Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Halloween is approaching. The two Halloween episodes of ABC’s short-lived The Neighbors were both, to borrow the words of one of the show’s characters in one of the episodes, a magical Halloween-ween. It’s too bad there isn’t a legal way to watch both of them back-to-back.

Watching Dan Fogelman’s Paradise on Hulu during its first season caused me to go track down The Neighbors, Fogelman’s earlier creation. I wanted to watch The Neighbors a few years ago when it was on Hulu, but the streamer removed it before I could get to it.

After I was able to find The Neighbors, I finally finished watching its entire run a few months ago, and it’s a shame that this single-camera sci-fi comedy that was an ABC Studios production (hence it’s a Disney property) isn’t currently accessible on Hulu or its sister streamer Disney+. (Only the first of its two seasons was released on DVD.) I laughed my head off twice or a few times during every episode.

The Neighbors followed Jersey mom Debbie Weaver (Jami Gertz in my favorite role of hers), husband Marty (Lenny Venito), and their three children as they got to know their four next-door neighbors in a gated community in Jersey. Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye, who can currently be heard as multiple characters in King of the Hill’s new season), husband Larry Bird (Simon Templeman in my favorite role of his), and their two sons are from the planet Zabvronia and have been awaiting for 10 years instructions from Zabvronia on when to return home.

In the meantime, the Bird-Kersees (and the other Zabvronians who live in the gated community the Weavers, the only humans in the community, moved into in the pilot) took on human form and adopted the names of famous Earth athletes to try to assimilate. They’re studying the human race and its confusing customs—social rules that sometimes confuse even the Weavers themselves.

Fogelman once described Larry as “a bit of an alien Archie Bunker” who “doesn’t ever want to do anything that’s very human or commit to anything human.” Precocious and cynical Dick Butkus (Ian Patrick), the littlest Bird-Kersee, takes after his dad, while Reggie Jackson—Dick’s older brother, who took the form of an Asian teen and was played by Tim Jo—and Jackie are far more enthusiastic about adapting to Earth.

“I think that show was ahead of its time, and I think Dan Fogelman needs to bring that back,” said ’90s Star Trek alum Rosalind Chao—Templeman’s wife and a two-time Neighbors guest star as Dr. Barb Hartley, a therapist the Neighbors writers named after Bob Hartley from The Bob Newhart Show—to A.V. Club interviewer Will Harris last year. “I just loved that show, and everybody involved in it, I’m still quite friendly with them all. It was really fun. They had George Takei on The Neighbors, they had Mark Hamill… They had so many cool elements on that show. I think it really was ahead of its time. I feel like if it had another shot, it would have a new life.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if The Neighbors was overlooked by ABC viewers during its two-season run because they assumed it was a rehash of Mork & Mindy and 3rd Rock from the Sun. Even I thought the same thing when The Neighbors first aired, which was why I never watched it—except for one episode I did partially catch, and it was the final act of its 2012 Halloween episode because I was waiting for Modern Family’s Halloween episode, which aired right after The Neighbors’s Halloween episode, to begin.

The Neighbors was surprisingly funnier than Mork and 3rd Rock. Sure, Mork reruns on Nick at Nite were a blast when I was a kid because of Robin Williams’s improv skills, but as an adult, Mork’s lack of a strong supporting cast—an important element of every great sitcom—is more noticeable and off-putting. 3rd Rock was much better than Mork at giving every regular—from the actors who played the Solomons, who came from an unnamed planet on the Cepheus-Draco border, to the ones who played the Solomons’ human foils—something funny and memorable to do, but because it came from Bonnie and Terry Turner, it had a live studio audience that was as loud and obnoxious as the studio audience from the Turners’ later hit, That ’70s Show.

Fogelman’s show had the terrific supporting cast Mork was never able to surround Williams with because the characters Mork showrunner Dale McRaven, a Dick Van Dyke Show alum, and his writers tried to come up with as foils to the alien from Ork (Mork had a lot of cast turnover) were often boring. Mork and either Exidor (who was played by Robert Donner and was well-received by the show’s studio audience) or Morgan Fairchild’s first-season character (Susan Taylor, Mindy’s high-school nemesis) were the only funny characters on Mork (“I don’t think this show ever had a good supporting character,” wrote Jaime Weinman in a 2004 blog post about Mork), whereas every Bird-Kersee and every Weaver had great material on The Neighbors. And because of its single-camera format, The Neighbors had neither a studio audience, my least favorite part of 3rd Rock reruns (although it wasn’t a deal-breaker), nor a laugh track.

The absence of a studio audience, which The Neighbors would have had to pause every few seconds for to allow its members to laugh, meant that The Neighbors barraged you with jokes and sight gags at a speed that rivaled that of Police Squad! (or the pace of jokes on animated sitcoms like Solar Opposites, the current Mike McMahan show that feels like a more nihilistic take on The Neighbors).

