just like Ray did—that he’s one of the workers. The deputy sheriff notices the Hollywood fakeness of Ray’s accent and the special forces fighting techniques in Ray’s moves. There should have been a scene like that in You Only Live Twice where a Japanese person looks at Bond’s disguise as a Japanese fisherman and says in Japanese, “There’s no way in hell you’re Japanese.” But despite not being much of a fan of Ray’s brownface disguise, the deputy sheriff becomes Ray’s ally.) Also, Madsen played Chapel with a mischievous edge that’s more appealing to me than Mancuso’s more earnest approach to Ray.

“You know that show, uh, Touched by an Angel? Well, this ain’t it,” says Chapel to his wealthy target of humiliation at the end of “Friends,” Vengeance Unlimited’s final episode.

As K.C. Griffin, a paralegal and former client of Chapel’s, Kathleen York, who later recurred on The West Wing as Andy, Toby’s congresswoman ex-wife, and on In the Dark as the lead character’s adoptive mom, was a believably written and attractive audience surrogate and a great foil to Madsen’s anti-heroics. K.C. humanized Chapel—much like how the companions in the Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat eras of Doctor Who humanized the Doctor.

In terms of being a female foil to an eccentric vigilante, K.C. was much better written than Melinda Culea’s Amy Allen, a potentially intriguing journalist character in the mold of a Howard Hawks heroine in the A-Team pilot, but then that Hawksian personality disappeared by the time of the second A-Team episode NBC aired. Amy was a non-entity by the time of Culea’s last few episodes before The A-Team fired Culea.

At the start of Vengeance Unlimited’s run, Chapel collects a favor from K.C., but she isn’t comfortable with his twisted tactics. She later changes her mind about Chapel and talks him into letting her be his assistant. By the second episode, she’s knocking back popcorn like a Vengeance Unlimited viewer and laughing while she sits next to Chapel and watches him annoy on the phone a publicity-hungry FBI profiler who refuses to admit that he wrongly sent Chapel’s innocent client to prison.

In some episodes, there isn’t a client of the week, so K.C. directs Chapel to an injustice in progress like the kidnapping of the wife of an undercover cop who testified against a right-wing gun manufacturer who does business with Nazis in “Justice.” G.I. Robot from Creature Commandos would appreciate the comeuppance those Nazis receive at the end of “Justice.”

Vengeance Unlimited leaves hints that Chapel is avenging his wife’s death, but the pain from that loss is still so raw that he’s unable to say her name or open up about her death to K.C. We know zip about Chapel’s past, while we know a little more about Ray: He fought in Vietnam and was trained by an evil spymaster (played by Robert Vaughn right before he was cast in The A-Team’s final season as General Stockwell, the team’s new boss).

Stingray has its own 24-hour YouTube stream as part of Shout! Studios’s streaming deal with Cannell’s indie studio, so I finally caught a bunch of Stingray episodes. In the last three months, I watched a ton of episodes of Cannell shows for the first time in preparation for writing these pieces about them. I burned through nine A-Team episodes and 13 Hardcastle and McCormick episodes I never saw before. (The Rockford Files is the only Cannell show I saw every episode of, and it’s now the only Cannell show I own in its entirety on physical media because I got sick of The Rockford Files running away from streamers like it was Ray driving away from clients who fell in love with him without saying goodbye.) I’m glad I didn’t play a drinking game while watching The A-Team and Hardcastle and McCormick on the internet because if I took a shot every time a car flipped over, I’d be dead from alcohol poisoning.

One of the 10 Stingray episodes I watched for the first time on YouTube was “Ether,” whose title makes it sound like it’s a 47-minute Jay-Z diss track by Nas. “Ether” has nothing to do with the quality of Jay-Z’s bars. Ray goes undercover as a fake surgeon named Rastelli to investigate for his client of the week, a British surgeon, suspicious patient deaths at his hospital, but then he runs into a problem where he—a guy who was never a surgeon—has to do actual surgery in the OR. One of Stingray’s most far-fetched plot twists reveals that Ray isn’t in the OR. An American surgeon who was one of Ray’s past clients is doing him a favor: Right before the operation, Ray sent him to don a surgical mask and trick hospital staffers into thinking he’s Dr. Rastelli, so he’s the one who’s doing the cutting instead.

