Welcome to the weekly TV thread. Next week, I’ll be paying tribute to the late Loni Anderson and her work on one of my favorite shows, WKRP in Cincinnati. I’ll be recommending a bunch of WKRP episodes like the one WKRP expert Jaime Weinman once described as an episode that showed that “the difference between Loni Anderson and other late ’70s sex symbols like Suzanne Somers and Farrah Fawcett is that Anderson was actually extremely talented, especially at comedy.”

Last week, it was exactly a year ago when I first took over the Couch Avocados column from Chris Beveridge, a.k.a. Fandompost. He used the space to just list the premiere dates for upcoming shows, and that’s fine if you need help navigating the overstuffed streaming world (I sometimes do). I wanted to use the space in a different way: to talk about why an old show still resonates with me or to unpack what works and what doesn’t work about a newer show I just watched. I also wanted to use the space to bring awareness to an overlooked gem.

On some weeks, I get frustrated by how much time these Couch Avocados posts take away from a TV-related book I’ve been trying to write. (This led to an ongoing writer’s block. I’m not sure if I’ll finish writing the book, and if I do finish working on it, it might not be in the form of a book.) But on most weeks, I enjoy seeing the conversations that spring from something I said in the header, and occasionally, someone will say to me in the comments section, “This was a fantastic essay,” which always pleases me.

Now onto one of the new shows I watched last week. It’s why the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul composer Dave Porter’s “A Better Life” from the Marvel Studios miniseries Echo, an action vehicle for Alaqua Cox, a deaf amputee who first appeared as Choctaw assassin Maya Lopez, a.k.a. Echo, on Hawkeye (a show I never watched despite being a fan of the Matt Fraction/David Aja comic that inspired it).

Despite an underwhelming finale, showrunner Marion Dayre’s Echo, the first show under the Marvel Spotlight banner (the TV equivalent of Marvel Comics’s MAX imprint for mature readers), was easily my favorite show from the Defenders corner of the MCU, which has been a mixed bag for me (I can see why Outlaw Vern hates Daredevil’s first season). I loved the focus on a deaf amputee action hero, and Cox, Tantoo Cardinal, and Graham Greene were great in their roles. Like Echo, ITV’s recently renewed Code of Silence (now on BritBox here in America, but I don’t have BritBox, so I watched Code of Silence through other means) contains lots of subtitled sign language (it’s British Sign Language instead of the American Sign Language that was seen in Echo), and it stars a deaf actress as a woman who wants a different life from her previous one and finds herself up against some really dangerous mofos.

However, Alison Brooks, a Canterbury police station canteen worker recruited by Detective Sergeant Ashleigh Francis to read lips on surveillance videos, doesn’t have the fighting skills and mystical superpowers that Maya possesses, so every time Alison disobeys both DS Francis and the sergeant’s boss and throws herself into danger to gather more intel on her own—which happens at a rate that has alienated a few Code of Silence viewers—she has to find other ways to get out of a jam.

When I first learned about Code of Silence from Chicago Tribune TV critic Nina Metz’s mostly positive review of it, I was amused by how the show has the same title as that Andrew Davis flick where Chuck Norris takes down a Colombian cartel in the climax with a police robot tank.

Yeah, there’s no robot tank during partially deaf creator Catherine Moulton’s Code of Silence. It’s called Code of Silence because it’s a show about both Alison’s gift for lip-reading and the code-switching she does as she veers back and forth between the deaf world (Alison’s ex, a young government council bureaucrat, and her mum, whom she lives with, are deaf as well) and the hearing world.

Diarmuid Goggins, who directed the first three episodes, and Moulton frequently capture what Alison experiences through her hearing aid: muffled noises that sound to us—the hearing world—like speech if we were hearing it from underwater. They came up with a brilliant visual device that puts us right in the head of Alison and makes us understand how deaf people piece together words from lip movements, body language, and context.

Subtitles that first appear as gibberish float next to characters’ faces and then the letters switch places and form actual words as Alison gets the gist of what they’re saying to each other.

Code of Silence’s first season is a solid six-part crime thriller—Alison, not satisfied with just interpreting footage of a crew of jewel thieves, talks her way into becoming an undercover informant to DS Francis and befriends Liam Barlow, the crew’s handsome hacker, whom she falls in love with while spying on his plans—as well as an intriguing portrayal of a working-class Briton struggling to make ends meet and pushing back against being underestimated because of her deafness.

This is a tense and serious show, and its only moment of humor is a good one that doesn’t clash too much with the show’s thriller tone, mostly because it’s done in, of course, silence: After Alison is fired from her waitressing job at a café, a different job from the one at the canteen—this opens the door for her to pursue, against the detectives’ orders, a bartending job at the thieves’ favorite pub to get close to them—she secretly steals two bottles of champagne from the café’s inventory as she walks out the door. As the stubborn and intensely driven Alison, Rose Ayling-Ellis is excellent—both Code of Silence and another new British cop show that’s told from a civilian’s point of view, Channel 4’s Patience, are examples of the merits of giving disabled roles to actors who are actually disabled—and so is Kieron Moore as the equally cunning Liam, the first man from the hearing world (outside of Alison’s dad, who split from her mum, is not deaf, and is played by John Bishop, who, in real life, has a deaf son) to ever take Alison seriously and treat her as a human being.

Both Joe Absolom and Beth Goddard are suitably terrifying as other members of the crew Liam works for, while over on the police side, Andrew Buchan is great as DS Francis’s impatient boss, who has never gotten over a killing of an innocent bystander, which he wishes he could have stopped the crew from committing during their previous score, and Charlotte Ritchie is immensely likable as DS Francis, the cop Alison gets along with the most. There’s nothing more Serializd than a one-sentence Serializd review of Code of Silence in all lower case that says, “idk what alison sees in liam when ashleigh is right there.”

I ran into a lot of complaints from Code of Silence viewers about how often Alison’s recklessness stresses them out or angers them. They overlooked a moment of lampshading the show does when Alison tells DS Francis why she can’t stop being so stubborn.

That’s good enough for me, and it reminds me of Ted Zakalokis saying he joined the Army and then took a mailroom job at a Beverly Hills talent agency just to avoid having to bake baklava all day long for his uncle on The Famous Teddy Z. The amount of danger Alison puts herself in because she doesn’t want to go back to scraping ovens leads me to today’s prompt: Is there a show that caused you to quit watching because a character’s self-destructiveness is so infuriating—like when I said to Stars (they come & go) on the week of June 19 that “I quit Insecure after the second-season finale [and didn’t resume Insecure until 2025] because I wanted to take a break from watching some of the main characters. They’re frustrating people who make the worst decisions”?