Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

I like almost all of the late Hugh Wilson’s sitcoms. (Easy Street is the only Wilson sitcom I haven’t watched.) The Famous Teddy Z, one of three fish-out-of-water sitcoms Wilson created, starred future Two and a Half Men star Jon Cryer as Ted Zakalokis, a naive and extremely young Beverly Hills talent agent with zero agenting experience, and future Friends semi-regular Jane Sibbett as Laurie Parr, a secretary who knows a lot more about agenting than Teddy does and is eager to take over his job.

Like Emily St. James said in her 2014 A.V. Club reassessment of Wilson’s beloved and short-lived Frank’s Place, “[Wilson’s] work was best known for its anything-for-a-laugh spirit, but there was also a rich streak of gentle humanism running through his work. (Yes, even in Police Academy.)” The sharply written WKRP in Cincinnati, my favorite Wilson creation, combined that spirit—exemplified by the shtick about Les Nessman’s pompous ambitions as a newscaster or the gags about Johnny Fever’s off-screen fondness for weed—with an appealing optimism about “the suits and the dungarees” setting aside their differences to try to lift a former easy-listening station out of the ratings toilet.

Wilson drew from his youthful experiences as a radio sales rep in Atlanta in the ’60s, as well as other radio industry folks’ experiences, when he worked on WKRP (which I first caught in reruns on KTVU in the mid-’80s, but I didn’t really get into WKRP until it was on E! in 1996). By the time Wilson made Teddy Z, his last three sitcoms, starting with WKRP, were all abruptly canceled. Wilson’s bitterness about both that and his observation that Hollywood greenlights a lot of derivative stuff (a theme of both “Teddy Gets Fired,” an episode inspired by writer Chuck Ross’s Casablanca experiment in 1982, and the unaired “How to Make a Television Show”) was all over Teddy Z, his least humanistic show.

Despite the bitter tone, Teddy Z was still an enjoyable sitcom—the only scenes that sucked were whenever Teddy Z got away from the fictional Unlimited Talent Agency to show Teddy being nagged at home by his old-world grandmother—and, as I recently discovered on Internet Archive, where Teddy Z’s entire run has been posted, the late Alex Rocco as obsequious agent Al Floss was much funnier than Jeremy Piven as Ari Gold, Vincent Chase’s abrasive agent, on Entourage.

“I didn’t think the show was that good—except that I thought Rocco was solidly brilliant. He blew me away,” said Wilson about Teddy Z in a 2015 Archive of American Television interview.

The Academy thought Rocco was solidly brilliant as well: The Godfather alum and the future voice of Itchy & Scratchy Studios CEO Roger Meyers Jr. on The Simpsons won an Emmy for playing Al. Meanwhile, the #MeToo’d Piven won, ugh, three for playing Ari.

Here’s one of many reasons why I, like Mark Kermode, despise Entourage: It glorified its high-powered agent character’s jerky and racist behavior, while Teddy Z did not. When Al did in front of Teddy a racist impression of a Chinese restaurant owner he paid to spy on a rival agent’s power lunch discussions in “Teddy Gets a Better Offer,” the show didn’t say, “Aww, dat wacist impwession is so cyute.”

Teddy had two mentors on the show: One was Richie Herby, a nice and honest co-worker who was played by Tom La Grua and was Teddy and Laurie’s supervisor in the UTA mailroom before Teddy was plucked from the mailroom by agency head Abe Werkfinder and Teddy picked Laurie to be his secretary. (TV historians Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh referred to Richie as Teddy’s cousin in their entry on Teddy Z and its time slots on CBS in the 1995 edition of The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows: 1946-Present, a thicc-ass tome I bought in college and still have with me. [Family Feud buzzer sound.] Richie was never related to Teddy.)

The mailroom manager had faith in Teddy, even when the kid was just a mailroom temp with no aspirations of becoming an agent. He was the first to warn Teddy that UTA was a highly competitive workplace where everybody, including the clerks in the mailroom, wanted to be a big shot (another reason why this was Wilson’s least humanistic show).

The other mentor was Al, a dishonest shark who occasionally told Teddy how to think like an agent, but otherwise, he had no faith in Teddy and wanted him to drop dead. Al bore a grudge against Teddy that stemmed from his biggest client, a mercurial, Marlon Brando-esque movie star named Harland Keyvo, firing him in the pilot episode to become Teddy’s first client because he preferred Teddy’s honesty (Teddy angrily punched Harland in the stomach off-screen when they first met, which won over Harland) over Al’s tendency to kiss up to Hollywood big shots like himself.

