Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that back when I had linear TV, there were hundreds of shows where I tuned in just to hear the opening title theme and then switched to a different channel.

One of those shows was CBS’s short-lived Crazy Like a Fox, a San Francisco private eye comedy that was filmed all over the streets of Frisco—about an hour’s drive from my hometown of San Jose if traffic isn’t a mess—and, for just the scenes in Harrison and Cindy Fox’s house, Harrison’s law office, and any other character’s office, in “beautiful downtown Burbank.”

I was 12 when Crazy Like a Fox went into syndication after its reruns were exclusive (for two years) to the channel that’s now known as Freeform. It wasn’t Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures or SCTV, so it looked like yawnsville to 12-year-old me.

Judging from the opening titles, Crazy Like a Fox was really just Simon & Simon, but instead of a pair of mismatched brothers running a detective agency in San Diego, it was a reckless Frisco P.I. dragging his strait-laced lawyer son into his problems like Rick dragging Morty into interdimensional mayhem. For instance, in the third episode, a spectacular car chase ends with Harry Fox, the reckless gumshoe, getting hauled into court for traffic violations during the chase, and despite the efforts of Harrison, his lawyer son, in court, the judge suspends Harry’s driver’s license. This show—created by a pair of former Good Times staff writers and a second duo that created the short-lived Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff Bring ’Em Back Alive—was also The Rockford Files in reverse: The son wishes that Dad had a less dangerous job.

However, Crazy Like a Fox’s frantic main title theme ruled. The middle section was basically Dave Grusin’s catchy and ubiquitous “Fratelli Chase” from The Goonies five months before The Goonies was a thing. And whoever was the pianist doing wild glissandos and all that other shit during the Crazy Like a Fox main title theme must have dunked his hands into a sink full of ice immediately after the recording session. That pianist went hard.

For 36 years, I had no idea who composed the Crazy Like a Fox main title theme. I finally learned in February that Mark Snow—the same guy behind the X-Files theme, the perfect-for-strutting-down-the-runway La Femme Nikita theme, and long before those two joints, the last of three different Starsky & Hutch main title themes—composed it.

In honor of Snow’s recent passing, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is his Crazy Like a Fox theme.

The Crazy Like a Fox theme is Snow in Carl Stalling mode. I like it even more than Snow’s X-Files theme.

Also, Harrison and Cindy Fox kind of suck as parents. They’re too busy sucking face in the opening titles to notice that their son is grabbing a freshly baked cookie that hasn’t cooled off yet—with his bare hands. As someone who taught himself to bake cookies—my sister and my brother-in-law gave me Snoop Dogg’s From Crook to Cook: Platinum Recipes from Tha Boss Dogg’s Kitchen for Christmas, and the first thing I learned to make from that cookbook was Rolls Royce PB-Chocolate Chip Cookies—and was initially surprised about the heat that’s required to bake them, I know that kid is about to enter a world of ouch.

A YouTube account has posted recordings of Decades airings of most of Crazy Like a Fox’s episodes—including “Suitable for Framing,” the 1985 episode that guest-starred George Clooney, who was, at the time, a regular on the half-hour sitcom E/R, not the hour-long drama ER, as Cindy’s irresponsible brother—in their entirety. Tubi, the streaming service you would expect to carry Crazy Like a Fox, currently doesn’t have it, while multiple copies of Still Crazy Like a Fox, the 1987 reunion TV-movie that was filmed on location in England, are all over YouTube and have been posted by accounts like the Sony Pictures India account.

I’m going to go watch some more Crazy Like a Fox episodes for the first time to enjoy more of Snow’s work on the show and see how much Crazy Like a Fox gets wrong about the Bay. The best thing about the two Crazy Like a Fox episodes I watched so far is the pairing of the late Jack Warden—he was great in everything, including his dual role in Used Cars—and John Rubenstein, whom I best remember from his powerful guest spot as the remorseful drunk driver who killed the Salinger parents on Party of Five and his mischievous guest spot as an immortal magician (also played in a younger form by Michael Weston, Rubenstein’s son) in Supernatural’s “Criss Angel Is a Douche Bag” episode.

Bonus track: The Crazy Like a Fox theme isn’t my favorite piece of music by the late Snow. My favorite Snow tune is the aforementioned theme from Nikita (“Cherchez la femme, cherchez la femme, dans la nuit, dans la nuit”). Snow’s theme from USA Network’s ’90s spy show always makes me want to put on my black Timbs and my most expensive fit and strut across a rain-slicked street like the two heroes of, wait for it, another USA Network hit show.