Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Jan Hammer’s “Payback” from Miami Vice’s “Payback” episode, a.k.a. the Frank Zappa/Roberto Durán episode.

A couple of weeks ago, I caught one of Regular Show’s Halloween episodes that are currently being livestreamed on YouTube by Cartoon Network. In that episode (the show’s final “Terror Tales of the Park” anthology), Rigby tells his friends a story about Shannon Acidbutt, a non-verbal xenomorph who binge-watches Mordecai and Rigby’s favorite cop show, the fictional Carter and Briggs, and is the worst housemate ever because she never turns off Carter and Briggs to help out with any household chores, and all I thought was, “Ooh, a Miami Vice parody!”

I stopped watching Regular Show before it started doing a recurring parody of both Miami Vice and Lethal Weapon—Carter was a riff on Crockett, while Briggs, his partner, was a riff on Riggs, but because Regular Show was on Cartoon Network, Briggs wasn’t allowed to say, “I’m too old for this shit”—so I had no knowledge of the parody. Right after the “Terror Tales of the Park” segment about the housemate from hell, I clicked to Hulu to watch for the first time the episode that introduced Carter and Briggs.

Miami Vice impacted my big brother and I in different ways. When the show first aired on NBC, my brother dressed exactly like Crockett for a junior high school dance, but without the cigarette or the five o’clock shadow.

Meanwhile, I didn’t get into Miami Vice until FX added it to its nighttime schedule in 1996. (The scene where balding informant Izzy Moreno, the Cuban comic-relief character who finds temporary work as a male stripper, entertains an all-female clientele by stripping to Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s revamp of “Walk This Way” is the most 1986 thing ever.) Instead of admiring the fashions and wearing a pastel blazer like Crockett’s blazer, I fell in love with Jan Hammer’s instrumentals—they’re my favorite thing about Miami Vice—so I snapped up Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, Hammer’s 2002 double-CD compilation of his favorite instrumentals he composed for the show.

When I came up with an ’80s music block for an internet radio station I started for the purpose of playing film scores, most of the tracks I put into rotation were selections from Hammer’s massive compilation. (I called the ’80s block “Soda and Pie”—a reference to the dialogue at the start of the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” video.)

That’s why I’m always interested in watching a Miami Vice parody. But all the Miami Vice parodies I saw have overlooked two things about Michael Mann’s hit show (which was created not by Mann but by Hill Street Blues staff writer Anthony Yerkovich) that are worthy of parody. Edward James Olmos won an Emmy for the subtlety he brought to his scenes as Lieutenant Castillo—my favorite character on the show—but there are a lot of lengthy office scenes where Olmos never speaks and just glares at people, and that’s funny to me. And the shaggier Don Johnson’s hair got, the worse the writing became.

The non-serialized show became obsessed with wrapping up every episode with a depressing and bleak ending. Had the Lonely Island existed when Miami Vice was new, I bet the trio would have done a parody of dark Miami Vice endings that would have been a lot like its perfect “Dear Sister” sketch about the solemn ending of The O.C.’s second-season finale, and that Miami Vice sketch would have ruled.

My favorite Miami Vice parody would have to be Key & Peele’s “L.A. Vice” sketch, which poked fun at how often Crockett or Tubbs shouted, “Nooooo!” One of the Miami Vice pilot’s most famous moments is when Crockett shouts exactly that as he realizes he’s too late to stop his partner—played by a then-unknown Jimmy Smits—from being blown up by a car bomb. Durán’s only scene in “Payback” also ends with Crockett shouting, “Nooooo!”

Peter Atencio, who directed almost all the Key & Peele sketches, loved to make the show’s outdoor sketches look like they cost $100 million to shoot. The “L.A. Vice” sketch, which Atencio shot at the same Los Angeles River culvert that was made famous by movies ranging from Grease to Terminator 2, was no exception.

Meanwhile, the “New Jersey Vice” sketch from 1986’s The Joe Piscopo New Jersey Special, which was made for ABC, does not look like 100 million bucks. The only funny thing about it is Eddie Murphy imitating Philip Michael Thomas’s occasionally cheesy line delivery as Tubbs (a cop who always went to work in double-breasted Hugo Boss suits because he was, according to Mann in 2024, a Black Republican). Murphy’s comedic alma mater, Saturday Night Live, did an okay “Laramie Vice” sketch where special guest host John Lithgow played a Wild West lawman who runs around in pastels, and the funniest part was when Lithgow atrociously lip-synched in a recording studio “Heartbeat,” Johnson’s cover of a 1982 Wendy Waldman song from his temporary pop music phase. Regular Show’s Miami Vice parody is also merely okay. It’s yet another Miami Vice parody that goes for the easiest gag: Crockett’s pastels.