The blue-collar Richie was the angel on Teddy’s shoulder, while Al was the devil. The show’s writers clearly enjoyed writing dialogue for Al a bit more than they did writing dialogue for Richie—while also still being aware that Al, who was to Teddy Z what Louie De Palma was to Taxi, was a terrible person.

“Al Floss frightens me,” said Rocco to the Los Angeles Times in 1989.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is always an instrumental. But because Teddy Z had the lifespan of a gnat, and none of its very minimal original music was released, including the very late ’80s but catchy theme tune that was sung by an uncredited Bill Champlin (the guy who covered Ray Charles’s “In the Heat of the Night” for the TV version of the 1967 Norman Jewison film of the same name), the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is instead from a different Cryer project.

Cryer, who appeared as Lex Luthor’s nephew in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace prior to Teddy Z, later played Lex on the CW’s Supergirl and was a way more intriguing Lex than fucking Kevin Spacey. (“What I loved about what Supergirl let me do with Lex Luthor was that they let me do the comics Lex Luthor, which was different than the movie versions that we’ve seen so far: the exo-suit, and [I] really got to do a lot of fun things. So I hope they let Nicholas Hoult have as much fun [as Lex] as they let me have ’cause he’s going to be amazing,” said Cryer to the A.V. Club in 2024.) Supergirl’s theme for Lex was composed by Blake Neely and Daniel James Chan.

Teddy Z was a favorite show among TV critics and real-life Al Flosses. (“Just as ‘L.A. Law’ became a sort of cult favorite among attorneys, Rocco says, tapings of ‘Teddy Z’ on Friday nights usually draw a sampling of agents from the William Morris Agency, ICM and other talent agencies eager to watch the antics of Floss,” wrote Diane Haithman in her 1989 L.A. Times interview with Rocco.) But behind the scenes, it was kind of a mess like the set of Superman IV.

A 2024 Hollywood Reporter article about the making of Teddy Z revealed that co-producer Richard Dubin, who previously worked with Wilson on Easy Street and Frank’s Place, and Wilson came to blows over casting choices (until Dubin finally had it and quit). Cryer had a deal with CBS due to his breakout role in Pretty in Pink, and because he was a WKRP fan, Cryer wanted Wilson to create a show for him. Teddy Z was the result, but Dubin wanted Ben Stiller, who auditioned for the role of Teddy, to play him and recalled to THR that “Jon, while a very able and journeyman actor, didn’t have the cojones necessary for [Teddy].”

Dubin also preferred Lainie Kazan as Teddy’s mom over Erica Yohn as Teddy’s Yia-Yia (Greek for “grandmother”). But Wilson didn’t get along with Kazan and fired her after seven episodes were taped. Wilson replaced the mom character with Yia-Yia, Yohn was cast as her, and all of Kazan’s scenes were reshot. Teddy and his younger brother’s parents were dead in the redone pilot, and Yia-Yia had taken over raising both siblings. Despite Wilson’s changes, the domestic scenes felt listless compared to the workplace scenes.

“Unlike Wilson’s two previous shows, several characters on this show seemed to have been forced in by network focus-groups, particularly Teddy’s grandmother and precocious kid brother. CBS wanted some kind of domestic-comedy element in the show, but the writers clearly had no interest in the domestic scenes,” wrote WKRP fan Jaime Weinman, the author of Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes, in a 2008 Maclean’s blog post on Teddy Z.

As I watched Teddy Z’s only season for the first time, I could tell that CBS feared that viewers wouldn’t be able to understand Teddy’s job as a talent agent, and the network thought of the domestic scenes as an oasis for viewers who couldn’t relate to all the inside-baseball stuff about showbiz. In fact, when I was younger, I had zero interest in Teddy Z when it resurfaced on Comedy Central and Trio’s “Brilliant But Cancelled” block because I didn’t give a shit about agenting. Meanwhile, WKRP (which, like the original Star Trek, was more popular in syndication than when it was on network TV) appealed to me a lot more because I knew some people who worked in radio, and I got involved in college radio. (I hosted a show at the same Santa Cruz station where future podcast magnate Jesse Thorn got his start—we had shows at the same time, but we never met each other—and at around that period, one of my cousins worked for KMEL-FM’s street team.)

