Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Joseph LoDuca’s “The Team” from the earlier seasons of Leverage.

The subject of today’s Couch Avocados header was originally supposed to be the first season of Severance, my current favorite “billionaires suck” show. (I haven’t watched Severance’s second season yet.) But a few people in last week’s comments section brought up that they used to watch ABC’s The Knights of Prosperity, the “stealing from the rich” show that had the misfortune of coming out before the 2008 financial crisis, while TNT’s Leverage became a hit show because it emerged in the middle of the crisis.

By the time the Dow plunged 680 points, TNT viewers were in the mood to see a bunch of offbeat heroes doing the same thing Donal Logue, a pre-Modern Family Sofia Vergara, Kevin Michael Richardson, Maz Jobrani, Josh Grisetti, and the future Jersey dad on The Neighbors tried to do each week in front of an audience that, after three minutes, switched from ABC to Fox to catch American Idol, the behemoth that slew The Knights of Prosperity. Like Timothy Hutton’s Nathan Ford character said in the Leverage opening titles, the rich and powerful take what they want, and his team steals it back for the ordinary folks who were screwed over by the rich. But Leverage Consulting & Associates—which, despite Nate’s death, is eating the rich again, thanks to Prime Video’s Leverage: Redemption—is way more competent than the thieves from the earlier show.

Severance will be postponed to two Thursdays from now. I loved The Knights of Prosperity.

Eugene Gurkin was a janitor cleaning toilets for the Man. When the death of an elderly Black janitor he knew spurred him to pursue his dream of opening his own bar, Eugene gathered together a few New York friends with menial jobs like his—including the beautiful Esperanza Villalobos, a Colombian waitress who escaped her engagement to Enrico Cortez, Colombia’s most vicious drug lord, and is hiding out in America—and formed a plan to rob the apartment of Mick Jagger, who guest-starred in the Knights of Prosperity pilot as himself.

The aspiring bar owner was eager to become a thief even though he was neither slick nor professional like the career thieves in the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven and Michael Mann crime flicks. The Knights of Prosperity’s penultimate episode even guest-starred an actor from Mann’s most beloved crime flick: Heat alum Danny Trejo played a professional safecracker Eugene turns to for help in opening a safe, but the safecracker’s reliance on guns clashes with Eugene’s vision of his crew, the Knights of Prosperity, as “non-violent gentleman thieves.”

Produced by Worldwide Pants, David Letterman’s production company, The Knights of Prosperity was a serialized single-camera comedy: Every week (for the first eight episodes), the Knights had to overcome a comical obstacle to get to their goal of stealing from Jagger. (The show’s original title was Let’s Rob Jeff Goldblum until Goldblum became unavailable, so he was replaced by Jagger, and the title was changed to Let’s Rob Mick Jagger before it was finally The Knights of Prosperity.)

But Jagger was too busy to play himself in additional scenes, so the show wrapped up the arc about Jagger’s luxury apartment (Eugene rescued Esperanza from Enrico, played by Bobby Cannavale, by giving up all of his intel about the absent Jagger’s apartment in exchange for her freedom, but then Enrico and his minions got busted for trying to rob Jagger’s crib) and ended its only season with an unresolved arc about Ray Romano. The comedian played an asshole version of himself that was the complete opposite of his diffident suburban dad persona from Worldwide Pants’s biggest prime-time hit, Everybody Loves Raymond.

The Knights attempted to steal a $1.5 million diamond ring Romano kept in an apartment he rented while he starred as a heroin addict in a terrible Neil LaBute play to try to break out of his Everybody Loves Raymond image. The amusing scene where the Knights cringe at Romano’s awkward performance in the play predicted Chris Rock’s poorly received 2011 Broadway debut in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat (a play that happened to co-star Cannavale).

Logue’s show was the creation of Late Show with David Letterman veterans Jon Beckerman and Rob Burnett, the creators of Ed. (Beckerman and Burnett’s cult favorite about the denizens of fictional Stuckeyville, Ohio was never able to make it to DVD because, as Burnett said in a 2012 Reddit AMA, “At first we were told it was an issue with music clearance, but Jon and I went through and said we would take out all of the non-essential [background-type] music. That issue seemed to get cleared up. Now I think it’s just two big companies who co-own the show — Paramount and NBC/Universal — who can’t agree or don’t care enough.”) I had an account on Television Without Pity when Ed first aired, and I regularly read TWoP’s message board about Ed after I watched each episode. Like David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, Ed was set in a small town and was four shows in one.

