Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Anthony Head is swirling in the heavens. In honor of Head’s passing, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Nerf Herder’s first and best version of its Buffy the Vampire Slayer main title theme.

Prior to the Buffy theme, “Van Halen”—a song that takes me back to my sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz and my journalism studies that year—was Nerf Herder’s most popular tune (“Sammy Hagar, Sammy Hagar/Is this what you wanted, man?/Dave lost his hairline, but you lost your cool, buddy”). The Buffy theme eclipsed in popularity the Santa Barbara pop-punk band’s 1996 ode to Van Halen’s David Lee Roth era and was covered by bands like the Breeders and the St. Louis band the Civil Tones.

Nerf Herder re-recorded its Buffy theme to reflect the changes to the opening titles, but that later version is less to my liking than the first-and-second-season one. The reason why the first-and-second-season version is so damn killer is because of the drum work by Steve Sherlock. It sounds grimy. It’s very garage-rock à la the Sonics’ “Have Love, Will Travel” or Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction.” Sherlock’s drumming never sounded like that again after Buffy’s second season. I wonder if he used a different drum kit in the re-recording.

“[The opening theme from] Season 1 is a 90’s skate punk demo carried over from the pilot,” wrote a commenter—who pointed out that Nerf Herder singer/guitarist Parry Gripp must have used a whammy bar or a wah-wah pedal to achieve an “airy surf sound” in the first two seasons—under the @buffythevampireslayerstar YouTube account’s posting of the first-season opening titles. “It has a very Socal surf/skate shop video sound to it.”

Exactly. And that’s mostly due to the drum work, which perfectly represents the late ’90s Sunnydale High School setting. Rupert Giles in 1977—back when he called himself “the Ripper”—would have rocked out to that drum beat. Giles in 1997 would have said, “Does the drummer have to be so bloody fast?”

Head was always terrific as Giles, a reformed warlock and former punk rocker who was now kind of a fuddy-duddy as both a librarian at Sunnydale High and the Watcher in charge of training the rebellious but ethical Buffy Summers. (“Did anyone ever tell you you’re kind of a sexy fuddy-duddy?” said Ms. Calendar, Giles’s second-season love interest, to Giles in the 1997 Buffy episode “The Dark Age.”) But once in a while, “the Ripper” would slip out and shock Buffy, Willow, and Xander. The first Buffy scene I thought of last Friday when I learned the news of Head’s death from pneumonia at 72 was Giles’s killing of Ben—a compassionate hospital intern who was, since birth, the human host of the villainous goddess known as Glory—from “The Gift,” Buffy’s fifth-season finale.

The current Slayer took a lot of risks that present-day Giles wouldn’t do, but she would never take a human life. In a stunning role reversal, Giles took a Summers-style risk and made the hard choice of taking a human life for the greater good.

Giles took his glasses off when he was appalled by something, as well as when he did something he was ashamed of or when he needed to bring back “the Ripper.” When he cold-bloodedly suffocated Ben, he put his glasses on, a sign that he’s not ashamed to murk him, as well as a sign that both his Ripper self and his present-day self are one and unified at that moment. Head played the “She’s not like us” scene beautifully.

Buffy wasn’t the first thing I saw Head in, and I remember first seeing him in a series of Taster’s Choice ads with Sharon Maughan from 1990 to 1997. Head and Maughan had tons of chemistry as Michael and Sharon—neighbors in an apartment building who bonded over Taster’s Choice, started hooking up, and later faced an obstacle in the form of Trevor Eve, Maughan’s real-life husband, who portrayed Andrew, Sharon’s ex-hubby—in the first serialized series of commercials I ever encountered that wasn’t the saga of the Trix Rabbit. I was a kid when Taster’s Choice began the story of Michael and Sharon, so I was like, “Wow, you could do that? You could do cereal ad-style serialization in instant coffee ads?”

A few years ago, I found out on YouTube that the earlier installments of Head and Maughan’s Taster’s Choice saga were remakes of a series of Nescafé Gold Blend ads that captivated British viewers from 1987 to 1993 and starred Head and Maughan as Tony and Sharon. Head portrayed Michael as American in the Taster’s Choice ads, while Maughan kept her British accent, but in the earlier Gold Blend series, both Tony and Sharon were British.

