Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Because it’s Black History Month, every Original TV Score Selection of the Week in February is from a “first Black something” or a TV project that was created or helmed by a Black writer or filmmaker.

I kind of wish the 1973 screen version of Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door—the film stars the late Lawrence Cook as Dan Freeman, a Black CIA employee who never gets to be an agent in the field and quits the agency to start a Black revolution—was a TV project instead of a feature film, so that I could give it some love here. It’s a movie where lots of racists die. I fucking love it.

Door was directed by the late Ivan Dixon, a.k.a. Kinch from Hogan’s Heroes, who, as UCLA Magazine said a couple of months ago, “was part of a generation of Black entertainers who fought for more professional opportunities and for more nuanced portrayals of Black characters on screen.” After Door, Dixon went on to direct a ton of Rockford Files and Magnum, P.I. episodes. My favorite Dixon-directed Rockford episode is 1979’s “The Battle-Ax and the Exploding Cigar,” a great “Jim Rockford finds himself a cog in a heartless machine” episode that reminds me a lot of The Anderson Tapes—wow, I didn’t know Pinoy animator Louie del Carmen likes The Anderson Tapes and has written a brief blog post about it, which blows my mind because I thought I was the only Pinoy who likes that 1971 heist flick—and the episode even used in its intertitles a funky white electronic font that’s similar to the yellow font in the Anderson Tapes opening titles.

Dixon’s film was comfort-food entertainment to me in the late 2010s—the early years of our current dystopia—just like how the 1969 book version must have comforted the late Nipsey Hussle, who said he was Dan Freeman infiltrating the power structure outside South Central in the 2018 track “Blue Laces 2.” FX rejected Lee Daniels’s 2021 pilot for a new adaptation of Door. The only Lee Daniels projects I’ve watched are The Butler and Empire. I’m not a fan of either of those projects, so I don’t think he was the right director for an updated version of Door. Boots Riley would have been the perfect director for Door. I bet he would have either changed the setting from Chicago to his home turf of Oakland or expanded the story’s scope so that Oakland is involved.

If Dixon were alive today, I wonder if he would have directed an episode of Luke Cage.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is an Adrian Younge/Ali Shaheed Muhammad banger called “Gun Threat,” from the first season of Luke Cage. I could easily picture Ghostface Killah or the late MF DOOM freestyling to the second half of this tune.

I grew up listening to A Tribe Called Quest, so I was thrilled when Luke Cage showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker got Muhammad, ATCQ’s beatmaker, and Younge to score the show. The founder of the Linear Labs record label, Younge wrote the score to Black Dynamite, partnered up with Ghostface on the solid 2013 album Twelve Reasons to Die (and its sequel), and collaborated with Souls of Mischief on the equally solid 2014 album There Is Only Now. Younge and Muhammad’s instrumentals for the show turned out to be—sweet Christmas—terrific.

There’s no prompt today. I left my prompt in El Segundo.