Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

I’m currently watching for the first time a bunch of episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, not because of the death of Sonny Curtis, who wrote and sang “Love Is All Around,” the show’s beloved theme song, but because of Hulu’s removal of the show on September 30. Sue Ann, Lou Grant, and Georgette are the Mary Tyler Moore Show characters who make me laugh the most.

However, I still prefer Taxi, which was created by a bunch of TMTMS alums (including James L. Brooks) after they left MTM Enterprises, over TMTMS. I grew up watching Taxi instead of TMTMS. (I watched only one TMTMS episode when TMTMS was on Nick at Nite: the one where Mary wears for an entire act the risqué green gown that was designed by a prostitute she befriended while she was in jail for refusing to reveal a news source. It’s the only TMTMS episode I’ve seen four times.)

I watched for the first time 27 of TMTMS’s 168 episodes this week. I’m now at the seventh and final season. I miss Mary’s old studio apartment and its built-in bookcases along the floor more than I miss Rhoda and Phyllis. I’m finding out that TMTMS was obsessed with the recently deceased Robert Redford. Rhoda and Sue Ann were thirsty for him. Charlene, Lou’s hot lounge singer girlfriend in Season 5, dated him long before she met Lou. They mentioned Redford as often as Phyllis mentioned the unseen Lars.

TMTMS was about the work family that made Mary’s life in Minneapolis a lot less lonely. Peacemaker, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad spinoff, is also about a work family: the one that changes the life of the title character, who’s basically Ted Baxter if he were a jingoistic mercenary who loves hair metal.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Clint Mansell and Kevin Kiner’s “Peacemaker Discharged” from Peacemaker’s first season.

A couple of weekends ago, I watched for the first time my Blu-rays of Peacemaker’s first season, which I bought two years ago because I enjoyed the Blu-ray of The Suicide Squad, and then I quickly caught up to Peacemaker’s new season (despite not having HBO Max). Unlike the Peacemaker fans, I didn’t have to wait three years for the second season. I waited only five hours.

The first season, in which mercenary Chris Smith’s return to his hometown of Evergreen, Washington (played by Vancouver in the first season and Atlanta in the current one) was disrupted by an alien invasion, was a really solid and genuinely funny R-rated action comedy in the mold of, of course, The Suicide Squad. (I never watched David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, which The Suicide Squad ignored, just like how Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ignored the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.) I found out that the yelps that come out of Eagly, Chris’s violent pet eagle, are performed by Dee Bradley Baker, whom I know best for voicing Klaus on American Dad! and performing the coos that came out of Murf on Star Trek: Prodigy. That tidbit amused me because I’m considering taking up voice acting classes again—the last time I went to voice acting school was in 2009, at Voice One in San Francisco—and I happen to be currently reading Baker’s articles about being a voice actor from his I Want to Be a Voice Actor! blog.

I’m glad to have Peacemaker’s first season in my physical media collection. Then I got to the second season’s first episode, and my initial reaction to the season’s new crisis was similar to William Boimler’s.

But as the season progressed, I changed my tune after realizing that Gunn is venturing into an alternate universe not for fan service reasons. (Pointless fan service is precisely why I still haven’t watched 2023’s poorly received The Flash, which brought back Michael Keaton as Batman for no other reason than fan service, but now that the movie is on Tubi, and I have an ad blocker, maybe I’ll bite the bullet and finally watch it.)

Gunn wants to see if the dimension Chris—an antihero who wants to be less of the narcissistic dickhead moviegoers who never watched The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker met for the first time when he briefly showed up during Gunn’s Superman this summer—accidentally stumbled into will cause him to become the villain of his own story. Will the lives of the rest of the 11th Street Kids—Emilia Harcourt, Leota Adebayo, Adrian Chase, and John Economos—end up falling into despair just because Chris wants to spend the rest of his life in what I’m calling “Evergreen 2” with both his dead brother, who was never accidentally killed by Chris in Evergreen 2, and a kinder, gentler version of the self-destructive Harcourt? (I love how Chris’s obsession with starting over in Evergreen 2 begins with a drunken text he should have never sent to the Evergreen 2 Harcourt.)

Once I realized what Gunn was trying to do, I said, “I’m on board.” The temptation of staying in Evergreen 2—a suspicious-looking alternate universe because it appears to have ethnically cleansed itself of non-white folks, while Chris doesn’t notice Evergreen 2’s overwhelming whiteness—is a continuation of what Norm Wilner said about Peacemaker’s first season when he reviewed it for NOW Toronto back in 2022: “The arc of the Peacemaker series is about finding the humanity inside a character who’s basically an action figure: a person who believes himself to be righteous, but doesn’t have the emotional range to understand the complexity of the world around him.”

At about the same time as Chris’s discovery of the allure of Evergreen 2, Tim Meadows first showed up as an asshole government agent who brings to mind both the high-strung John C. McGinley character from Point Break and the even more high-strung Ron Leibman character from Night Falls on Manhattan, and I was like, “This season is perfect.”

I thought the drummer who keeps saying to Dewey Cox, “You don’t want no part of this shit,” every time he uses drugs in front of him was the funniest character Meadows played. Langston Fleury, one of the few Peacemaker characters Gunn didn’t base on somebody from DC Comics, has somehow out-funnied the “No, Dewey, you don’t want this” guy. An unprofessional and narcissistic A.R.G.U.S. agent who claims to be suffering from “bird blindness” (the inability to tell eagles like Eagly apart from ducks or parrots) while helping Rick Flag Sr. take down Chris, Fleury continually says things that would have caused the CW Broadcast Standards and Practices folks who policed Legends of Tomorrow’s romance storylines to puke in their soup.

Almost every scene with Meadows as Fleury has made me laugh. Fleury is this show’s resident “guy who gives inappropriate nicknames to everybody.” The “Live-Action TV” section at the TV Tropes entry for “The Nicknamer” lists 57 live-action shows where somebody regularly did that. Sawyer hurled insulting nicknames at other castaways on Lost. Mick Rory was the same type of character over on Legends of Tomorrow.

Peacemaker reminds me a bit of the best seasons of Legends of Tomorrow and its ensemble of ragtag superheroes and antiheroes who manage to save the world despite being inexperienced, clumsy, emotionally immature, or way too drunk to be wielding a heat gun. (Legends of Tomorrow started out as an underwhelming clone of Gunn’s version of Guardians of the Galaxy, which itself was Gunn’s homage to Farscape, and it later found its groove under showrunners Phil Klemmer and Chris Fedak by becoming even more bonkers than the Guardians movies.) Today’s prompt is: What have you liked about the DCU under the creative control of Gunn so far? For me, it’s Gunn’s ability, whether on Peacemaker or in Superman, to combine the emotional stakes of Guardians with the Silver Age weirdness of ’50s and ’60s DC Comics covers like that one where Superman is a dick—he’s always a dick in Silver Age cover art—and he forces a parched Jimmy Olsen to beg for water in the desert.