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 show that was created or produced by Stephen J. Cannell. We’re now entering the half of Cannell-ary 2026 where the shows I’m spotlighting are Cannell shows I never watched during my childhood and have only started watching earlier this month. If you watched a shit-ton of USA Network in the late ’80s, you couldn’t hide… from Riptide.

The Silk Stalkings pilot, which I briefly discussed last week, was one of the only five Silk Stalkings episodes Cannell wrote, and he peppered the pilot’s dialogue with lots of golf metaphors to establish that Palm Beach homicide detectives Rita Lee Lance and Chris Lorenzo were golf fans who called each other “Sam” because of their mutual admiration for golf legend Sam Snead. Riptide, which, like The A-Team, was created by Cannell and Frank Lupo, was the type of Cannell high-concept show that would have been called a “whiff” by ’80s TV critics who were fond of using golf metaphors like Rita was.

In other words, the critics during Riptide’s original run on NBC were not as kind to Riptide as they later were to Wiseguy, another Cannell/Lupo creation, and the very short-lived Profit, one of the few Cannell productions Cannell didn’t create or co-create. Even though I never got to become a TV critic like I wanted during the years when I wrote movie reviews for newspapers, I still regularly read articles by a few TV critics and agree with a lot of their opinions. But Riptide is one place where I would have distanced myself from the TV cognoscenti.

Sure, Riptide was flawed—“They would not have been in the Vietnam War,” admitted Riptide showrunner Babs Greyhosky when she pointed out in 2024 on former stand-up comic Ian Fermaglich’s Ian Talks Comedy podcast that Perry King, Joe Penny, and Thom Bray were too young to be playing Vietnam vets on Riptide—but the show was also highly entertaining.

The best part of Riptide was, of course, Post and Pete Carpenter’s main title theme, and it’s the Original TV Score Selection of the Week.

When I was a kid, Riptide was one of hundreds of programs where I paused my channel surfing to vibe out to the opening title theme but didn’t stick around for the rest of the show. I wasn’t yet into hour-long action dramas about private eyes. Nowadays, I wish there were less cop shows and a lot more shows about private eyes who hate cops—one of which was Riptide.

Last Cannell-ary, I pointed out that Post and Carpenter’s main title themes from The A-Team and Stingray were great because they had a three-act structure that elegantly summed up the show’s characters without any lyrics. The duo’s main title theme for Riptide had a three-act structure as well. Its best part was the middle act: an interlude that perfectly combined wordless, Beach Boys-style doo-wop vocals with a reggae-lite beat.

Even though I’m a Beastie Boys fan instead of a Beach Boys fan (it’s partly because one of the Beasties was a Pinoy—Mix Master Mike, whom Pinoys like myself look up to—while the Beach Boys are Pinoy-less), that tropical interlude was so cool that my nine-year-old self grabbed my family’s JCPenney AC/DC cassette player/recorder, put the portable recorder up to the TV speakers when a Riptide rerun started up on USA, and added the Riptide theme to a mixtape of TV themes I was trying to compile at the time.

I preferred my mixtapes of TV themes over TeeVee Toons mogul Steve Gottlieb’s first volume of Television’s Greatest Hits because the guy TeeVee Toons hired to impersonate Adam West as Batman sounded more like the “Distributed by the SFM Entertainment Division of SFM Media Corporation” guy as Batman, and that first Television’s Greatest Hits LP had some really terrible covers of TV themes.

Speaking of moguls, I don’t admire a lot of TV moguls. Almost all of them are billionaires I can’t relate to at all.

Cannell is a rare mogul I admire because he overcame his struggles with dyslexia, he was a brilliant writer who was a master at leavening action with humor, and he wanted to build shows around Black private eyes or female protagonists (most of those shows never got greenlit, and only one of them became a hit: Silk Stalkings).

“I used to go to the networks all the time and pitch shows with female leads. I’ve always wanted to do a show with a female lead. They wouldn’t let me do it,” said Cannell to crime novelist Craig McDonald in 2003.

Cannell liked to be remembered more for his writing than the mogul stuff—hence the frequently reshot vanity card where he pecked away on his typewriter in his office and then tossed into the air the typewriter’s page, which attached itself to a couple of other pages to form a giant “C.”

