Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

January is Cannell-ary. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month is a Mike Post instrumental from a Stephen J. Cannell production.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Post’s slinky main title theme from Silk Stalkings, the ’90s USA Network staple about high-society murders in Palm Beach, Florida and the colorfully dressed and extremely attractive detectives who investigate these crimes the Palm Beach PD refers to as “silk stalkings.”

These days, Silk Stalkings is best known among comedy nerds as the show barely anyone paid attention to during Talking Stalkings, the now-defunct Funhaus gaming channel’s beloved and very short-lived comedy podcast, which started out as a livestream where the Funhaus comedians—each one was introduced as “the resident Silk Stalkings expert,” but none of them knew jack about the show—drunkenly watched the Silk Stalkings pilot for the first time. It evolved into an Eric Andre Show-style parody of amateurish podcasts about old TV where nobody could get the Silk Stalkings DVD to work properly and Rahul Kohli showed up at the L.A. offices of Funhaus (while on a break from iZombie’s shoot in Vancouver) to portray an arrogant and grumpy version of himself who insults special podcast guest star Johnny Depp (actually a Depp impersonator in a Captain Jack Sparrow costume).

At eight seasons, Silk Stalkings was the longest-running show that was created by Cannell. He wrote Silk Stalkings’s first couple of episodes—the 1991 pilot bears a lot of what author Jaime Weinman has called Cannell’s specialty as a writer: the injection of character comedy into an otherwise standard crime drama plot—and then had zero creative involvement, aside from returning to write another first-season episode and a couple of episodes during the Janet Gunn/Chris Potter era.

Instead of Cannell, the late David Peckinpah, Sam Peckinpah’s writer nephew, was the guy who shaped Silk Stalkings into the lurid but weirdly cozy show A.V. Club contributor LaToya Ferguson adores so much that she clamors for a Silk Stalkings reboot. Under his regime, Silk Stalkings got rid of Sergeant Rita Lee Lance’s brain aneurysm, a problem Cannell introduced in the pilot. Despite suffering from frequent headaches, Rita refused to have it surgically removed because she didn’t want to be confined to desk duty. Peckinpah and his writers figured that the demands of Rita’s job were sufficient enough as drama for Rita, so they retconned the blood bubble in Rita’s brain out of existence.

As Rita—the show’s noirish narrator, whose voiceovers were full of quips like “The trouble with people today is even in Palm Beach, you murder some guy for his money, you better take American Express. Unfortunately, for Quentin Kirkland III, he’d apparently left home without it”—the perfectly surnamed Mitzi Kapture was a great choice as the show’s lead. She was a heroine in the mold of the petite Stepfanie Kramer as Sergeant Dee Dee McCall—known in the LAPD as “the Brass Cupcake”—from Hunter (a Frank Lupo creation that was produced by Cannell’s studio and saved from the ratings basement when Cannell brought in his mentor Roy Huggins in the second season to overhaul Lupo’s creation, which meant lots of hours of Huggins, famously a jerk to younger writers, ordering Lupo to “Get rid of that piece of junk car you have [Hunter] driving” and so on).

“Stepfanie Kramer was of course absurd as a cop, with her stuntwomen kicking and punching guys twice her size, and with huge ’80s hair and thick makeup, but she was exceptionally likable and entertaining and played everything with a light touch, suggesting (without winking at the audience) that she had a certain consciousness of the absurdity of the thing; that also comes across in her interview on the DVD, where she makes fun of the hair and the bad makeup and the hooker outfits,” recalled Weinman in a 2005 blog post about Hunter.

That’s also a perfect description of what the similarly petite Kapture brought to Rita, except she didn’t have big ’80s hair. In the show’s first three seasons, the hair department gave Kapture a timeless look that was reminiscent of Rita Hayworth and Gene Tierney’s hairdos in the ’40s—in keeping with Cannell’s urge in Silk Stalkings’s first two episodes to evoke a noir police procedural. But he wanted to set this neo-noir series in posh Palm Beach, and he wanted to tell it from a female cop’s point of view and, as Kapture said about Cannell’s initial vision when she was interviewed by United Press International in 1994, “create a female character with a male partner and have them equals. The male cop respects her as much as he would a male partner.”

The hair may not have been as huge as Kramer’s, but just like Kramer during Hunter’s first six seasons, Kapture was so likable on Silk Stalkings that you cheered whenever Rita punched in the face or the groin a sleazebag who attempted to rape her.

