Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Each week, TVLine names a Performer of the Week. The beloved (but badly snubbed by the Emmys) Rhea Seehorn won the title last week for her performance in the first episode of Apple TV’s Pluribus. I haven’t watched Pluribus yet.

I’m way behind on my Vince Gilligan shows. I haven’t finished watching Better Call Saul’s entire run yet. I haven’t even gotten to El Camino, the feature-length Breaking Bad epilogue Netflix released in 2019. So because I haven’t reached Pluribus yet, my favorite new performance of the last several days is Alberto Isaac as Oliver Probblo—a coked-up regional theater actor who plays Scrooge in a production of A Christmas Carol outside Dayton, Ohio and “tries to find things to do as Scrooge… in the off-season, so he doesn’t get rusty”—in The Chair Company’s fifth episode, “I Won. Zoom In.”

I’m currently watching both HBO’s The Chair Company and Adult Swim’s Lazarus at the same time. There has been more plot progression and character development in the first five episodes of The Chair Company than there was in the first six episodes of Lazarus. Both shows are about misfits chasing a massive conspiracy. I’m a fan of Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Space Dandy, and Carole & Tuesday, which are all Shinichiro Watanabe shows. I never expected the Tim Robinson/Zach Kanin absurdist comedy series to be the more impressive series than the Watanabe sci-fi anime from earlier this year. (But the original music Kamasi Washington, British downtempo musician Bonobo, and British electronic musician Floating Points composed for Lazarus totally slams, of course.)

I could go on all day about The Chair Company. I don’t want to spend too much time on that series this week, but I do want to single out Isaac’s turn as Oliver, whose photo as a corporate boss from an acting exercise in a “Life of the Party” acting class was repurposed by Tecca, a malevolent office chair company, for its website’s photos of Tecca employees. The webmaster made it look as if Oliver is both the CFO of Red Ball Market Global, Tecca’s parent company, and a Brucell Pharma board member named Ken Tucker ([Sean Connery Diamonds Are Forever voice] named after the former Entertainment Weekly TV critic, perhaps?). I’m Filipino, and so are both Isaac and Lou Diamond Phillips, another Chair Company semi-regular. I like how Robinson and Kanin keep giving Isaac—an East West Players Asian American theater troupe veteran whom I best remember as Josh Chan’s dad on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend—such showy and very Robinson-esque parts.

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson fans are probably familiar with Isaac from his funny guest spot as Don Bondarley, the constantly forgetful “King of the Dirty Songs,” in ITYSL’s third-season finale. Several of ITYSL’s funniest sketches were stolen by elderly actors like Isaac and the late Bob McDuff Wilson, who played a dignified business school professor who suddenly stops behaving like an adult at a reunion lunch with his former students because he’s attracted to the burger one of them ordered (“Gimme dat”) in the “Dylan’s Burger” sketch. Isaac’s standout work in “I Won. Zoom In.” made me go check out the Working Actor’s Journey podcast’s 2022 interview with Isaac, whose wife is another East West Players vet, Gilmore Girls alum Emily Kuroda, and his discussion of his journey—whose latest stopover is the hilarious world of The Chair Company—is worthwhile.

The Chair Company’s current eight-episode first season unravels while it’s New Dimension November, which I named after “New Dimension,” one of the tunes the Japanese duo Force of Nature composed for the inventive Samurai Champloo, the Watanabe creation where Edo-period swordsmen fight like breakdancers and Edo-period painters cover castles with graffiti. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month is a hip-hop instrumental that was composed for Champloo.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “Aruarian Dance” by the late, great Nujabes, a.k.a. Jun Seba. Listen to the four-minute, 11-second track here.

“Aruarian Dance” and its smooth vibe can be heard during both the 2004 episode “Akage ijin (Redheaded Foreigner),” which was retitled “Stranger Searching” for English-speaking audiences, and the 2005 episode “Ikkyū nyūkon (Heart and Soul Into the Ball),” which was retitled “Baseball Blues.” The first time I heard “Aruarian Dance,” it wasn’t on Champloo.

I didn’t even know the Nujabes tune was from Champloo. (I didn’t watch Champloo until 2014, when it was on Netflix.) I first heard “Aruarian Dance” in 2005, when Siik—a Los Angeles DJ who later co-founded with two other L.A. DJs, Partytime and the world-famous Sosupersam (a.k.a. Samantha Duenas), in 2013 a still-existing series of monthly R&B-themed DJ set parties called 143 (named after the ’90s pager code for “I love you”)—perfectly mashed it up with Amerie’s “1 Thing.”

Siik’s “1 Thing”/“Aruarian Dance” mash-up was my introduction to the musical brilliance of Nujabes. Champloo got me hooked on most of the rest of Nujabes’s work.

Bonus track: “Aruarian Dance” is the most popular piece of original music from Champloo that’s not “Battlecry,” the OP theme Nujabes did with Japanese rapper Shing02. Lots of folks have done live covers of “Aruarian Dance,” but my favorite cover would have to be the Kids Electric Orchestra version from 2016. The Kids Electric Orchestra is a group of students from a music class at an elementary school in South Korea, and these students love to cover the likes of Radiohead, MF DOOM, and, of course, Nujabes. Watch the two-minute, 10-second video of the kids’ cover of “Aruarian Dance” here.

By the way, WordPress sucks right now. Its block editor no longer works for people like me who prefer to compose their posts in the block editor via their laptops instead of via their phones. (I refuse to compose long-form posts on the phone. I’m currently taking voice acting classes on Zoom, and a few of my classmates’ voices have sounded really tinny in my headphones because they’re accessing Zoom through their phones, which I don’t do. I prefer to do everything on my MacBook.) There are no YouTube embeds on the Couch Avocados post this week because I composed this post in WordPress’s classic editor, and trying to code a YouTube embed into the classic editor is like trying to ice-skate uphill.

Anyway, today’s prompt is: Because the word “dance” is in the track title, is there an episode you like because of the remarkable dancing skills the show’s stars demonstrated in that one?

The first thing I can think of is any moment when Fred Berry, one of the founding members of the dance group known as the Lockers (other founding members included Toni Basil and the late Shabba-Doo), was popping and locking in the role of Rerun on What’s Happening!!

Here’s another example: Right before The Mary Tyler Moore Show left Hulu in October, I watched for the first time ever TMTMS’s 1976 episode “Murray Can’t Lose.” The coolest part of “Murray Can’t Lose” was the late Georgia Engel—who played on TMTMS the type of demure character nobody would expect to dance like Bob Fosse—demonstrating her skills as a trained Broadway dancer during the scene where Georgette performed a sultry cover of “Steam Heat” at the Teddy Awards.

In iZombie’s “Five, Six, Seven, Ate!” episode, Detective Babineaux taught Ravi how to dance, and Liv was on “salsa dancer brain” in order to track down the murderer of a pair of salsa dancers. Rose McIver and Rahul Kohli went through strenuous choreography training for “Five, Six, Seven, Ate!” The results looked fantastic. And in between the TMTMS/What’s Happening!! era of sitcoms and iZombie’s salsa dancer brain episode in 2019, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia viewers like myself were amazed in 2018 by Mac’s five-minute interpretive dance piece about coming out of the closet—not at all played for laughs—at the end of “Mac Finds His Pride” (Sunny’s 13th-season finale), which took Rob Mac seven months to train for because he had no background in dancing.

My big brother, a tango instructor and DJ, will probably not be happy that I’m unable to name any examples of tango choreography from scripted or reality TV. That’s because the only thing I can think of is Captain Stubing doing the tango with a female passenger in the Pacific Princess ballroom on The Loooooove Boat.