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

January has been 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 The A-Team co-creator Stephen J. Cannell. I use the Post instrumental each week as a jumping-off point to talk about my memories of the Cannell show the instrumental is from and why I miss Cannell’s style of escapist TV (especially from the era after he left Universal Television to strike out on his own), a style that called for lots of cars to flip over like pancakes and, as Cannell fan Jaime Weinman once pointed out, lots of scenes in warehouses. (“The limitations of doing a big action show without studio resources can be seen in each of these shows, which tend to set lots of scenes in warehouses — which Cannell often used in lieu of studio space,” wrote Weinman in 2006.)

I went in chronological order from 1974 (The Rockford Files) to 1987 (Wiseguy) for Cannell-ary 2025. This year, I chose to go in the order from “Cannell production I watched the most” to “Cannell production I watched the least.”

Previously in Cannell-ary 2026, I thought about making a profit by delivering pizzas on my 10-speed, and Brown Shoe, my buddy at the messenger service who has that nickname because she likes to rock a pair of chocolate brown Adidas Sambas, said to me, “You’re expecting big bucks? It’s not like you’re gonna wind up with enough dough to buy pajamas made of silk. Stalking’s a better way to spend your time. As in stalking an armored truck and waiting for the driver to stop and get out and take a piss so that you can make your move and swoop in to swipe some of the truck’s valuables.” She also said to me, “And you think that Riptide show is cool, but there are some things that you would change if it were up to you, so think about your masterpiece. Watch that gumshoe show, and call to see if Paul can score some weed.”

And now I’ve reached the final week of Cannell-ary 2026. Baa Baa Black Sheep, which Cannell loosely based on Marine Corps fighter pilot Gregory “Pappy” Boyington’s 1958 World War II memoir of the same name, is the definition of a Dad show.

As Pappy, Robert Conrad leads a bunch of “misfits and screwballs” straight out of The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes. When these Marine fighter pilots aren’t embroiled in dogfights with Japanese fighter pilots, they’re getting drunk, gambling what little money they have left, scrapping with each other over women, or sticking it to uptight Naval officers who give them a hard time because of their rowdiness or lack of hygiene. The show is an aviation nerd’s dream because of its massive amount of shots of the Corsair fighter planes Major Boyington and his Black Sheep Squadron flew in battle.

I currently live with my parents to help out my retired dad with the caregiving of my mom, and our house is about 10 miles from the Castle Air Museum, an impressive outdoor collection of vintage aircraft (including the Avro Vulcan and Air Force One) on what used to be an Air Force base. When my parents and I took my uncle and his wife to that museum in Atwater, California two Novembers ago, the two female college students who were manning the gift shop chose The Nightmare Before Christmas for the shop’s TV screen. Sure, it’s a fun movie, but the only aviation-related thing in Nightmare is Jack Skellington’s temporary takeover of Santa’s sleigh. If I were manning the gift shop, I’d pop into the disc player one of Universal’s Baa Baa Black Sheep DVDs. Cannell’s series is the perfect thing to show on TV in an aviation museum’s gift shop.

I never watched Baa Baa when it was in syndication in the ’80s (which was when MCA TV, Universal’s syndicated TV division, sold it for only weekend syndication, where it went by Black Sheep Squadron, its rather bland second-season title, because it ran for only two seasons on NBC from 1976 to 1978 and didn’t have enough episodes for weeknight syndication), so for the purposes of this blog post, I watched two Baa Baa episodes for the first time. Before I get to those two episodes, I’ve got to share my memories of Baa Baa’s opening title sequence.

I was too young to get into most of Cannell’s shows when Baa Baa was in syndication. The only Cannell shows that appealed to me then were The Greatest American Hero because of its superhero premise and 21 Jump Street because its cast was younger and more diverse than other casts from Cannell shows. But like many other Cannell shows, Baa Baa had a perfect opening title sequence.

The black title card about Pappy’s “misfits and screwballs” while a bunch of men sang, “We are poor little lambs/Who have lost our way/Baa, baa, baaaaaaaa,” gave the opening titles a cinematic feel, and that was followed by one of Post and Pete Carpenter’s best themes—a march that was their first theme for a military show, according to Post on his TikTok account—as a hand-cranked klaxon awoke the Black Sheep and sent them into battle.

When I was nine, I put my family’s JCPenney AC/DC cassette player/recorder up to the speaker of a crappy black-and-white TV set to capture the Baa Baa opening title theme—the Original TV Score Selection of the Week—for a mixtape of TV themes I was trying to compile for myself at the time, and I remember how difficult it was to hit pause at the right moment because Baa Baa always cut so damn fast from the end of the theme to the ’40s Universal Newsreel clip that always kicked off Act 1.