Picket Fences was simultaneously a courtroom drama, a cop show (the least entertaining half because, as Sheriff Jimmy Brock, Tom Skerritt was a very shouty lead, and this was the era when Kelley was fond of getting Skerritt and The Practice’s Dylan McDermott to unnecessarily yell out most of their lines), a doctor show, and a provocative family drama about Sheriff Brock’s teen daughter from a previous marriage and Dr. Jill Brock’s two sons with Sheriff Brock coming of age in Rome, Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, Ed was a courtroom comedy full of Frank Capra optimism, and it centered on Tom Cavanagh as Ed Stevens, a recently divorced Manhattan lawyer who moved back to his hometown of Stuckeyville and set up shop in a bowling alley he bought. The courtroom show shared space with a much more irreverent and not-very-Capra-esque show that was about the schemes of Ed’s Stuckeybowl employees and was awash with characters straight out of Late Show sketches like Jimmi Simpson’s bits as Lyle the Intern and the “Pat and Kenny Read Oprah Transcripts” segments.

Schemer Phil Stubbs, Michael Ian Black’s alley manager character, was obsessed with turning a multi-cam sitcom-style catchphrase he made up—“Well, shave my poodle!”—into a popular saying around Stuckeyville. Phil, who was originally played by Logue in Ed’s unaired pilot, was initially the only obnoxious character in the Stuckeybowl scenes. But when Ed hired Eli Goggins, played by paraplegic actor Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, to be Stuckeybowl’s new alley manager, Phil’s scenes became less obnoxious and more enjoyable because of the addition of the charismatic Mitchell as an audience surrogate and an initial antagonist to Phil. I wouldn’t be surprised if Beckerman and Burnett saw Mitchell’s Black teacher character entertainingly putting arrogant white teens in their place in 10 Things I Hate About You (a film I never watched until 2024, and I had no idea Mitchell was in it) and then realized that’s the type of character who should be dealing with Phil (Ed was too timid to put a stop to Phil’s antics).

The third show—a show about Ed’s friendships with Molly Hudson, a childhood friend of his who taught chemistry and was played by Lesley Boone, and Dr. Mike Burton, the fearless and happily married best friend played by Josh Randall, as well as Molly and Mike’s problems in their respective jobs—combined the Capra optimism with the Letterman writers’ caustic and postmodern attitude. Finally, there was the show that aimed to be a weekly rom-com: Ed and socially awkward high-schooler Warren Cheswick (played by Jeepers Creepers-era Justin Long) barged their way into the lives of popular women they were attracted to and demanded to be loved by them because they were Nice Guys. The first three shows were—and are still—hilarious. The fourth one kind of sucked.

I liked Ed the lawyer and loved his silly $10 bets with Mike. (The most memorable $10 bet was Ed betting during lunch that Mike couldn’t say to their waitress, “Burger me.”) But Ed was insufferable during his endless pursuit of the town beauty, English teacher Carol Vessey, who preferred older men who were jerks and was played by a pre-Modern Family Julie Bowen. He didn’t notice that Molly had a bit of a crush on him early on in the first season. (The possibility of Molly pursuing Ed was quickly abandoned.) Also, Kelly Ripa and Sabrina Lloyd’s recurring characters, who, like Eli, Molly, and Mike, were more fun to watch than Carol, made more sense as romantic partners with Ed. Early on in the show’s run, Ed dressed up as a knight in a suit of armor and disrupted Carol’s class to hand her flowers and ask her to be his lady. MADtv’s December 16, 2000 episode amusingly skewered the scenes where Ed stalked Carol in a parody of NBC’s sappy Ed promos. I wish the sketch was still on YouTube.

The best part of the fourth show was Warren’s close friendship with both Mark Vanacor, an overweight kid who acted as a voice of reason for Warren and was played by Michael Genadry, and Diane Snyder, who was played by a pre-Big Love Ginnifer Goodwin and was sort of like Daria Morgendorffer if she had a curly pixie cut and spoke without a monotone. When both Warren and his best friend fell for Diane, Warren shut down, after just one episode, what could have been a boring love triangle and won me, a Cheswick agnostic, over when he grew up and realized that Mark was a better fit with Diane.

The Knights of Prosperity had all of the sense of humor of Ed and none of the tedium of its romantic parts. (Okay, not all of it has aged well: Maz Jobrani, a comedian who is as Iranian American as kookoo sabzi, was never convincing as an Indian immigrant, and the racist wisecracks from Squatch, Lenny Venito’s cantankerous janitor character, about Gourishankar “Gary” Subramaniam, Jobrani’s getaway driver character, in earlier episodes are no fun to revisit because Gourishankar never got to deliver any funny comebacks to Squatch. In a 2007 TV Guide interview, Jobrani said that Gourishankar’s heroes are Donald Trump and Diddy. I wonder how Gourishankar feels about them now.) The Knights of Prosperity character who was the most like the oddballs at Stuckeybowl was the funniest member of Eugene’s crew: a deadpan, baritone-voiced security guard named Rockefeller Butts.

Rockefeller was wonderfully played by Kevin Michael Richardson, whose face might not be familiar to you, but you’ve heard his voice everywhere in animation. On Invincible, Richardson voices the Mauler Twins. He played the Joker on Kids’ WB’s The Batman (it remains the only one of his hundreds of animated roles that landed him Daytime Emmy nominations), and he still voices the principal on American Dad! In “The Return of the King,” the most popular and acclaimed episode of The Boondocks, Richardson took on the central role of Dr. Martin Luther King.

