Couch Avocados: TV Discussion Thread – March 19, 2026

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

In last week’s moribund comments section (one of many moribund Couch Avocados comments sections where barely anybody was interested in my prompt, so rather than returning there repeatedly throughout the day to check for any new comments, I just peaced the fuck out of there and never came back), Toothpic Monsoon wrote, “Stumble is the best comedy on right now and no one is watching it. I am very sad about this.”

No one is watching it? That’s not true. I watched it every week on Peacock. (Its first—and hopefully not only—season had its finale last week on NBC.) Back in December, I wrote a post about the most hilarious moments from Stumble, the Astrof siblings’ zany mockumentary about a cheer coach in Headltston, Oklahoma who can and will and must transform the bumbling Buttons Cheer Team at Headltston State Junior College into a force to be reckoned with at the annual Daytona college cheer nationals.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Michael Giacchino’s “Crazy Town” from Lost’s “Recon” episode. Stumble is one of the funniest portrayals of a crazy town I’ve ever seen.

Michael Giacchino, “Crazy Town” (from Lost) (2:03)

Headltston is Coach Courteney Potter’s new place to commute to after a leaked video of her being drunk at a victory celebration with her previous college cheer team (in her and her husband Boon’s hometown of Wichita Flats, Texas) led to both her firing and a job offer from Headltston State. The town is not as backwards as East Peck was. That, by the way, was the South Carolina town Trial & Error, Stumble co-creator Jeff Astrof’s previous half-hour mockumentary, took place in, and it was so backwards that women drivers were a new thing to its citizens. (Trial & Error’s most frequently quoted line among its fans is still “Lady driver coming through!” The town flag boy would always shout that to drivers and wave red flags whenever a woman driver would leave her parking space.) But Headltston—whose economy is driven by a candy button factory where Sally, the inexperienced Buttons Cheer Team member in the GIF above, works—is just as bonkers and hilarious as East Peck was.

The town pastor is named Caesar Salid. He preaches at the Our Lady of Godiva Methodist Church. And peep the name of Headltston’s mayor—played by Steven Boyer, one of two Trial & Error alums who reunited with Astrof for Stumble. (The other alum is, of course, Kristin Chenoweth, who plays the evil Coach Tammy Istiny. It’s pronounced “ihs-tuh-nee.”)

The name of Mayor Mayknott’s town is always a challenge to spell correctly. I keep forgetting to include the first of two Ts in the name. One of my favorite Stumble running jokes is Jenn Lyon (who has been brilliant as Coach Potter), Taylor Dunbar (also brilliant as Peaches, a kleptomaniac Buttons Cheer Team tumbler), and, well, everyone else in the cast never saying “Headltston” correctly.

Each week, Coach Potter said “Headltston” five or six different ways to the off-screen interviewer.

NBC’s “Headltston” mispronunciation supercut (0:48)

Like Trial & Error, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins (NBC’s newest mockumentary and an amusing parody of ESPN docuseries like The Last Dance and 30 for 30), and any other post-Arrested Development half-hour comedy with a lightning-fast pace and no laugh track, Stumble is a show worth rewatching because you can easily miss a lot of jokes. But Stumble easily outruns Reggie Dinkins in terms of the amount of funny details in screen shots that require the pause button, whether they’re screen shots of silly newspaper articles or glimpses of fictional dating apps. My favorite silly name in last week’s Stumble finale belongs to the writer of a very briefly glimpsed negative review of Tammy’s children’s theater performance as Peter Pan. The theater critic’s name was Ida Dunbetter.

One other sign that people are watching Stumble (besides me and my regular visits to Peacock to catch the latest episode) is that the fans at the Stumble subreddit are always keeping track of all these blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em jokes. But the audience for Stumble definitely deserves to be bigger. NBC’s original choice to schedule Stumble on Friday night—a night when the high-school or college cheerleaders who would be into the show are usually not home—did not help Stumble’s chances of survival.

I want another season of Stumble. I want to hear Jenn Lyon come up with 50 more different ways of saying “Heedlestoon.”