“The demographics on our show are widespread,” said Kapture to UPI. “I hear from 12-year-old girls and people in the 80s. It’s a very broad spectrum. Young girls really identify with my character. Middle-aged people enjoy the sensuality. Older people like the crime stories. There’s some quasi-nudity in the show. But not for me. The first year they tried to put me in a bathing suit. I knew if I agreed we’d become ‘Baywatch.’ I’d lose my identity as a cop and I didn’t want that to happen. You know, I’d be pulling guns out of my bikini or whatever.”

Silk Stalkings was the quintessential trashy ’90s procedural I would put on while folding my laundry when I lived alone in a tiny downtown studio apartment (right above Bookshop Santa Cruz) during my years as a UC Santa Cruz student and the show where I would briefly take my eyes off that laundry I was folding to see how much female nudity USA tried to get away with on basic cable.

There were tons of hot starlets slinking around in short skirts, bikinis, lingerie, towels, or bedsheets on Silk Stalkings. But the show never got more risqué than that.

That was also true of Silk Stalkings’s bedroom scenes—which never released any butt cheeks like the softcore love scenes on NYPD Blue and were never as thrusty as the ones on Dream On—because USA was a commercial cable channel that didn’t want to offend the sponsors.

“I like that someone made a porno without any sex in it, and they said, ‘Yeah, let’s run this for eight seasons,’ ” quipped comedian James Willems in the first episode of Talking Stalkings.

Silk Stalkings was never as terrific or compellingly written as Homicide: Life on the Street, whose first four seasons I watched avidly when they first aired on NBC. (It was the type of cop show Tom Fontana liked to occasionally ridicule on Homicide, via the dyspeptic dialogue of Richard Belzer as John Munch when the TV inside Munch and the other detectives’ break room was tuned to some steamy hour-long drama series.) And its original score (most often composed by Danny Lux, Post’s protégé, instead of Post) never made my head nod like the latest hip-hop tracks that were being featured over on New York Undercover did while I watched Williams infiltrate a sadistic Black fraternity or saw Torres infiltrate “a gang of trained killers.”

But if you were an ’80s and ’90s kid like I was, you took one look at one of USA’s trashy “Sunday Night Heat” promos and its clips from Silk Stalkings and thought, “I’m there, baby.”

And then after the half-naked seductress of the week put on more clothes in Act 3, you bounced and went over to MTV to see if Amp or Yo! (the late ’90s reimagining of Yo! MTV Raps) was airing.

I don’t remember a lot of the storylines from when Silk Stalkings first aired. One thing I remember is changing the channel from USA to something else because I didn’t want to see the dad from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off doing a sex scene. I thought, “What’s next? Principal Rooney guest stars and makes out with a masseuse for 20 minutes?” (This was eight years before Jeffrey Jones, a registered sex offender, was arrested for child porn possession and one other crime that’s too disgusting to mention in a blog post about a mostly lighthearted neo-noir show.)

If you were a ’90s kid who had to watch Silk Stalkings with your parents, you had to suffer through the discomfort of watching its bedroom scenes alongside Mom and Dad. LaToya Ferguson and I were lucky: Her family didn’t allow her to watch Silk Stalkings, which she didn’t watch until the early 2010s, while—during its first couple of seasons as a CBS show that was part of the network’s late-night “Crimetime After Primetime” block—I only watched it when my parents were asleep.

One other thing I remember about Silk Stalkings is sitting through “Partners in Crime” (one of several episodes the late Carl Weathers directed for the show) just because Cindy Ambuehl—pretty damn good later on in the role of the vengeful ex-wife of brash action movie producer Peter Dragon on Action, Fox’s raunchy and controversial single-camera comedy about Hollywood bigshots—ran around in a miniskirt in every scene. She looked foxy as an ambitious tabloid journalist who suspects something’s not right about the woman she thought she accidentally hit with her car.

Ambuehl was one of many Silk Stalkings guest stars who appeared in more than one episode, each time as a completely different character. Like the original Law & Order, Silk Stalkings was full of “repeat offenders” and cast changes.

From its early days as a show that aired on CBS and USA at the same time to its heyday as a USA exclusive, Silk Stalkings went through three different police captains and three different eras, each one anchored by a different duo. (The neurotic Harry Lipschitz was the only captain who appeared in all three eras. He was played by Charlie Brill, whom I best remember as the low-key villain of both Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Trials and Tribble-ations,” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s “The Trouble with Tribbles” sequel, while he’s better known to boomers as half of the husband-and-wife stand-up act McCall and Brill.)

The most beloved of the three duos is the first one: Kapture as Rita and Rob Estes as her case partner, best friend, and eventual husband, Sergeant Chris Lorenzo, a playboy cop who was sort of a white precursor to Will Smith’s wealthy Mike Lowrey character from the Bad Boys movies.