The Knights of Prosperity was the type of caper comedy where the team leader is terrible at things like disguising his identity and jumping fences—even though he’s the team’s mastermind—and he’s nothing without his team. Eugene’s team meeting topics sometimes had nothing to do with robbery or surveillance, like when he spent a whole meeting trying to determine what the Knights’ official theme song should be, and that theme song meeting scene was stolen by Richardson, who often stole scenes on The Knights of Prosperity with just one or two words. (In the series premiere, that one word was “Kenickie.”)

Richardson has a spectacular voice. I love Rockefeller’s pronunciation of the word “naked.” He pronounces it just like how Black Sheep frontman Dres and Adonis Creed pronounce it: “nekkid.” I occasionally find myself imitating Rockefeller’s baritone voice and singing, “Eugene Gurkin was a jani-taaaaaah cleaning toilets for the Man,” on key when I’m alone. Richardson sang The Knights of Prosperity’s catchy theme song, and because this was a Worldwide Pants production, Beckerman and Burnett turned to Late Show bandleader Paul Shaffer to compose and produce the theme (while Beckerman and Burnett wrote the lyrics). Before he was Letterman’s musical director, Shaffer co-wrote the gay anthem “It’s Raining Men” while he was a member of SNL’s house band, and the Knights of Prosperity theme is definitely my favorite song out of all the tunes Shaffer worked on outside of late-night TV.

Bonus track: The Knights of Prosperity pilot, which has been preserved in its entirety on YouTube like the 12 subsequent Knights of Prosperity episodes, is the only episode that doesn’t contain Shaffer’s theme. However, the pilot frequently used “Apache” by Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band as a theme for the Knights. The Incredible Bongo Band version, which has been called the national anthem of hip-hop by Kool Herc, is perfect heist music. And Shaffer’s theme is the perfect anthem for Eugene and his offbeat crew.

One of the show’s running gags was Eugene’s inability to become other people. In the pilot, Eugene was barely convincing as a British doorman at Mick Jagger’s apartment building, and in the third episode, his idea of pretending to be the Jewish owner of the Jewish party supply warehouse where the Knights have their meetings was to wear a coffee filter as a yarmulke, while later on in that same episode, his idea of disguising himself as Jagger inside the Rolling Stones frontman’s building was to don a rubber Halloween mask of Jagger’s face. Meanwhile, Richardson is a terrific impressionist. I wish I could find a clip of him perfectly imitating Mark Hamill’s regular voice. Richardson does my favorite William Shatner impression.

Maurice LaMarche, whose impression of Shatner hosting Rescue 911 is one of the funniest moments from The Critic, is a fan of Richardson’s Shatner impression. On his YouTube account, LaMarche got Richardson to recreate Captain Kirk’s goofy-looking way of running across the surfaces of alien planets in Star Trek episodes like “The Empath.”

When they imitated Shatner, the late Joe Alaskey, Kevin Pollak, and Will Sasso were doing 1969 Shatner, a.k.a. Shatner overacting and dramatically pausing in Star Trek’s humorless third and final season, where everybody was directed to act like they’re in what we now call a telenovela, probably to make up for the third-season budget being slashed. Richardson is the only Shatner impressionist who does present-day Shatner, a.k.a. Boston Legal-era Shatner, who is aware of all the comedians’ dramatic pauses when they make fun of him, so he doesn’t pause as much when he speaks.

The Knights of Prosperity made me a fan of Richardson and his hundreds of voices, whether it’s the voice of present-day Shatner or the voice of Principal Lewis. Beckerman and Burnett’s show appears frequently in “Name a show you’re positive no one remembers but you” quote posts on Bluesky, and that’s today’s prompt. I feel like I’m the only guy who remembers Outpost, an unsold 1989 sci-fi western pilot that aired only once on CBS and starred Joanna Going, who can currently be seen on The Pitt, as the young marshal of a human outpost on an alien planet, and Station Zero, an animated MTV show that attempted to be a Bronx hip-hop version of Beavis and Butt-Head.

Outpost should have been a weekly series. If it had lasted for two or three seasons, sci-fi fans would have sung its praises in Women’s History Month articles about Ellen Ripley, Captain Janeway, Ahsoka Tano, Wynonna Earp, and other female lead characters in sci-fi during March. Station Zero was basically Desus vs. Mero long before the existence of that first podcast from Desus Nice and the Kid Mero, the Bronx’s favorite sons. However, Station Zero was as animated as Don Cornelius’s neck. The more fluidly animated Downtown, future Titmouse, Inc. co-founder Chris Prynoski’s one-season wonder, was a more enjoyable animated MTV show about New York teens and 20-somethings. Do you have an equivalent of Outpost and Station Zero that, to other people, sounds like it’s as unreal as Dad’s Casa?