A much better episode than “Ether” is my favorite one out of the Stingray episodes I watched for the first time: “Caper,” Stingray’s only comedy episode. Cleverly written by Evan Lawrence, whose only other writing credit is “Third Down and Twenty Years to Life,” the Hardcastle and McCormick episode where an embarrassed McCormick unconvincingly poses as a college student, “Caper” finds Ray assembling for a rescue mission aboard a cruise ship a team that includes a commercial actor played by Soap alum Robert Mandan. But nothing goes right during Ray’s meticulously planned mission.

The actor poses as a captain, but he’s a terrible improviser. The female con artist Ray sends to distract a guard with her beauty fails to seduce the guard. The thief Ray brought along with him to help him rescue his client’s kidnapped father sucks so much at burglary that he would have gotten caught stealing a ballpoint pen at a gas station shop. Ray loses his cool for once. The charming “Caper” is like a ’60s Mission: Impossible episode where Rollin, Cinnamon, Barney, and Willy get sloppy, and Jim Phelps wants to slam his head against the wall and disavow any knowledge of the day.

Mancuso’s show was one of several Miami Vice clones in the ’80s. While other Miami Vice clones tried to emulate the pairing of Crockett and Tubbs, the music montages, and the gaudy fashions, Stingray was only interested in emulating the montages. As the second longest-running Miami Vice clone (Houston Knights was the longest-running one at 31 episodes), Stingray is alright. But it’s no Vengeance Unlimited, and the original songs Post and Geyer created for Stingray are far from Post and Geyer’s best work. However, like Jaime Weinman said, Stingray was one of several Cannell shows that had an edge over other cheesy ’80s action shows because of the dialogue in episodes that were written by Cannell (instead of by colleagues who tried to imitate his style but weren’t as good at it).

“His dialogue was something I always noticed from an early age: it was perfect TV dialogue, never too verbose but not dripping with clichés either, and injecting humor at unexpected times without killing the mood,” wrote Weinman when Cannell died in 2010. “It’s stylized dialogue in the best sense, punchier and pithier than the way real people talk, but not too ‘writerly’ to make us think of the person typing it out, rather than the character saying it. (One example I always like is from the pilot of Stingray: ‘You do that on purpose, don’t you? You love these broken-field conversations. I make these diving grabs and come up with grass on my chin and you love it.’) Even if the show wasn’t very good – and, as showrunner, he has to be faulted for that – the actual scripting could be solid coming from him.”

I know I keep going back to Weinman’s old blog posts about Cannell shows. Well, he was the best at analyzing Cannell’s writing or Post’s approach to composing main title themes. The author of 2021’s Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes always said a lot more about Cannell than just “The hero’s car rocks, dude.” I pointed out earlier that when Stingray was on linear TV, I never stuck with it past the opening titles even though the main title theme was a killer instrumental. Now that I’ve been watching Stingray for the first time, I like Post and Carpenter’s main title theme even more now because of what Weinman once pointed out about Post’s composing skills.

“[Post] understood that successful TV shows are about characters, not situations, and that therefore a good theme song should introduce you to the characters,” said Weinman in a 2004 post about why composer Ian Freebairn-Smith’s jazzy opening title theme in the first 11 episodes of Magnum, P.I. was a failure that was replaced by co-creator Donald P. Bellisario with Post and Carpenter’s much more famous theme.