After watching ITV’s 2005 interview with Head and Maughan, I was like, “Wow, I didn’t know they made goo-goo eyes at each other over instant coffee for 10 years in two different countries.”

In Living Color, my favorite sketch comedy show when I was in high school, parodied Head and Maughan’s Taster’s Choice ads in 1992. Jim Carrey portrayed the Head counterpart, while Kelly Coffield Park played the Maughan counterpart as a woman who’s not going to be ignored. I remember the Tester’s Choice sketch’s bloopers a lot more than the actual sketch. Carrey repeatedly burst into laughter.

Whether it was a coffee ad In Living Color parodied, Buffy, Doctor Who’s “School Reunion” episode in 2006, Merlin, Free Agents, or Ted Lasso, Head owned the screen. As Rupert Mannion, the despicable owner of West Ham United and the philandering ex-husband of Rebecca Welton, Head played one of the few characters who did not change for the better on a show that was all about people growing and changing (one other character who preferred to remain a jerk was temperamental Ghanaian billionaire Edwin Akufo, played by the hilarious Sam Richardson).

“When I first went out to L.A., I worked with a teacher: Beverly Hills Playhouse, Milton Katselas. He said, ‘Words will take care of themselves. It’s about finding the core of the person.’ That’s what it always was. It’s about finding the weirdness about [Rupert]. You think, ‘How can anybody behave like that?’ And then you look at the world, and you think, ‘There’s a few out there,’ ” said Head about his comfort with Ted Lasso’s lack of a redemption arc for Rupert to the Inside the Film Room YouTube channel in 2023.

I said earlier that Head’s performance during Giles’s killing of Ben was the first thing I thought of when I found out about Head’s death. The second thing I thought of was his 2011 appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, where Head and Ferguson humorously recalled their days of making out with each other on stage in a ’90s production of The Rocky Horror Show. On Buffy, Head spoke in a posh accent as Giles. But in the 1998 Buffy episode “Band Candy,” where cursed chocolate caused Sunnydale’s adult citizens to behave like they did when they were teens, Head spoke in his natural North London accent to portray Giles’s immature self. The thing that jumped out at me when I first watched the 2011 interview segment was Head’s North London accent because I was so used to hearing him sound posh on Buffy.

My favorite part of Head’s appearance on Ferguson’s much-missed talk show was when he did a gentlemanly bow to Geoff Peterson, the gay robot sidekick who was built by the late, great Grant Imahara and was wonderfully voiced by Josh Robert Thompson. It’s the complete opposite of the worst moment from Ferguson’s show: the super-cringey moment when Russell Brand confronted Geoff, broke his body, and poured water on him, which genuinely upset Ferguson.

When news of Head’s passing broke on Bluesky, his biggest fans recalled the generosity both he and Sarah Fisher, his wife, displayed towards Jay Hulme, a poet who came out as trans in 2015. After he found out that Hulme was not happy about the fact that his only photos of himself with Head at a convention were when he had long hair and no chest binder, Head and his wife invited him to come over to their farm.

“They spent the day with me, took me to the fanciest restaurant I’d ever been to in my life, introduced me to their horses, took lovely photos, and printed and signed them, and even gave me tips for an essay I was writing on Shakespeare for school,” wrote Hulme on Twitter in 2019.

Head ended up writing the foreword for Hulme’s first self-published poetry book.

“I hope he rests in peace with his beloved Sarah, who died so recently, and that his daughters are being held and supported,” wrote Hulme on Bluesky last Friday. “We all have the ability to make the world a better place, each in our own way. I think it’s fair to say that Anthony Head knew this, recognised it, and did far more than most to live up to the opportunities his fame afforded him in order to put good into this world whenever and wherever he could.”

Meanwhile, Brand was outed as a sexual predator and is now a born-again Christian who spouts right-wing garbage.

Be an Anthony Head. Don’t be a Russell Brand. Don’t do things like beating up a non-violent gay robot who’s 10 times funnier than you are.

Today’s prompt: Name your favorite Anthony Head roles.