The funniest part of Regular Show’s “Carter and Briggs” episode from 2013 has nothing to do with its recreation of the splashiest elements of Miami Vice and Lethal Weapon. It’s instead the moment when, after Mordecai and Rigby win the chance to appear in an episode of Carter and Briggs (because they defeated the competition in a car donut stunt contest that was judged by the nameless actors who play Carter and Briggs), the other park employees watch on TV Mordecai and Rigby’s only scene with the stars of Carter and Briggs, and the actor who plays Briggs is unable to hide his disgust with Mordecai and Rigby’s stiff line delivery.

Carter was voiced, by the way, by the legendary Steve Blum, a.k.a. Spike in Cowboy Bebop’s English dub, Mugen in Samurai Champloo’s English dub, and Wolverine on Wolverine and the X-Men. Briggs was voiced by a white guy, Roger Craig Smith, who also provided the animal noises for Shannon Acidbutt and voiced Captain America on Avengers Assemble and other Marvel Animation projects. I would have liked the episode more if Phil LaMarr or the late Carl Weathers, two of Regular Show’s Black guest voice actors, played Briggs.

A much funnier fictional cop show is McGarnagle, one of many shows Homer Simpson gets so invested in that he shouts at characters on the TV screen (“It means he gets results, you stupid chief!”) like they’re Garrison Keillor sounding too sleepy at a PBS pledge drive. Dan Castellaneta provided the Clint Eastwood-style voice of a hard-boiled cop who “solves crimes in his spare time” and looks like a cross between Eastwood as Dirty Harry, Richard Widmark as Madigan, and Henry Fonda, Widmark’s Madigan co-star, when he starred as Detective Sergeant Chad Smith on the short-lived The Smith Family, which co-starred a post-Mayberry Ron Howard as Smith’s teenage son.

McGarnagle appeared only twice on The Simpsons. Every time I rewatch a clip of McGarnagle, I get a kick out of the McGarnagle actors repeatedly saying McGarnagle’s name, the comically oversized sandwich McGarnagle is trying to eat in the chief’s office, and Hank Azaria doing the exact same voice he did as the captain who chewed out McBain while voicing the chief who chews out McGarnagle and looks exactly like McBain’s captain.

A part of me wishes that McGarnagle existed so that I can hate-watch an old white cop who keeps getting 10-year-old witnesses killed. It would have probably lasted nine seasons on CBS, just like Brazzos, the fictional procedural that starred Charles-Haden Savage as New York’s smartest cop, did in the Only Murders in the Building universe.

I wish OMITB’s brief glimpses into Charles’s old show were as sharp and funny as the clips of the show-within-the-show during creators Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel’s short-lived The Grinder. On that Fox legal comedy, Rob Lowe starred as a vain Hollywood actor who played a maverick lawyer on The Grinder—the CSI: Miami of courtroom dramas and a trashy procedural that had very little to do with how lawyering actually works—and he misguidedly thinks he doesn’t need to pass the bar to become an actual lawyer like his younger brother and their dad.

Both the fictional courtroom show and its spinoff—The Grinder: New Orleans, starring Timothy Olyphant as the Grinder’s younger brother, who was often shirtless for no reason—were a hilarious and dead-on parody of CSI: Miami-style procedurals and their implausible plot twists. They reminded me of the fake courtroom show in That Mitchell and Webb Look’s equally hilarious 2008 “Speedo” sketch about a pair of legal drama showrunners from the U.K. who don’t do their research. Speedo (“I was just thinking about how much I goddamn love justice”) is a parody of Shark, the forgotten CBS procedural that wanted so badly to be House in the courtroom (Spike Lee directed the pilot! It’s no Do the Right Thing!) and starred James Woods as a brash L.A. prosecutor who talks a lot about how much he goddamn loves justice.

A part of me wishes that The Grinder: New Orleans also existed so that I can hate-watch that Olyphant show’s hackneyed depiction of bayou justice as well. Today’s prompt is: Is there a fictional show from a live-action or animated series that you wish was an actual show?

Does Pog & Dar: Cop Landlords from the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place” whet your appetite for a trigger-happy drama about hard-boiled landlords and their crackdown on tenants who breached the rental agreement? Does Intensive Karen from the end of Community’s “Basic Sandwich” episode make you long for a drama about a hot paraplegic doctor who crosses her legs intensively?