M*A*S*H and Cheers writer Ken Levine called Cannell’s vanity card “the worst” in a 2010 blog post about the time when he wanted to create an unpretentious vanity card for the production company he formed with David Isaacs, his writing partner, because he found many vanity cards to be overly cutesy and pretentious. When Levine rehashed that post in 2015, he softened his opinion—Cannell died of complications from melanoma a few months after Levine’s 2010 post—and changed it to “Maybe the worst.”

Levine is nuts, man. I liked the animation of the page flying in the air. Cannell’s vanity card is an unforgettable image from my childhood.

Back when Cannell learned on the Universal backlot how to do the thing he was always doing in his vanity card, the most popular crime dramas were in the humorless mold of Quinn Martin and Jack Webb, whose half-hour Universal Television cop show, NBC’s Adam-12, was where Cannell served as head writer. Beginning with The Rockford Files, my favorite of Cannell’s creations, Cannell took the hour-long crime drama and brought humor and irreverence to it in the same way Roy Huggins, his mentor and Rockford’s co-creator, brought humor to the adult western genre when he created Maverick in 1957.

Cannell’s knack for blending action with sharp character comedy was precisely why when Steve and Roger envisioned on American Dad! an action-packed opening title sequence for their crime-solving personas as, respectively, Wheels, a pun-loving detective in a wheelchair, and the Legman, the bearded partner who bickers with Wheels in every episode of their imaginary show, they slapped the end of their Wheels and the Legman intro with a “Created by Stephen J. Cannell” credit.

Huggins’s greatest protégé populated his shows with lead characters who made references to real-life movie stars (one of my favorite Jim Rockford lines is when he makes fun of a cop who just arrested him by saying to him that he sloppily performed the arrest and that “John Wayne would have kept the sun to his back”), TV shows, comic books (Milton Hardcastle loved to read Lone Ranger comics), or fictional crime novels that were bestsellers in the characters’ universe—which is what ordinary people in real life often do. Many of us make comparisons to (or want to be as clever as) the characters in our favorite movies, shows, comics, or crime novels when we speak. Also, Cannell’s protagonists were a lot more relatable and appealing than, for example, whoever the fuck Efrem Zimbalist Jr. played on Quinn Martin’s The FBI because they were less than perfect. Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, which I spotlighted two weeks ago and had never watched until last year, was a great example of all of that.

This year, I watched the two-hour Riptide pilot and a bunch of other Riptide episodes for the first time via Tubi, and, well, the show is, in its earlier episodes, like a seven-ingredient tiki cocktail at Straightaway’s, the Riptide Detective Agency founders’ favorite restaurant: kind of an overstuffed mess.

But Riptide has its charms. When an episode Cannell wrote for a lesser creation like Riptide was mid, one or two bits of character comedy from the mind of Cannell always somehow elevated the episode—like the hilarious undercover cantina scene that elevated the Cannell-scripted “The Mean Green Love Machine.” That was because he learned from writing for Adam-12 that, as he said to McDonald in 2003, a comic relief character “had to exist during those three pages or four pages and be funny and at the same time, real. I sort of developed this technique of saying, ‘Every character has to have a yesterday and is going to have a tomorrow.’ ”

Cannell noticed that Adam-12’s comedic “spine stories” before he joined the show were just played for laughs, which wasn’t satisfying enough for him. He gave McDonald an example: A cartoonish woman with curlers in her hair would call the police because her cat won’t come down from a tree, and Officers Malloy and Reed—Adam-12’s lead characters—would respond to the call.

“I decided if the woman comes out there, and her cat’s in the tree, instead of it being some dopey thing about the cat being in the tree, I’d have this lady be late for her night school class in law,” continued Cannell in McDonald’s interview with him. “So there would be another energy in the thing beyond just, ‘Oh my cat’s up in the tree! Can’t you boys get it down?’ ”

The guys who wouldn’t have minded rescuing cats from trees on Riptide are Vietnam vets Cody Allen, Perry King’s grew-up-around-wealth-but-is-fine-without-it character, and Nick Ryder, Joe Penny’s blue-collar character. They both run a detective agency out of the Riptide, Cody’s cabin cruiser, at Pier 56 at the real-life King Harbor Marina (in the SoCal city of Redondo Beach).

Riptide helped boost tourism in King Harbor while it was filmed on location there. J. Rickley Dumm, a Riptide associate producer, said to the Los Angeles Times in 1986 that “It was a wonderful place to shoot. It was like being on vacation.”