But when I finally got into Teddy Z, the agenting scenes were written so well that I preferred them over the domestic scenes, which were mostly filler. That’s why unaired Teddy Z episodes like “How to Make a Television Show” (a heartbreaking fucking episode if you’ve ever been a screenwriter who tried to pitch a series idea to a network) and “Teddy Gets a Guru” (the last episode that was produced, and its primary guest star is a doozy: Cheers-era Bebe Neuwirth, who was great as a pretentious, chakra-obsessed movie star in search of new representation) are the show’s best ones: Yia-Yia and the kid brother never appeared in those episodes.

Yia-Yia’s dialogue about wishing for Teddy to stay away from Beverly Hills and go back to working at her surviving son’s Greek bakery—before the mailroom job, Teddy joined the Army just to avoid having to bake baklava all day long—got really tiresome. (Her scenes were as repetitive as all those early ’00s Asian American indie movies about conflicts between strict immigrant parents and artistic children, which I couldn’t relate to because my Filipino parents were different from the parents in those movies: They never objected to either my earlier interest in journalism or my current interest in Outlaw Vern-style self-publishing.) However, Yia-Yia got less annoying when she learned more about Teddy’s new job at UTA and finally became supportive of him.

Although Cryer enjoyed acting on Teddy Z, especially when he shared scenes with Rocco, he felt that Teddy Z could have been better than the final result. In a 2014 A.V. Club “Random Roles” interview, he recalled saying to Wilson early on in the development of Teddy Z that he didn’t want to play the same kind of character Gary Sandy played on WKRP.

“Gary Sandy was actually a very funny character actor, but in WKRP, he was just the nice guy that all the wacky radio-station characters revolved around,” said Cryer to AVC’s Will Harris, a Teddy Z fan. “I said, ‘I would love to do something that skewered show business in a similar way.’ So [Wilson] wrote this really fun script that everybody loved and everybody wanted to do… except that I was Gary Sandy.”

I can see why Cryer didn’t want to play the Andy Travis of the show: The cutthroat Al—who even crossed over to Murphy Brown early on in Teddy Z’s only season—and the aspiring-to-be-cutthroat Laurie are more interesting characters than Teddy.

But Cryer was perfect in the role of Teddy. On Internet Archive, I never skipped the unnecessary (and probably demanded by CBS) recap of the events of the pilot at the start of each episode because of Cryer’s likable and believable delivery (“The money is terrific! The problem is… I don’t know what I’m doing, but… so far, so good, you know what I’m saying?”). He’s the opposite of Harrison Ford phoning it in and reading aloud his terribly written Blade Runner narration like it’s the iTunes Terms of Service.

Had Teddy Z lasted longer than a season, I’m sure Teddy would have evolved in some way from the nice guy in a sea of oddballs. (NewsRadio handled this type of character a bit better. After the first episode, a James Burrows-directed pilot that’s so different from NewsRadio’s more surreal episodes in later seasons—most of which were directed by frequent Seinfeld director Tom Cherones—Dave Nelson immediately went from being a nervous and polite Midwesterner to a more confident and frequently sarcastic Midwesterner who was often as eccentric as the people who surrounded him. Dave Foley became much funnier once his news director character got past his first-day jitters.)

I’m also sure that Teddy and Laurie would have coupled up. Cryer dated Jane Sibbett during the show’s run. Their off-screen chemistry translated well on screen in “Teddy’s Big Date,” an unaired episode in which Teddy finally got the guts to ask Laurie out when he was invited to a Hollywood big shot’s private screening of his latest movie.

Laurie accepted, but Teddy proceeded to repeatedly do the wrong thing, whether it was not knowing that Al’s advice to wear a tux to a private screening was a prank (Laurie pointed out to Teddy that nobody suits up in a tux for a private screening) or bringing along with them to dinner Fay, Laurie’s alcoholic mom (terrifically played by the late Janet Carroll, best known as Tom Cruise’s mom in Risky Business). Fay flew in from San Francisco to visit her daughter and unload all of her dating drama on her, and mother and daughter couldn’t stop bickering. The funniest moment of Fay, Teddy, and Laurie’s bumpy night was Fay’s lengthy humiliation of both Al and his much younger date when the maître d’ seated Al and the blonde right next to the trio, which led to Al storming out of the restaurant with his date and getting his revenge on Fay in an equally funny way.