Freebairn-Smith’s brain was stuck in the era of Mannix, so he wrote a Mannix-style instrumental that failed to reflect the character of Thomas Magnum—a younger guy than Joe Mannix and the type of P.I. who was allergic to business suits—and was all about the glamour of being a P.I. in an idyllic setting, which was more of a Glen A. Larson thing than a Bellisario thing. (Larson co-created Magnum, P.I., but he had nothing to do with the show after Bellisario overhauled Larson’s terribly written draft of a script about a security consultant on an estate, turned the consultant and his two buddies into Vietnam vets, and changed the setting from Bel-Air to Hawaii.) Post and Carpenter’s instrumental worked because they made their theme about Magnum.

Weinman said that “instead of telling us that this is some cheesy private-eye show that happens to take place in Hawaii, [Post and Carpenter’s theme] tells us that this is a show about a really cool and fun character… The pulsating opening theme, the string tune that follows it, the electric guitar solo, all tell us to expect something from the main character (he’s adventurous, he’s romantic, he’s a Vietnam vet) and from the show itself (a mixture of several different styles).”

Post and Carpenter’s main title themes from The A-Team and Stingray are also beautifully constructed character portraits. The A-Team theme is divided into three acts: the Elmer Bernstein-style section that represents the four fugitives’ raucousness as a military-trained team, the electric guitar-driven middle section (I always thought it was a motif about Amy and a riff on early Pat Benatar because of the Benatar-esque bandana headband Amy wore in the pilot, but it’s actually a riff on “Sunshine of Your Love” and a motif about the team’s past in Vietnam), and a final restatement of the Bernstein-style section. The Stingray theme has a nifty three-act structure as well: a slightly sinister-sounding opening section that says, “I don’t know whether to trust this mysterious stranger or not,” followed by a middle section anchored by a fanfare that says, “Yeah, you can trust him because he’s capable of empathy,” and a final restatement of the “man of mystery” stuff.

Even though Stingray wasn’t one of the successful shows Weinman referred to, Post and Carpenter remembered once again during the inception of Stingray as a weekly series that these themes for these hour-long action shows are fantastic when they’re about the characters, not the situations.

Bonus track: Stingray was a darker-looking Cannell show, so instead of an end title sequence that played back lighthearted clips from the preceding episode, the end titles consisted of serious-looking stills of the Stingray crew shooting the preceding episode. As the ’80s wore on, Cannell tried to branch out from buddy comedies and went darker, so in addition to the Miami Vice-inspired vibe on Stingray, his production company experimented with ambitious serialization (Wiseguy), a three-part adaptation of a Dallas Barnes novel about sex crimes (Hunter’s “City of Passion” arc), and a creepy procedural about Feds who rely on forensics and profiling to track down serial killers (Unsub). For the main title theme from Unsub, the creation of Wiseguy writers David J. Burke and Stephen Kronish, Post dabbled in horror, and it’s more unsettling than Mark Snow’s main title theme from The X-Files.

Richard Kind was a regular on Unsub, and his memories of NBC president Brandon Tartikoff’s reaction to its pilot are among the highlights of Will Harris’s 2015 A.V. Club “Random Roles” interview with Kind.

“The pilot is so dark that the villain, played by Paul Guilfoyle, from the original C.S.I., is a cobbler, a shoemaker, who puts razor blades in the heels of women’s shoes so that when they try them on, they bend over in pain and he stabs them in the back of the neck with an awl,” said Kind to Harris. “Cannell shows the pilot to Tartikoff, and in the middle of the screening, Tartikoff stands up and goes, ‘What the fuck are trying [sic] to do, close down this entire network?’ And Cannell… We were already into our fifth show or something, so Cannell just goes, ‘Well, this is 13 and out.’ Which it was… But then the next thing you know, you’ve got Law & Order, C.S.I., Criminal Minds, and all these shows about killers and what goes on in the forensic crime labs and how they find the killers–that’s what has taken over TV. But Unsub was the first one.”

Next week is the final week of Cannell-ary, which concludes with the Cannell drama that, like Unsub, paved the way for a bunch of hour-long dramas that took the Cannell show’s unique premise to another level.