Like almost all of Cannell’s other creations, Baa Baa (which isn’t found on any streaming services) began with a two-hour pilot, but I didn’t have time this month to get to the pilot movie or watch Baa Baa’s entire run, so I chose to watch only “The Meatball Circus” and “Prisoners of War” from the first season. Written by Cannell, “The Meatball Circus” is a good example of Baa Baa’s recurring interest in the tensions between Pappy’s mostly rebellious team and a strict military culture. Cannell’s slobs-vs.-snobs episode aired two years before National Lampoon’s Animal House cracked up moviegoers and resulted in a ton of slobs-vs.-snobs comedy movies.

When Bob Costas interviewed James Garner on Later with Bob Costas in 1991 about his enjoyment of playing on The Rockford Files a reluctant hero who operated out of his trailer home and used an answering machine instead of hiring a leggy secretary, Garner said, “Every private detective I ever talked to felt that was much more realistic than a lot of the brave ones [who preceded Jim Rockford on TV as lead characters in private eye shows]. Bravery gets ya nuthin’ but hurt.” Unlike Jim, Pappy and his men, whom the major referred to as “Meatheads,” were not reluctant heroes. The only thing the Meatheads were reluctant about was conforming to formality and decorum.

In “The Meatball Circus,” Pappy is assigned to join forces with the Navy for a suicide mission he’s trying to simplify so that it doesn’t end horribly for his squadron. But his efforts to form a plan to get out of the mission alive are disrupted by Naval officers’ bullying of everyone from the Black Sheep except him.

A snooty Navy base commander banishes the Meatheads from his base’s mess hall for not dressing formally while dining in the mess hall. In one of the episode’s coolest scenes, the Meatheads respond to their expulsion by overturning their plates one by one and dumping the base’s food on the dinner table—Pappy overturns his plate as well out of solidarity—before leaving the mess hall.

“Vitus Reflux,” Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s episode about a prank war between Academy cadets and the more militaristic cadets from Starfleet’s War College, happened to be released right when I watched “The Meatball Circus.” Both episodes have a few things in common: They’re entertaining, and they end with young misfits using a combination of strategic thinking and mischief to humiliate their tormentors—with the help of their unorthodox and muscular mentor. In Starfleet Academy’s case, that mentor is Holly Hunter—still kind of ripped like she was when she starred as Billie Jean King in the 2001 ABC TV-movie When Billie Beat Bobby—as Chancellor Nahla Ake.

I’ve heard that Ake’s refusal to sit formally in chairs like all previous Star Trek lead characters (including even the immature Dal R’El on Star Trek: Prodigy) have done is causing a minor controversy among Trek fans. Hunter’s character is a Starfleet captain who resigned out of shame for adhering too much to rules and regulations and then found more fulfillment as a teacher to little kids on a much more relaxed campus on Bajor before she returned to Starfleet to lead the Academy. It makes perfect sense that Ake’s post-Romper Room self prefers to sit like Jiminy Glick.

“Because I’m the Starfleet chancellor as well as the captain [of the U.S.S. Athena], I wanted to avoid rigidity. I wanted to avoid formality and kind of a more militaristic posture,” said Hunter to People magazine. “Then I was doing a little research: what does her name mean? And her name means ‘water in the desert.’ And I thought that was kind of a cool little clue about who she is, because if you’re water in the desert, that means you could be nurturing to other people, too – but it’s also the actual element of water. I thought, maybe I could be that: maybe I could be fluid. Maybe I could take up space in a different way. And so the playfulness, the fluidity, and then there was something almost feline or animal or catlike about the character in my imagination. So I just kind of combined all of these ideas and played with them.”

The debate over how Hunter sits is one of the biggest wastes of time ever. Meanwhile, nobody in Baa Baa’s audience complained about the Meatheads’ disregard for formality—except real-life former Black Sheep Squadron members like Fred Avey, who wasn’t happy with Baa Baa’s depiction of them and said in 1997, “Television made it look like all we did was party, but that was in no way true. We never went up drunk. The only thing accurate about the show was that we flew Corsairs.” (The debate over sitting in chairs in Starfleet and the review bombing of Starfleet Academy’s first season are among the reasons why I hate conservative Trek fans and continue to try not to listen to or read any of their whining. Trek, like all other franchises with massive fanbases, has a MAGAt problem. Let’s treat MAGAts just like how we treated them in 2018: We ruin their lunches and laugh them out of restaurants.)

I wonder if one of the newcomers who play the cadets Ake gives advice to on campus will go on to become an Emmy-winning sitcom legend. (Speaking of which, Bella Shepard—who plays Genesis Lythe, the ambitious cadet daughter of a Starfleet admiral from a new alien species known as the Dar-Sha—looks like a petite Mary Tyler Moore.) That’s because in “The Meatball Circus” and “Prisoners of War,” the pilots under Pappy’s command were played by a bunch of familiar faces before they went on to bigger and better roles. Second Lieutenant Robert Anderson was played by future multiple Emmy winner John Larroquette. Dirk Blocker, the son of Bonanza star Dan Blocker and a highlight of Brooklyn Nine-Nine as the lazy Detective Michael Hitchcock, was a lot less lazy as First Lieutenant Jerome Bragg.

