Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Danny Elfman’s main title theme from Tales from the Crypt, whose fans rejoiced on social bleedia after Shudder announced last week that it acquired the classic HBO anthology series, which will make its streaming debut on Shudder, and it will begin posting episodes on Frightday, May Cursed. AMC Networks’s horror-themed streamer will unveil the episodes in an unusual fashion: Instead of dropping all episodes at once, each season will be added to Shudder each Frislay. [Crypt Keeper cackle]

I follow film critic Kristen Lopez on Bluesky. She is currently working on Welcome, Boils and Ghouls, an oral history of the making of Tales from the Crypt for Running Press, and her posts about her upcoming book were how I found out about Shudder’s acquisition of the series. (Not included in the acquisition is the animated Tales from the Cryptkeeper, Nelvana’s kid-friendly version of Tales from the Crypt. That series can currently be found on Tubi, the Roku Channel, Prime Video, and Nelvana’s Retro Rerun YouTube channel.)

I don’t subscribe to Shudder. I don’t really need Shudder because, thanks to becoming a fan of Ernest Dickerson’s Tales from the Crypt spinoff movie Demon Knight, which I watched for the first time a few Halloweens ago on Peacock, I’ve been watching Tales from the Crypt episodes on YouTube (they’re all over the site), Internet Archive, and a favorite site of mine I cannot identify. For instance, I watched “What’s Cookin’,” the “Christopher Reeve and Bess Armstrong struggle to run a squid restaurant” episode, for the first time last week on that site I’m unwilling to name. It’s a great half-hour of foodie horror comedy—even though a half-hour E! Entertainment Television special about the making of “What’s Cookin’,” which I made the mistake of watching in 1992, totally spoiled for me the episode’s gnarliest bit of practical effects magic 34 years ago.

But some of the copies of Tales from the Crypt episodes that were posted on YouTube are missing the opening titles. Why the fuck would you post a Tales from the Crypt episode without those amazing and unskippable opening titles, which feature both the brilliant work of visual effects genius Richard Edlund (he was a great interviewee during Lawrence Kasdan’s Light & Magic, a Disney+ docuseries I just started watching because I love listening to Industrial Light & Magic staffers’ memories of how they accomplished their effects) and a hummable and classic theme by Elfman (long before many of us became appalled by his sexual misconduct scandals)?

That’s why Shudder’s acquisition of Tales from the Crypt is a great thing: The opening titles won’t be omitted. Also, people who first watched Tales from the Crypt when its reruns were censored for syndication and basic cable (I was one of them because my family didn’t have HBO when the series first aired, so KTVU and, in 1997, KPIX on late Saturday nights in the Bay Area were where I first watched a few episodes) will be able to watch it uncensored.

Tales from the Crypt wasn’t the first of many HBO anthology shows. The Hitchhiker was the first. But nobody is writing books about (or building fan podcasts around) The Hitchhiker today—and Solar Opposites never got Page Fletcher to reprise his role as the Hitchhiker like how it got John Kassir to reprise his role as the Crypt Keeper in its Halloween special—because The Hitchhiker was empty calories without the tits or the softcore sex scenes, which were removed from The Hitchhiker when I first watched some of its episodes on USA Network.

The thing that struck me about The Hitchhiker was that it was so damn humorless. The Hitchhiker wanted so badly to not be your daddy’s noir, but even noir flicks like Laura and Gilda had a wiseass sense of humor, and not in a Joss Whedon/MCU kind of way. (There are Hitchhiker defenders. According to Hitchhiker defender John Kenneth Muir, the era of The Hitchhiker I watched was when the series was at its lowest point, and Muir spoke highly of an HBO-era Hitchhiker episode from 1986 that was directed by a pre-RoboCop Paul Verhoeven, an episode that sounds really enticing to me, so maybe The Hitchhiker isn’t entirely awful.)

Tales from the Crypt told the same kinds of stories of murder, lust, and blackmail that The Hitchhiker did. (Every episode except for the final one, an animated episode Tales from the Cryptkeeper was unable to air because it was too violent for Saturday morning TV, was an adaptation of a story from an old EC horror or crime comic.) But when the nudity and violence were deleted from Tales from the Crypt, every episode was still entertaining because Tales from the Crypt never took itself too seriously.

The Crypt Keeper—wonderfully voiced by Kassir—was the king of dad jokes before we called them dad jokes. The celebrities who hopped aboard Tales from the Crypt to play greedy murderers or receive the nastiest comeuppances via grisly makeup effects were clearly having a blast on the show, and their enthusiasm was infectious.

An episode like 1990’s Frank Darabont-scripted “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy”—a “comedians are clowns crying on the inside” episode that featured both a mostly non-comedic performance by Don Rickles and a rare performance by Shakes the Clown-era Bobcat Goldthwait in which he spoke in his present-day voice, a.k.a. his normal, off-stage voice—made you think you were going to be watching a Very Special Episode that will win over Emmy voters. But after 17 minutes that were mostly somber, “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” couldn’t resist turning into a mini-Evil Dead sequel straight out of Evil Dead’s lighthearted late ’80s/early ’90s era, and that’s fine with me. Sometimes prestige TV can go fuck itself.

If Tales from the Crypt was still in production today like The Simpsons is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Crypt Keeper kidnapped a fictionalized version of one of those TV critics who gush and gush about modern-day prestige TV in the most annoying ways and then electrocuted him in his closing segment. It would have been lit. [Crypt Keeper cackle]

Today’s prompt, which is only for Tales from the Crypt fans, is this: