Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

I’m three episodes into Deli Boys, the new Hulu/Onyx Collective single-camera comedy created by Abdullah Saeed and showrun by Michelle Nader (a writer from the extremely racist 2 Broke Girls, which made me initially skeptical about Deli Boys, but it’s nothing like 2 Broke Girls). It’s gory, hilarious, and more sharply written than I expected. My only familiarity with Asif Ali was his voice work on Star Trek: Lower Decks as Ensign Asif, Boimler’s delta shift counterpart and one of Boims, Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford’s adversaries. On Deli Boys, he has great chemistry with Saagar Shaikh.

Ali and Shaikh star as, respectively, Mir and Raj Dar, a pair of wealthy Pakistani American Muslim brothers in Philadelphia. (It’s not actually Philly. Deli Boys was filmed in Chicago.) They discover that the successful convenience store chain that was started by their Baba (Urdu for “Dad”), who was recently killed by a golf ball to the head right in front of their eyes, is a front for a cocaine ring that’s being targeted by the FBI. Like the aspiring crooks in the subject of last week’s Couch Avocados piece, The Knights of Prosperity, Mir and Raj know nothing about how to be criminals. (Everything Raj knows about crime comes from watching Better Call Saul.) But unlike the Knights, the brothers never wanted to be criminals.

Mir constantly brags about his MBA and wants to start a life with his pharma rep fiancée. Raj, the less uptight older brother who thinks of himself as a Pakistani Rick Rubin, is a lazy pothead who just wants to spend the day enjoying an “orgy cabal” with Prairie, his shaman girlfriend played by Alfie Fuller. But then Lucky Auntie, one of Baba’s consiglieri and the only female gangster in Baba’s crew of department heads, storms into Mir and Raj’s lives with a gun in her hand, picks her unqualified nephews to take over Baba’s half of the business, and teaches them the ins and outs of the coke mob like a homicidal, non-singing Miss Nancy from Romper Room. Poorna Jagannathan was my favorite cast member on Never Have I Ever, a show I have mixed feelings about (and quit halfway through its run), and as Lucky Auntie, she steals the show and runs off with it in stiletto heels.

I was expecting something along the lines of the unwatchable Mafia Mamma—I never got past its corny trailer—and what I got was a rich depiction of the Pakistani American immigrant experience that’s relatable (even though I’m Filipino) and lighthearted but also unapologetically bloody.

Speaking of extremely gory shows…

Invincible’s third-season finale dropped this morning. It contains the best animation in the show’s run so far. I was never a Walking Dead fan. (I got tired of it after the first five seasons and never went back.) Fans of The Walking Dead will love this finale because of the epic rematch between Steven Yeun and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, while I was more enthusiastic about the brief guest spot by a horror comedy legend in the finale’s mid-credits scene.

As for last week’s Invincible episode (a massive battle between the GDA and Angstrom Levy’s army of evil Invincibles from alternate realities), I realized both Paradise’s first season and Invincible’s third season—in addition to the presence of Sterling K. Brown in both things—came out with penultimate episodes that were designed to increase the viewer’s stress level. Paradise’s “The Day” was not only better, but it managed to unsettle me without repeatedly decapitating people.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is John Paesano’s “Criminal Lives” from Invincible’s “You Want a Real Costume, Right?” episode. The instrumental was written for the third-season episode’s remarkable seven-minute opening montage, which contains no dialogue and traces the descent of Tether Tyrant and Magmaniac, a pair of background characters who are dating each other. Both men want out of the supervillain business because they’re too empathetic to be henchmen, but hardships at both the diner where they work and their crummy apartment building force them to live out on the street and return to crime.

Invincible, a.k.a. Mark Grayson, briefly appears in the montage as a combatant against Tether Tyrant and Magmaniac. It’s one of the few moments on the show where the Invincible we’ve known since the first episode (instead of one of his evil multiverse counterparts) comes off as unsympathetic. The montage exemplifies one of the strengths of Prime Video’s animated adaptation of the now-defunct Image superhero comic: its ability to show that the working stiffs who took jobs with the enemies of Invincible and the Guardians of the Globe have inner lives and are human beings just like Invincible, Atom Eve (voiced by Gillian Jacobs), and their fellow superheroes.

Comics veteran Jay Faerber, who wrote a ton of episodes of CBS’s Zoo and the CW’s Supergirl and has a great Bluesky account, penned “You Want a Real Costume, Right?” I wouldn’t be surprised if Faerber was influenced by Dennis Haysbert’s scenes in Heat as a hapless ex-con who hates his mean boss (played by a slightly unrecognizable Bud Cort) at the greasy spoon where he works when he wrote Tether Tyrant and Magmaniac’s wordless scenes. (Maybe I should ask Faerber about that on Bluesky. He clicked “Like” on my reply to his comment about not being able to remember the existence of the short-lived ’90s legal drama The Antagonists. I said I never watched The Antagonists either, but CBS promoted the hell out of it during The Flash, a show I did watch.)

Invincible comic co-creator Robert Kirkman, who has written several episodes of the star-studded animated version, recently revealed that Bryan Cranston repeatedly turned down roles he and the show’s other producers offered to him. I wonder if the “Criminal Lives” montage will change Cranston’s mind about blowing off Invincible.

A Slashfilm article on Cranston’s ambivalence about Invincible pointed out that he’s no stranger to voice acting: He dubbed a main character for the English dub of Macross Plus long before his central roles on Malcolm in the Middle and Breaking Bad. He also voiced a young Jim Gordon in the 2011 animated adaptation of Batman: Year One. (Slashfilm left out Cranston’s lead role as elderly superhero Titanium Rex on SuperMansion, Crackle’s now-defunct stop-motion animated superhero sitcom.) The article included a quote from a 2018 Screen Geek interview where Cranston said he’s only interested in the superhero genre if he’s offered a character that hasn’t been done before.

“I want to play an antagonist a fraction smarter than the protagonist, never dumbed down to give the hero an easy win. That’s frustrating and boring to watch,” said Cranston to Screen Geek.

I never followed the Invincible comic, so I don’t know if there are any adversaries outside of Omni-Man—Invincible’s Viltrumite father and the show’s formerly evil Superman counterpart (in fact, Kirkman originally named him Supra-Man, but Image didn’t want to get sued by DC)—and Levy who are exactly what Cranston wants. Most of the adversaries Invincible has fought on the show so far were either defeated by him or, in the case of Powerplex, the supervillain voiced by Aaron Paul, Cranston’s old Breaking Bad co-star, are too consumed by power and rage to do anything right.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Invincible’s Fangoria-friendly reputation turned off Cranston. When The Pitt cast member Taylor Dearden, Cranston’s daughter, was 17, she fainted at a Breaking Bad season premiere screening in a theater after watching Gus slit Victor’s throat. Breaking Bad remains the goriest thing on Cranston’s résumé. (On a similar note, the late, great Gene Hackman famously had no interest in doing Unforgiven because his daughters were upset by the violence in several of his movies, but Clint Eastwood persuaded him to change his mind.)

Today’s prompt: If you have watched the show that won’t stop chasing Cranston, discuss anything about it, whether it’s the third-season storylines or the fact that Sandra Oh, who voices Debbie, Mark’s mom, is the best out of all the voice actors who don’t juggle dozens of speaking parts on Invincible like Grey Griffin, Ross Marquand, Khary Payton, and Chris Diamantopoulos do. The Invincible character I love to hate the most isn’t a superpowered villain: It’s instead Adam, Eve’s working-stiff adoptive dad. He hates superheroes and is emotionally abusive to Eve because of her powers.

On Lower Decks, Fred Tatasciore was lovable as Bajoran security chief Shaxs (Lower Decks’s most memed line is Shaxs saying to Boimler that “Fighting fascism is a full-time job!”), but as Adam, I wish he would get hit by a bus.