Many of these jokes and gags—for instance, Larry frequently broke the fourth wall and was aware of ABC’s commercial breaks—were fantastic.

My favorite arc in The Neighbors’s second season was the love triangle between Reggie, Amber Weaver (Debbie and Marty’s teen daughter, played by Clara Mamet, David Mamet and Rebecca Pidgeon’s daughter), and Reggie’s Zabvronian “soulmate,” a Charlie’s Angels-era Farrah Fawcett-esque beauty named Jane (well-played by Megan Park, the future director of 2021’s The Fallout and last year’s Aubrey Plaza comedy My Old Ass).

I’m the type of male viewer who finds triangles to be as interesting as watching paint dry. But the Reggie/Amber/Jane triangle was an entertaining exception to that. It was like watching Betty and Veronica compete over an Asian American guy instead of a red-haired white dude (which doesn’t happen often on American TV), and in addition to the Archie counterpart being played by a Korean American actor, the show’s Veronica was hilariously played by the deadpan Mamet. Instead of being a fashion-conscious rich girl, she was a feminist who paid zero attention to fashion and once said in her usual, Lieutenant T’Lyn-like manner, “Emotion bores me.” Amber was at times stranger than her alien boyfriend and his zany family.

Coming in a close second (in the second season) to the Betty and Veronica comic I never knew I wanted was an arc about Jackie’s first job on Earth. Olagundoye, a virtuoso at accents and dialects, was a ton of laughs—in that job arc, as well as, hell, all of the show’s other arcs—as a 675-year-old woman who was a freedom fighter and a warrior whose skills included two-handed blade expertise and “laser beam avoidance” on her home planet, but in the Jersey suburbs, the best work she could find was folding burritos for a Mexican fast food chain called Salsa Castle.

The Neighbors’s medieval-themed Mexican restaurant is why the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Lee Holdridge’s “Castle Dance” from TNT’s 2001 adaptation of the 1983 Marion Zimmer Bradley novel The Mists of Avalon.

Jackie initially considered fast-food work to be humiliating. She and her fellow Zabvronians can’t eat food. They get their nourishment from reading books instead of eating, which is why the fridge in the Bird-Kersees’ house is filled with books instead of groceries.

One reason for Jackie’s initial embarrassment that I think should have been added to the dialogue—but it never was, because the Neighbors writers seemed to completely forget in the second season about Zabvronian book-eating—was the fact that she has to spend hours making products she’s physiologically incapable of enjoying.

Jackie’s tune about fast-food work quickly changed, especially after she succeeded in convincing Salsa Castle’s British CEO (played by Lucy Davis from the original Office and Wonder Woman in the episode “The Neighbours”) to give her more reasonable working hours and promote her to manager.

In both Jackie’s Salsa Castle arc and an arc about her husband becoming a barista, The Neighbors had a progressive view about work that was the opposite of Fox News job-shaming former Cosby Show regular Geoffrey Owens in 2018 for bagging groceries at a Trader Joe’s in the Weavers and the Bird-Kersees’ home state of Jersey: No job is better than any other job.

The exterior of the Salsa Castle where Jackie worked looked drab as fuck—I wonder if second-season budget cuts had something to do with that—but its menu and bizarre “Mexican food in an Arthurian setting” gimmick fascinate me.

If someone orders queso with their Excaliburrito, Salsa Castle will proclaim their order with a knighting ceremony, complete with a pre-recorded fanfare and a cheese squirter that’s shaped like a sword.

I wish Salsa Castle existed so that I could order for breakfast the Dragon Egg Breakfast Burrito and then on another day at lunch, I would have to choose between King Arthur’s Quesadilla, Lancelot’s Chicken Taco, the Taliesin Tostada, the Steak Excaliburrito with Black Knight Beans, and Joan of Arc’s Flaming Fajitas.

These Mexican goodies with medieval-themed names are as absurd as past Taco Bell culinary experiments like the ’70s and ’80s burger known as the Bell Beefer, which contained all the ingredients of a white people taco and looked more like a sloppy joe than a burger. Salsa Castle is a far cry from the authentic taquerias I often went to in Santa Cruz when I was a UC Santa Cruz student. Despite that, I totally want an Excaliburrito with queso or one of Lancelot’s Chicken Tacos.

I also wish the Steak Me Home Tonight food truck from Happy Endings—another great early 2010s ABC single-camera comedy that was canceled too soon—was a real-life food truck. Today’s prompt is: Is there a fictional restaurant from the small screen or the big screen that you fantasize about visiting?

I asked a similar Couch Avocados question last November (“Which fictional TV character’s home would you want to eat dinner at, whether the night is Thanksgiving or any other night?”), and the discussion led to me bringing up Steak Me Home Tonight. Warning: Do not read the Happy Endings writers’ fictional menu from Dave’s sandwich food truck on an empty stomach.