Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Out of the six scripted TV-related deaths in the last week, one of the two deaths that hit the hardest for me was Alf Clausen’s because of my knowledge of—and admiration for the work of—film and TV composers, which grew from running a film music radio station on the internet for about 13 years. Also, I was a Simpsons fan during its first few seasons, and even though I stopped watching it regularly in the mid-’00s and fell out of love with it because I agree with Hari Kondabolu’s criticisms of the show in 2017’s The Problem with Apu, I always loved what Clausen brought to The Simpsons.

Clausen—who served as music director for a couple of ’70s variety shows and then composed scores for Moonlighting and ALF (including ALF’s main title theme)—joined The Simpsons in its second season. The first episode he scored was the very first “Treehouse of Horror” in 1990. He didn’t compose the show’s beloved, Jetsons-style main title theme—Danny Elfman, the disgraced sex pest, composed it—but, from the first “Treehouse of Horror” to the 2017 episode “Dogtown,” all the variants of the Simpsons theme, all the mostly funny musical numbers, and all the instrumentals were the handiwork of Clausen.

The Moonlighting composer was skilled at adapting to the whims of Simpsons writers like John Swartzwelder and Conan O’Brien, the genres or shows those writers parodied, and Simpsons co-creator Matt Groening’s edict that, as Clausen described it in a no-longer-online 2007 interview with UGO, the emotion is to be scored first and the action comes second. He wasn’t the first Simpsons composer to follow Groening’s edict. Richard Gibbs, Arthur B. Rubenstein, and Patrick Williams, a composer from Simpsons co-creator James L. Brooks’s earlier hit show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, followed that edict before the show’s Clausen era. Clausen simply continued with what Gibbs, Rubenstein, and Williams did.

“[Groening] said he didn’t want the show to be ‘Mickey Moused’ like Disney,” said Clausen to UGO. “He didn’t want the show scored like Warner Brothers’ cartoons – which are usually very action-oriented in nature – and he was really more interested in scoring the emotions of the characters. So whenever I’m stuck in a scene and I can’t figure out what I should do, I always go back to that directive and I start to score from that perspective, and it always serves me well.”

It was basically the same “Let’s score this animated sitcom like a drama instead of like a Looney Tunes short” approach that Solar Opposites composer Chris Westlake later went with when he scored every episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks. (That was crucial to why Lower Decks soared as the first comedic Trek series.)

“A long time ago a musician friend of mine gave me a saying that I’ve never forgotten. He said, ‘You can’t vaudeville vaudeville.’ Basically what it means is that you can’t score something funny with something funny, with funny music. It doesn’t work,” said Clausen to Consequence of Sound (now just plain Consequence) in 2017. “My take has been, every time we have something dramatic to score, that’s the way I score it. I don’t score it like Looney Tunes or anything like that. Matt told me that too. ‘We want to be different. We want to do something that people are not going to expect…’ ”

In honor of Clausen’s passing, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is my favorite score cue from The Simpsons’s Clausen era: his theme from the show-within-the-show Chief Wiggum P.I. during the non-canonical 1997 episode “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase,” a compilation of fake Simpsons spinoffs that was partly based on Fox’s real-life interest in launching spinoffs of The Simpsons, which itself was a spinoff of The Tracey Ullman Show. (In 1994, Groening and Brooks pitched to Fox a Krusty the Clown spinoff where Dan Castellaneta would have played his Krusty character in live-action form. Groening and Family Ties writer Michael J. Weithorn wrote the Krusty pilot script, which never ended up being produced.)

Chief Wiggum P.I. transformed Springfield’s lazy police chief and Principal Skinner into New Orleans private eyes, and the chief brought along with him to the Big Easy his weird son Ralph. The kid, of course, gets kidnapped by his dad’s nemesis, New Orleans crime lord Big Daddy (voiced by Gailard Sartain from the Ernest movies and a live-action kids’ show I watched every Saturday morning when it first aired on CBS, Hey, Vern, It’s Ernest!), in the only Chief Wiggum P.I. episode that was shown to the audience by compilation host Troy McClure, whom you may remember from such spinoffs as Son of Sanford and Son and After Mannix.

“Keep at least one eye open ’cause [Wiggum’s] best friends, the Simpsons, just might pop in to wish him luck,” said Troy (voiced by the late, great Phil Hartman) in his introductory segment—a warning that Chief Wiggum P.I. will contain an awkward appearance by main characters from the parent show just like all the awkward appearances by the stars of parent shows in cheesy backdoor pilots.

Written by future Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen, Chief Wiggum P.I. was a parody of both Magnum, P.I. and the unpopular Baywatch spinoff Baywatch Nights, whose first season centered on two of Baywatch’s main characters, lifeguard Mitch Buchannon and LAPD sergeant Garner Ellerbee, moonlighting as private eyes. For Chief Wiggum P.I.’s fake theme, Clausen combined Mike Post and Pete Carpenter’s Magnum theme with a little bit of the noir-lite vibe of Lou Rawls’s “After the Sun Goes Down” from the first-season Baywatch Nights opening credits. He also threw in the mechanized snares that kick off Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice main title theme, as well as a parody of the wacky last few notes of Dick DeBenedictis’s Dixieland-style Matlock theme. Clausen came up with a funny mini-history of themes from ’80s and ’90s crime dramas, and this mini-history lasted only 27 seconds.

I was as jazzed as Chief Wiggum at a donut shop when Rhino Records included the Chief Wiggum P.I. theme on its 1999 compilation Go Simpsonic with the Simpsons. Today’s prompt is: What are some of your favorite instrumental or vocal pieces of original music from The Simpsons?