Bonus track: Speaking of bumpy rides, Cryer compared Teddy Z’s behind-the-scenes atmosphere to a roller coaster in the THR article. The Teddy Z theme song—written by Steve Tyrell and his wife, the late Stephanie Tyrell, the songwriters behind 1992’s “How Do You Talk to an Angel,” the only hit song from the short-lived Fox rock band drama The Heights, and all the original songs for the TNBC sitcom California Dreams, another show about a fictional rock band—and the opening title graphics sometimes make me think of all the colorful and snazzy logos on the cars of the Great America roller coasters I rode in Santa Clara in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

The Teddy Z theme, which I never heard until I first watched Teddy Z on Internet Archive last year, is my favorite thing the Tyrells wrote and produced. It contains some of the same electric guitar squeals that are a part of one of my favorite songs from the ’80s: The System’s “Don’t Disturb This Groove,” whose 1987 music video happens to be full of the same “step printing effects” that were all over the Teddy Z opening titles and were later one of Wong Kar-Wai’s favorite visual devices in movies like Chungking Express. I miss music videos with step printing effects.

I also miss multi-cam sitcoms like Taxi and Teddy Z that didn’t “sweeten” the studio audience laughter (there’s way too much sweetening these days by the few sitcoms that still film in front of a live studio audience) and wanted the viewers at home to hear—without embellishment—exactly how the studio audience reacted to dialogue while the cameras rolled.

Some examples of Taxi and Teddy Z’s unembellished studio audience laughter are Taxi co-creator James L. Brooks’s honking laugh from the audience side of Stage 23 at Paramount Studios and a bunch of audience members saying, “Wooooooooo,” every time Eileen Meisner, a feminist agent and Al’s biggest rival at UTA, took down Al for being obsequious and lizard-brained in “Agent of the Year,” the final Teddy Z episode that aired on CBS. Eileen appeared only once on Teddy Z and was winningly played by Robin Riker from Alligator and Get a Life as if she were auditioning for the role of Captain Janeway. She would have been great as Janeway.

The fearless Eileen was in the mold of women from earlier Wilson shows like WKRP receptionist Jennifer Marlowe (“Arthur [Carlson] relies on her so heavily because she is the compassionate mother figure he always yearned for,” wrote WKRP Relived blog author Roy Penney in 2017), WKRP owner Lillian Carlson (the hard-to-please mom Arthur is stuck with), and intimidating New Orleans lawyer Jan Rudy from Frank’s Place. Jan appeared only once on Frank’s Place and was nicely played by the late Conchata Ferrell—one of Cryer’s future co-stars on Two and a Half Men—in “The Bridge,” the largely non-comedic Frank’s Place episode that won Wilson an Emmy for writing (and landed guest star Beah Richards an Emmy for just one scene) in 1988.

But unlike Jennifer, Mama Carlson, and Jan, Eileen got to shove a terrified man (Al, of course) up against the kitchen sink and say to him, “I’ll rip your fucking dick out with my fucking hands, you fuck!” (That was mostly bleeped out by Wilson because it was CBS in 1990, nine years before the network allowed Mark Harmon to blurt out the word “shit” in a Chicago Hope episode without being bleeped.)

The worst thing about the abrupt end of Teddy Z was that Eileen never got to go toe-to-toe with Al, who also happened to be one of her ex-boyfriends, a few more times. “Agent of the Year” was an exploration of the idea that Eileen and Laurie are the future of the agency, and Al is on the way out because he’s a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War (while Teddy doesn’t know what he’s doing).

Rocco—the Teddy Z studio audience’s favorite performer who wasn’t Riker—always played this rubber-limbed dinosaur masterfully. Teddy’s name may be on the tin, but Rocco as Al is the biggest reason why this one-season flop from the creator of the more famous WKRP is worth tracking down on Internet Archive or YouTube.

Today’s prompt: I remember my jaw dropping when Tom Ellis showed up as Lucifer in The Flash’s continuation of the CW’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event because I knew nothing about Ellis’s cameo beforehand. Post or discuss a TV crossover that was perfect to you like Lucifer’s scene with Constantine in “Crisis on Infinite Earths: Part Three” and Rocco’s one-scene guest spot as Al in a Murphy Brown episode (which was interestingly about Corky’s first journalism award win because nearly a year after it aired, Rocco won his only Emmy for Teddy Z) are to me.

It could be Scooby-Doo and Mystery Incorporated’s adventure with Sam, Dean, and Castiel on Supernatural or the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia gang’s volunteer work at Abbott Elementary (the second half of which hasn’t aired yet). Or it could be the aforementioned Lex, voiced by Clancy Brown, joining forces with Mark Hamill’s Joker to try to kill Tim Daly’s Superman, which attracts the attention of Kevin Conroy’s Batman in a crossover that’s so entertaining and sharply written I never watched Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice or its R-rated extended cut because I knew that Zack Snyder’s movie would never be able to measure up to it.