But the show, in a move that made things confusing, took Redondo Beach, the city that surrounds the marina, and renamed it King Harbor—even though Cody’s cabin cruiser is surrounded by boats with hulls that say, “Redondo Beach, CA.” Woops!

In what appears to be a concession to then-NBC president Brandon Tartikoff’s desire for a helicopter action show like the CBS hit Magnum, P.I. (which itself was influenced by Rockford’s depiction of a financially struggling private eye), Nick pilots an old pink Sikorsky helicopter he calls the Screaming Mimi. (Riptide wasn’t NBC’s first attempt to copy Magnum. It was preceded by Hart to Hart producer Tom Mankiewicz’s 1982 NBC flop Gavilan, which starred Robert Urich as an oceanographer who used to be a CIA agent and, like Jim Rockford, hurts his hand whenever he punches out thugs.)

Nick ferries tourists in the Mimi when he’s not using it to rescue troubled clients or dump onto bad guys a grenade in a mayonnaise jar.

King—the Riptide regular, not the harbor—is best known to Star Wars fans for voicing Han Solo in NPR radio drama versions and Walt Disney Records read-along storybook retellings of the first three Star Wars flicks. Unless I’m mistaken, Han never came up with an explosive device hack that’s as nifty as a grenade in a mayo jar. Pilots in ’Nam like Nick solved the problem of throwing a live grenade through a window—the grenade will explode before it hits the ground—by pulling the safety pin and then putting the grenade in a mayo jar to keep the handle depressed.

Again, the Mimi was Cannell and Frank Lupo’s answer to T.C.’s Hughes 500 chopper from Donald P. Bellisario’s Magnum. But because this is a Cannell show, the Mimi often breaks down at inconvenient times. It’s the ugliest chopper in the history of TV, thanks to a painted face on the front of the chopper that brings to mind the screaming face from the cover of King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King album.

Riptide’s shtick about the Mimi’s clunkiness is amusing. It was a continuation of Cannell’s urge on Rockford to depict private eyes who can’t afford to pay all their bills. (“Mannix and those guys never talked about money. So I wanted Rockford to be a guy who cared enough about getting paid to run credit checks on his clients and keep track of his gas mileage,” said Cannell to the L.A. Times in 1997.)

But the “this new Enterprise in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is a clunker” shtick gets really old on Riptide when machines that aren’t the Mimi go kaput. In addition to the Mimi’s mechanical woes, Cody drives a vintage woodie station wagon that breaks down at inconvenient times.

Murray “Boz” Bozinsky, Thom Bray’s character, is a dorky and kindly computer whiz who joins the agency in the pilot and is the most likable of the three detectives. His friendship with Cody and Nick goes back to when they helped save him from getting thrown into military prison during ’Nam for punching out his scummy superior officer over a “peaceful application” he stole from him while he was an Army computer scientist. Boz lugs around with him the Roboz, an orange robot he built to assist him in hacking. But the non-verbal bot also breaks down at inconvenient times.

One busted machine is enough for me. A chopper that barely works, a car that doesn’t work, a robot pal that doesn’t work, and a blender that attacks Nick? This is what I mean when I say Riptide is initially kind of an overstuffed mess.

For the women in NBC’s audience, Cody and Nick were super-protective of Boz (if this were high school, Cody and Nick were the jocks who admired the AV club kids instead of giving them wedgies, a precursor to the Channing Tatum character’s bond with the AP Chem kids while he was undercover in the 2012 movie version of the Cannell studio’s 21 Jump Street), King and Penny were frequently shirtless, and their characters spent an entire late-night car chase in their tighty-whities in the pilot. (That was because Cody and Nick were asleep when the bad guys stormed their boat, and they didn’t have time to put on any pants, which led to fanfics about them as a hot and heavy couple. Riptide and Wiseguy were the two Cannell shows that both the “Homoeroticism, Yay!” crowd at Television Without Pity and Britta Perry from Greendale Community College would have analyzed the most as if they were the Zapruder film.)

For the male viewers between 18 and 34, Cody, Nick, and Boz were surrounded by women in bikinis—several of them were Cody and Nick’s clients—and there were lots of A-Team-style shots of cars flipping over like pancakes.