First Lieutenant Lawrence Casey—the Meathead who looks like Gareth from The Office—was played by W.K. Stratton, whom I best remember as a racist uniformed cop Starsky angrily slaps in the face for saying to him the N-word while trying to justify his shooting of an unarmed Black man in the 1977 Starsky & Hutch episode “Manchild on the Streets.” Lieutenant Bob Boyle and First Lieutenant Donald French were played by, respectively, future Magnum, P.I. actors Larry Manetti and Jeff MacKay.

Captain James Gutterman—a Texan hothead who always wears a slouch hat and Hawaiian shirts—was played by James Whitmore Jr., who went on to play Freddie Beamer, a garage mechanic who wants to be Jim Rockford, on The Rockford Files and is now one of the most prolific TV directors of the last few decades. Finally, First Lieutenant T.J. Wiley was played by Robert Ginty, whom—thanks to one of the funniest running jokes in MST3K’s 1993 takedown of Warrior of the Lost World, which I watched when it first aired—I will never stop referring to as “the Paper Chase guy.”

So many of these Cannell series episodes are 45 or 48 minutes of “Hey, it’s that guy before he was in that thing.”

“Prisoners of War” is even better than “The Meatball Circus.” It was the Baa Baa episode I wanted to watch the most because Clyde Kusatsu—whom Star Trek: The Next Generation fans know best as both Vice Admiral Nakamura and a runner-up for the role of Quark on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—was the episode’s guest star.

Baa Baa wasn’t the only Cannell show where Kusatsu did a guest spot. One of my favorite characters Kusatsu played is Kenny Sasusha, an undercover agent from the Organized Crime Bureau’s Central California field office and a comic relief character in Wiseguy’s Profitt siblings arc. (Like ’20s chanteuse Alberta Haynes in Ghosts’s last couple of seasons because of her fascination with the Yiddish expressions ’90s finance bro Trevor Lefkowitz uses, Kenny is a POC who likes to use a lot of Yiddish words.)

Philip Baker Hall played a lot of judges when he was alive. Kusatsu, the former president of SAG/AFTRA in Los Angeles, surpasses him in the judge role department. I counted 24 judge roles on Kusatsu’s IMDb page and 11 on Hall’s page. Kusatsu is a lot more interesting when he’s not playing a judge, like when he showed up on Never Have I Ever as Paxton’s libidinous ojiichan, who movingly shared to strangers for the first time in his life his tough experiences as a kid in the Manzanar concentration camp at his grandson’s history class, or when he played Captain Tenyu Araki, Pappy’s prisoner, in “Prisoners of War.”

Araki is a Japanese fighter pilot who can speak English. He bonds with Pappy over baseball, leads the Black Sheep’s struggling ping-pong team to victory, and helps Wiley feel less alone about experiencing fear during combat in a nicely acted dramatic scene between Kusatsu and the Paper Chase guy.

The role of Araki, a Nisei from L.A. who joined the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service to find his place in the world, was one of Kusatsu’s earliest screen roles. Written by Ken Pettus, “Prisoners of War” is a great “the enemy is as human and complex as we are” story. I was amazed that a network TV series episode in 1976 had cast a Japanese American actor as a Nisei—it was better than Baa Baa’s casting of Chinese American acting legend James Hong as a Japanese colonel in the episode that followed “Prisoners of War”—and given him juicy scenes where his character recalled his upbringing in ’20s L.A. and admitted his fatigue with war.

I don’t know why Baa Baa isn’t currently free on Prime Video alongside The Rockford Files, whose most prolific episode directors (including Jackie Cooper, a.k.a. Perry White, and Ivan Dixon, a.k.a. Sergeant Kinchloe) helmed episodes of Baa Baa as well. There’s a whole generation of Asian American viewers who admire Kusatsu’s work like I do and the generation of Asian American viewers I’m from does, but they don’t know about his one-time appearance on Baa Baa as a tough soldier who runs and jumps and is a lot more action-y than any of the sedate judges or authority figures he later played. And there’s a whole generation of Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans who don’t know that Hitchcock started out on TV as an ace pilot who would have felt at home behind the cockpit of one of the choppers Jake Peralta loves so damn much. They ought to know.

Bonus track: The last sentence in the fourth paragraph was a shout-out to my favorite pop song that referenced a Cannell show: Ben Folds aimed Jim Rockford-style insults at an apathetic hipster friend of his who does nothing but snark about people who make something of their lives while he watches Rockford Files reruns and smokes trees all day in the 1997 Ben Folds Five song “Battle of Who Could Care Less.” It’s the perfect way to conclude this final Cannell-ary 2026 post.

“And you think Rockford Files is cool/But there are some things that you would change/If it were up to you,” sang Folds. “So think about your masterpiece (yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)/Watch The Rockford Files/And call to see if Paul can score some weed.”

Cannell-ary will return. Next week will be the beginning of Farscape February at the Couch Avocados thread. Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week in February will be an instrumental from Farscape. Hold on to your mivonks.