Like The X-Files, Silk Stalkings was one of the first hour-long dramas to have a rabid online fanbase. Many of the show’s early ’90s fans didn’t watch Silk Stalkings for the cases.

Like the X-Files fans who shipped Mulder and Scully, the fans (who called themselves “Stalkers” or “Silkies”) were there to enjoy—and then discuss on Usenet or AOL—the platonic love between Rita and Chris, who affectionately called each other “Sam” because they both worshiped golf champ Sam Snead. Those viewers hoped that one of the many times when the partners held each other’s hands or when Rita looked into Chris’s eyes and told him that he’ll always be her best friend would lead to a romantic relationship and wedding bells between them.

In the ’90s, I watched only a handful of episodes from the Kapture/Estes era in their entirety. The era I watched a lot more of when it first aired was the Janet Gunn/Chris Potter era, a.k.a. my public radio/university years. This will irk Silk Stalkings’s biggest fans, but I found Sergeant Cassy St. John, Gunn’s character, and Sergeant Tom Ryan, Cassy’s ex-husband and the character Potter is best known for outside of his voice work as Gambit on the Fox Kids version of X-Men, to be a more intriguing duo than Rita and Chris.

Cassy and Tom’s “friends who hated being married to each other and are better off as police partners who constantly rib each other about old habits or their post-divorce personal lives” dynamic was always more entertaining to me than the earnest bond I saw between Rita and Chris. (The earnest side of that bond was particularly prominent in 1993’s “Soul Kiss,” one of the few Kapture/Estes episodes I saw in their entirety in the ’90s.)

I wouldn’t watch Silk Stalkings on a regular basis nowadays because Cannell’s most copagandistic shows, whether it’s Silk Stalkings or Hunter, are the Cannell shows I’m the least interested in, but I had to watch for the first time a bunch of Rita and Chris episodes for the purposes of this blog post. My favorite thing about these Rita and Chris episodes I watched on Peacock is that I get to see performers who went on to do amazing things showing up in various states of undress and looking like pinups from the 1993 Marvel Swimsuit Special.

During a 54-second video Mike Post posted about the creation of his Silk Stalkings theme on his TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube accounts (I wish he explained why the theme contained a ticking clock straight out of Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning,” and I also wish he identified the vocalist who ended the theme with a bang by delivering a soulful howl straight out of the Merry Clayton section of the Rolling Stones and Clayton’s “Gimme Shelter”), Post was right that Silk Stalkings looked slicker than other Cannell productions. But he left out that it was still cheaply made just like those other shows.

Silk Stalkings was filmed in San Diego (and sometimes Scottsdale, Arizona) instead of Palm Beach to cut costs, the show didn’t have the budget to flip over cars every week like Cannell’s prime-time network shows did, and it used the garish colors of Rita and Chris’s outfits (or Cassy and Tom’s outfits) and the neon-colored walls of the detectives’ Palm Beach police station to try to distract us from the fact that the footage in Southern California was just never going to look as impressive as Miami Vice. Michael Mann’s show had the dough to actually film in Miami and look like a $30 million blockbuster every week. (Silk Stalkings’s flashy and tantalizing opening title sequence—designed by frequent Silk Stalkings episode director Ralph Hemecker, who went on to direct episodes of Once Upon a Time and the CW’s The Flash—is, like a lot of opening title sequences that kick off anime shows, better-looking than the actual show.)

One other amusing thing about these Rita and Chris episodes is that Silk Stalkings had some fun at the expense of its own cheap and tacky look. The most Cannell-esque part of the pilot, one of the episodes I watched for the first time earlier this month, is Ben Vereen as Ben “Hutch” Hutchinson, Rita and Chris’s first captain, channeling a little bit of his old character from Tenspeed and Brown Shoe (particularly whenever that character was annoyed by the ridiculous events in the Mark Savage mystery novels Jeff Goldblum’s character couldn’t stop reading) when Hutch complains to Rita about the station’s neon-colored walls.

Hutch says, “How am I supposed to work in a place like this? I mean, I’m supposed to be a cop. This is supposed to be a precinct, not something out of a science fiction movie!”

Like Stepfanie Kramer’s aforementioned awareness of the absurdity of playing a cop with big hair and thick makeup without winking right at the audience, Cannell lampshaded the absurdity of the station’s neon-colored walls as early as the pilot.

Silk Stalkings is a fucking trip. It’s not a great show, but Kapture was the perfect lead, and it’s fun to occasionally re-encounter the show on Peacock and say, “Damn, of course Trinity is able to run in heels. She’s Trinity.”