The klutzy but adorable robot was meant to please little kids who had just watched The A-Team, which aired right before Riptide during most of Riptide’s run on NBC. Meanwhile, for the male and female gearheads, Cody dumped the unreliable woodie for a GMC S-15 Jimmy truck, while Nick drove a red Corvette.

Riptide tried to be something for everybody in its first season, and it didn’t always work. There was also too much recycling from Rockford.

In 1974’s “The Kirkoff Case,” the first Rockford episode Cannell and Roy Huggins wrote and produced after Rockford’s two-hour pilot, Jim memorably said to a thug, “Does your mother know what you do for a living?” When Cody said the same thing to a mob henchman after he punched Cody in the stomach in the Cannell-scripted “Conflict of Interest” (the episode kids who watched Riptide—again, I wasn’t one of them—were especially fond of because it was where Nick showed Boz how to toss a grenade in a mayo jar), I thought, “C’mon, man. Don’t be stealing Rockford’s line, Cody.”

Cannell wasn’t the only guy who kept going back to Rockford. NBCUniversal keeps threatening to reboot Rockford long after the death of Rockford star and (uncredited) co-executive producer James Garner. NBC’s recent announcement that it ordered a pilot for a third attempt at a Rockford remake is news I’ve always dreaded. Reviving Rockford without Garner is like reviving Sanford and Son without Redd Foxx.

Speaking of junkyards, in the only newspaper review I could find from the period of Riptide’s existence on NBC, Hartford Courant TV critic Marc Gunther got tired of Nick’s junkyard-worthy chopper, while I like the chopper malfunction shtick.

“Riptide is, alas, too gimmicky to become another Rockford. The helicopter jokes wear thin after three or four episodes, and Boz’s robot is too smart, even for a computer. Bikini-clad women, with no relation to the plot, prance across the screen simply to excite viewers,” complained Gunther in a 1984 review that was otherwise favorable, especially regarding the show’s ability to laugh at itself.

At the end of the (sunny SoCal) day, Riptide’s ability to laugh at itself and the convincing chemistry between King, Penny, and Bray are why the show still works in spite of its initial derivativeness. That’s largely thanks to the aforementioned Babs Greyhosky, who wrote many of Riptide’s best episodes, including the farcical “Four-Eyes,” a backdoor pilot that’s sicker than your average backdoor pilot and was stolen by future Hunter regular Stepfanie Kramer as a private eye who turns out to be more competent than Cody and Nick, and “Prisoner of War,” a more serious episode about Nick’s new girlfriend and her untreated PTSD from her tour of duty as a registered nurse in Da Nang. Greyhosky was promoted to Riptide showrunner.

A military brat during ’Nam (and a substitute teacher who wanted to write for TV), Greyhosky wrote for both Magnum and The A-Team: two shows with completely different tones (The A-Team was more of a live-action cartoon than Bellisario’s show was, even though Thomas Magnum frequently broke the fourth wall like Bugs Bunny did), but they both attempted to counteract ’70s Hollywood’s depiction of Vietnam vets as one-dimensional and psychotic. Greyhosky’s compassion for either vets or the struggles of military families ended up being one of Riptide’s strengths as an hour-long action show.

“I was of the school that you can do really good character comedy and you can have depth to the show, so that’s what we tried to do with Riptide,” said Greyhosky on Ian Talks Comedy when the conversation switched to the struggles of a widowed ex-Marine who was nicely played by special guest star James Whitmore in 1985’s ’Nam-related and surprisingly bleak “Home for Christmas,” Riptide’s only Yuletide episode.

“Home for Christmas” was the directorial debut of Whitmore’s son, Hunter semi-regular James Whitmore Jr. He made it a bit more stylish than the average Cannell series episode. For instance, because of the gravity of the subject matter, “Home for Christmas” didn’t end with the closing credits being posted over action comedy highlights of the preceding episode while Mike Post and Pete Carpenter reprised their Riptide theme.

