Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Brad Breeck’s “Let’s Rewind” from Gravity Falls.

Summer officially begins June 21. Because of the shift from spring to summer, I’ve been thinking about how summer used to be a dumping ground for shows the three broadcast networks that dominated the TV industry from the ’60s to the ’80s—ABC, CBS, and NBC—had zero faith in, before they unveiled in September the new or returning shows that were their real pride and joy.

The TV industry often referred to summertime as “Burnoff Theater.” Many unsold pilots aired during the summer, and then—unless it was a really funny unsold pilot like Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel’s Lookwell, which, thanks to O’Brien’s fanbase and fans of Adam West’s hilarious 1991 performance as ’70s cop show star Ty Lookwell, is easily accessible nowadays—they were never seen again.

Burnoff Theater was also how American couch potatoes in the summer of 1968 were introduced to The Prisoner, a strange British import CBS dumped in a time slot that belonged to Jackie Gleason’s variety show during the fall, winter, and spring. The Prisoner—which Criterion will add to the Criterion Channel next month—is now a classic because of a fanbase that developed long after its CBS run and sang the show’s praises. Hollywood producers keep wanting to remake it, even after the failure of AMC’s underwhelming 2009 reboot, which the late Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner’s star/creator, wanted nothing to do with because he wanted to play Number Two this time (the role went to Ian McKellen) instead of reprising his role as Number Six (like he had done in one of my favorite Simpsons episodes, 2000’s “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes”). But back in 1968, nobody in America gave a Number Two about Number Six’s quest to find out who trapped him in the Village.

Northern Exposure was another show that began as a time filler for CBS one summer and later caught on with the public long after the summer when it debuted. The first Northern Exposure episode I ever saw when the show first aired—“Russian Flu,” the “Hio Hio Ipsanio” stinky medicine episode—was the fifth episode of Northern Exposure’s first season in the summer of 1990. “Russian Flu” guest-starred Jessica Lundy as Elaine, Joel’s fiancée from Flushing. Before she was stricken with the titular flu and forced to apply the foul-smelling Hio Hio Ipsanio all over her body, the surprisingly hot Elaine—I find her to be more attractive than Maggie, Joel’s future lover—was the complete opposite of the unattractive and pregnant Jersey housewife Lundy played in the 1990 slapstick comedy Madhouse, which I saw in the theater a few months before the premiere of “Russian Flu.”

Summer’s reputation as a place for the broadcast networks to burn off shows they didn’t care about finally changed when Fox experimented with enlarging Beverly Hills, 90210’s teen audience by dropping in the summer seven new episodes about Brenda and Brandon’s summer break with their new friends in Beverly Hills, and the experiment turned the then-one-year-old 90210 into a juggernaut. Oz, HBO’s first hour-long prestige hit, premiered on July 12, 1997 and was the first of many hour-long HBO originals that gained buzz over the summer. And when USA Network introduced Monk (in the summer of 2002), Psych (in the summer of 2006), and Burn Notice (in the summer of 2007), the popularity of those shows (Tony Shalhoub nabbed three Emmys for playing Adrian Monk) transformed USA into the “blue sky” channel and inspired other cable channels to take a chance on new, high-concept scripted fare in June, July, and August.

AMC premiered Mad Men on July 19, 2007. Whatever happened to that show? HBO continues to use the summer to unveil prestige fare like The White Lotus, which premiered on July 11, 2021. Lanterns—the DCU’s True Detective-style pairing of Kyle Chandler as a foul-mouthed Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, the Marine who became a Green Lantern—is set to drop on HBO on August 16.

While many TV nerds might say, “Ooh, summer was when I first got hooked on Stranger Things” (Netflix binge-dropped its first season on July 15, 2016), I’ll always think of summer as the time when I first encountered Moonlighting and Gravity Falls.

The two-hour Moonlighting pilot (remember when hour-long detective shows and hour-long space operas used to always kick off with feature-length first episodes?) first aired on ABC on March 3, 1985. I was a kid when Moonlighting quietly debuted as a 9pm movie-of-the-week. March 3 was a Sunday. There was no way in hell I was going to stay up past 10 and watch some TV-movie. I had no idea of the existence of Moonlighting until ABC reran its seven-episode first season in the summer of ’85, a period when I could stay up late because there was no school, and that summer was when I first caught the show. I found its two-hour pilot to be hilarious at the time. Its climactic action scene was the first “the heroes hang from a giant clock and nearly fall to their deaths” scene I ever saw outside of Looney Tunes, where that type of shit happens on the regular. I had no idea at the time that it was an homage to Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!, the 1923 silent movie. I just thought, “Wow, this is a cool-looking stunt, but I would never want to end up dangling from a skyscraper like Maddie and David.”

Summer reruns were how Moonlighting became a smash hit.

An even better show than Moonlighting was Gravity Falls. (Moonlighting ended with a whimper and without its creator, Glenn Gordon Caron, whose stewardship of Moonlighting was a tumultuous one. Meanwhile, Gravity Falls ended with a bang and one of the most touching final scenes ever.) I remember how the Disney Channel wanted nobody during the week of June 15, 2012 to miss its new animated show about a spooky summer vacation in the Oregon woods, so it released the entire first episode as a free download on iTunes. I snapped it up on iTunes and instantly took a liking to Alex Hirsch’s animated show.

Today’s prompt: Is there a show you discovered during the summertime in a way that was similar to my first encounters with Moonlighting and Gravity Falls?