Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Like In the Heat of the Night and Stargate SG-1, Netflix’s Dear White People was a sequel series to a hit movie instead of a thorough redo of a movie like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Parenthood were. Tessa Thompson, Teyonah Parris, and Tyler James Williams didn’t reprise their lead roles from Justin Simien’s amusing 2014 movie of the same name, which Simien based on his experiences as an undergrad at Chapman University, an Orange County liberal arts college, and they were replaced by, respectively, Logan Browning, Antoinette Robertson, and DeRon Horton. However, Thompson and Williams resurfaced on the show in smaller and completely different roles.

Simien wrote and directed several episodes and co-showran the TV version with veteran A Different World writer and Living Single creator Yvette Lee Bowser. Then after Bowser left, Simien promoted staff writer Jaclyn Moore to co-showrunner. Like the 2014 movie, Dear White People revolved around the Black students at the fictional Ivy League school of Winchester University.

But the scope was greater than the movie’s: Each episode spotlighted a different main character from the growing ensemble (think the character-driven approach the late Michael Piller brought to one of Simien’s favorite shows, Star Trek: The Next Generation, when he took it over and rescued it from mediocrity), and this time, the students at Armstrong-Parker House dealt with more than just white supremacy and the challenges of an intersectional existence. The TV version addressed abortion-related worries, hotep culture, the disappointment of finding out your favorite Black mentor has just been #MeToo’d, and, in a harrowing, partially non-comedic episode that was beautifully directed by Barry Jenkins, police racism.

Bowser’s old show about HBCU life, the beloved A Different World, sometimes got preachy, and it resulted in one of In Living Color’s best sketches from its later and much less funny seasons, a brutal A Different World parody called A Different Message. Dear White People never got preachy when it confronted hot-button topics, and it was more mischievous than A Different World, particularly in its annual tradition of clips from a show-within-the-show Sam and her classmates watched in their dorms or at viewing parties at A-P House. They hate-watched the Empire-esque backstabbing on Prince O’ Pal-ities and talked back at the screen while watching a Scandal-esque nighttime soap called Defamation.

Even though I never watched The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, Dear White People’s jokes regarding footage from an untitled, dystopian hour-long indictment of cults and its unnamed lead actress, a celebrity who’s a member of a cult, were pretty funny as well.

I watched only the first three seasons of Dear White People. I have zero interest in the fourth and final season because Simien changed his show to a musical. I enjoyed Crazy Ex-Girlfriend—none of its musical numbers were terrible, and its depiction of Filipino Americans in California was dead-on, thanks to Pinoy staff writer Rene Gube, who recurred as a weed-loving Catholic priest named Father Brah—but otherwise, I can’t stand musical theater.

On YouTube, there’s a clip of a 2022 Zoom interview that reunited Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis with Alice Krige, their Star Trek: First Contact co-star. When Frakes says he’d like to direct a musical, and that gets Sirtis to mention her wish to sing and dance in Les Misérables and Mamma Mia, Frakes is so disgusted by the thought of both the Broadway version of the Victor Hugo novel and Mamma Mia that he runs his fingers through his hair and groans exactly like Vice Admiral Janeway did after Admiral Jellico ordered her to destroy the Protostar and kill every kid aboard it if the Romulans seize it. That’s exactly how I feel about musical theater.

Because it has been Black History Month, every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month has been from a “first Black something” or a TV project that was created or helmed by a Black writer or filmmaker.

On February 6, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s “Gun Threat” from Luke Cage was at the center of my very brief post on how fantastic it was for an MCU project to be scored by both the producer of Ghostface Killah’s Twelve Reasons to Die and the beatmaker for A Tribe Called Quest. On February 13, Michael Gore’s theme from NBC’s Generations kicked off a very long post about the first Black daytime soap, which is now no longer the only Black daytime soap, thanks to the existence of CBS’s Beyond the Gates. Then on February 20, Terence Blanchard’s “Levees” from When the Levees Broke was at the center of a brief post where I said that When the Levees Broke was one of several exceptional TV projects that deserved to be added to the Criterion Collection. The final Original TV Score Selection of the Week in February is Kris Bowers’s “All About Reggie” from Dear White People’s first season.

Bowers has had a successful last few years, thanks to his work on Bridgerton, a show I’ve never watched, and the first animated project he scored, The Wild Robot, a movie I haven’t seen yet. His original scores for Dear White People nicely reflected his own experience—he came from a jazz and classical music background while also vibing out to ’90s hip-hop and the work of film composers like Bernard Herrmann and Howard Shore—as well as Simien’s urge to show that Black people aren’t a monolith. He created a theme for each main character—Chris Westlake preferred not to do that on Star Trek: Lower Decks, while Nami Melumad, who, like Bowers, scored an installment of Star Trek: Short Treks, assigned a different theme to each main character on Star Trek: Prodigy—so, for instance, Lionel, the campus journalist who idolizes Geordi La Forge and comes out early on in the first season, received a theme that was modeled after classical music.

“With Reggie, it was a pretty clear choice that he had to be 50s-era and 60s-era jazz because he’s the most present example of activism in Civil Rights,” said Bowers to Score It Magazine in 2017. “He comes directly from that era, so we felt that we had to do jazz for Reggie and for that entire episode. That becomes his sound throughout and it starts to blend into some of the other characters’ sounds.”

Reggie, the subject of the Dear White People episode Jenkins directed, was played by Marque Richardson, who originated the role in the movie version and was phenomenal in Jenkins’s episode. His theme slaps.

Today’s prompt is: Which TV show that was based on a movie surpassed the movie?

Two words: Stargate SG-1.