The closing credits were instead posted over a great pullback shot of a military funeral in the snow while an uncredited John Lennon soundalike (I bet he was Kipp Lennon—no relation—who later became Michael Jackson’s singing double for the 1991 Simpsons episode “Stark Raving Dad”) sang a faithful cover of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1971 protest song against American involvement in ’Nam. (Whitmore Jr. went on to direct over 80 episodes of JAG, the JAG spinoff NCIS, and all the NCIS spinoffs. I’m not into the Bellisario-created JAG/NCIS franchise. My favorite show Bellisario created is instead Quantum Leap, so one of my favorite things Whitmore Jr. directed is “8½ Months,” the Leap episode where Sam leaps into a pregnant teen and experiences childbirth.) Though Greyhosky didn’t write “Home for Christmas” (Tom Blomquist wrote it), it’s one of the highlights of her run as Riptide’s showrunner, along with her de-emphasis of the repetitive busted machine shtick.

Greyhosky—best known to Farscape fans for writing “Back and Back and Back to the Future,” her only contribution to Farscape—adeptly carried on Cannell’s idea that every character in a comedic scene has to have a yesterday and is going to have a tomorrow.

“The irony is that I always wanted to write serious drama. That was more of my thing, but even when I would write serious drama, there was always humor in it because that’s life. We weren’t joke tellers. The humor always came from the characters,” said Greyhosky on Ian Talks Comedy, where she recalled her stint as the only female showrunner of an hour-long drama at the time, as well as the teleplay she and Blomquist wrote for “If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em.”

A clip show episode that perfectly parodied Moonlighting—the ABC show that trounced Riptide in the ratings during the NBC show’s third and final season and caused its cancellation—in each of its wraparound segments, “If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em” was the final Riptide episode that was shot (but it wasn’t the final one that aired). After Riptide, King continued to act, and he’s currently the most active of the three Riptide stars. I was watching Adult Swim’s Newsreaders—a Childrens Hospital spinoff and a 60 Minutes parody where the funniest regular was one-time Riptide guest star Ray Wise as a racist, Andy Rooney-esque blowhard named Skip Reming—for the first time on Tubi while watching Riptide for the first time on the same streamer, and I did the DiCaprio pointing meme when King showed up in a 2015 Newsreaders episode as an NFL team owner named Mayhew Ketchup.

The owner of the fictional Kansas City Missourihawks, Ketchup responds to criticisms of the aloof and antisocial behavior of his team’s coach and deadpanly says to Sadee Deenus, Beth Dover’s interviewer character, “I can see how he’d have that reputation from his post-game interviews and his reliance on software, but ’round here, he’s just another guy trying to win games, you know, cornholing you in the shower.” It’s a trip to see King say lines that wouldn’t have been allowed on Riptide.

Penny went on to star in Jake and the Fatman, which lasted longer than Riptide, and then he poked fun at his Riptide days when he played an ’80s TV star who winds up as a hostage during a sporting goods store robbery in one of Boomtown’s best episodes, 2002’s “Insured by Smith & Wesson,” which used footage of Penny and King from Riptide. After retiring from acting, Bray taught TV studies at Portland State University and drama at middle schools in Oregon.

As for Greyhosky, she retired from writing for TV at 52 and is now a therapist for vets with PTSD. Her Riptide episodes are perhaps her greatest non-therapy-related achievement, and, hey, look, it’s a young Geena Davis as Boz’s prank-loving younger sister and, from a later episode Greyhosky wrote, George Clooney in his first TV role (a small villain role that doesn’t really scream out, “This is the guy who will make hearts throb as Dr. Ross and will suavely lead heists in the Ocean’s flicks,” whereas Davis, who was already a highlight of Tootsie and NBC’s short-lived Buffalo Bill, was plenty charismatic in her guest spot). Riptide was the show that landed Clooney his SAG card.

A 2006 MADtv episode—the same one that featured John Cho in the most popular of MADtv’s “24 with Bobby Lee” sketches, which Asian American fans of the sketch still quote to each other, thanks to the moment when Cho got Lee to shout in a Korean accent, “Freeze-uh! LAPD!”—did a fake commercial for the Clooney Collection. It was a box set of DVDs of Clooney’s guest spot on Murder, She Wrote, the Facts of Life episodes where he had a recurring role as the handyman for Mrs. Garrett’s novelty store, and the B-movies he starred in before his breakout role on ER.

It’s a damn travesty that Clooney’s switchblade-filled screen debut on Riptide was ignored by the Clooney Collection.

Next week, Cannell-ary 2026 concludes with Robert Conrad daring anybody to knock his team of misfit pilots off like when he dared America to knock a battery off his shoulder.