Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Ryan Elder’s President Curtis main title theme.

Elder once described his main title theme for Rick and Morty as a mash-up of the themes from Doctor Who, Farscape, and Invader Zim. For Rick and Morty’s third spinoff, Elder didn’t mash up three different instrumentals. He simply channeled the melancholy spirit of Mike Post’s Hill Street Blues theme while tying the new show to the Rick and Morty universe by throwing in a synthy woodwind that echoes the synthy woodwind from the Rick and Morty theme.

As someone who watched lots of Hill Street reruns on TV Land in the late ’90s, I really like the President Curtis theme. Divorced from the visuals of Curtis doing action hero stuff, it’s an affecting instrumental about the Keith David character’s loneliness after his divorce from the governor of Illinois. But together with those visuals, it becomes a funny gag about the weird disconnect between the fight scene footage and the normcoreness of Elder’s theme.

“[Hill Street is] a workplace comedy, and the guy would say, ‘Let’s be careful out there,’ and then these maudlin, wonderful, minor piano chords would start. It’s about evoking that pure time where it’s like, ‘It’s time to go to work with the adults,’ ” said President Curtis co-creator/showrunner Dan Harmon about Elder’s incongruous instrumental to io9’s Cheryl Eddy.

The President Curtis theme also makes me think of Simon May’s theme from the BBC 1 soap EastEnders, which came on at 7:30pm after Doctor Who every weeknight on KTEH 54, San Jose’s PBS station, in the late ’80s. (“They wanted something universal, almost feelgood [sic] to contrast with Albert Square and its gritty tough storylines,” wrote May—in a passage about EastEnders that sounds exactly like Post’s origin story for his Hill Street theme—in his 2015 memoir Doof Doof: My Life in Music.) Because I had zero interest in soaps when I was a Doctor Who-watching kid, the EastEnders theme was always my cue to change the channel from Who to either Entertainment Tonight or Night Court.

Elder’s theme doesn’t have any lyrics, so Curtis makes some up while singing along to it in the shower at the end of “Triangle,” an episode about a monster prison (and Keith David—not David Keith—demonstrates the type of singing voice that could only be developed from years of singing with a boys’ choir, which the Greenleaf star and Gargoyles cast member, in fact, started out doing): “Sometimes monsters go to prison/Sometimes they don’t/Sometimes we’re the real monsters/When the monster is our shame/But who’s to blame/If we don’t wash our balls?”

Speaking of monstrous behavior, I quit Rick and Morty after watching its fifth-season finale in 2022. I had enough of the show and its edgelord nihilism after witnessing the racist and sexist Rick and Morty fanbase’s childish meltdowns (regarding the addition of women like future She-Hulk: Attorney at Law showrunner Jessica Gao to the writing staff) and then having to sit through Elon Musk’s atrocious guest spot during 2019’s “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty,” an underwhelming heist genre parody about why Rick loathes heist flicks.

Harmon—who once ranted during Harmontown about the Now You See Me franchise, a series I, a longtime heist movie fan, don’t care for—and “Crewcoo” episode writer Caitie Delaney were taking dead aim at Now You See Me in “Crewcoo.” But the way “Crewcoo” was written made it look like every heist movie was Now You See Me, and that pissed me off a bit.

And then Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland was outed as a sex pest and fired by Adult Swim (Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden replaced him as the voices of, respectively, Rick and Morty), and I never went back to the Rick and Morty universe—until the President Curtis series premiere.

President Curtis totally works as a show that’s set in the Rick and Morty universe but is distancing itself from the multiverse baggage of the parent show. It’s the type of goofy and inventive monster-of-the-week comedy I wanted Fox’s Ghosted (a live-action Craig Robinson/Adam Scott paranormal buddy comedy show that happened to involve former Rick and Morty writer Ryan Ridley) to be, but Ghosted just didn’t have enough imagination to work around a super-low budget like Eerie, Indiana and Red Dwarf did.

President Curtis’s first season on Adult Swim leads me to today’s prompt: Is there an unproduced spinoff that you’re still pining for?

I’ll give three examples. The Office did a backdoor pilot for a spinoff that was supposed to revolve around Dwight. The Superstore writers wanted to do a spinoff about Cheyenne’s marriage to Bo. Neither of those series ideas went anywhere. A spinoff of Daria (which itself was a spinoff of Beavis and Butt-Head) that was supposed to star Tracee Ellis Ross as the voice of a grown-up Jodie Landon morphed from an animated series idea to an animated TV-movie idea and then vanished into the same void where the Dwight spinoff and the Cheyenne/Bo spinoff went.

I don’t think either the Dwight spinoff or the Cheyenne/Bo spinoff would have worked (Dwight and Bo are characters who are better in small doses), while there are two spinoff ideas I continually think about because they had so much potential.

The Rockford Files’s 1977 episode “Just Another Polish Wedding” was a backdoor pilot for a spinoff Stephen J. Cannell wanted to make about Louis Gossett Jr. and Isaac Hayes’s Rockford characters. Most backdoor pilots suck because they spend 22 or 43 minutes with characters who are complete strangers to us, and they’re so awkwardly shoehorned into the show. An example of that was The Cosby Show’s 1985 episode “Mr. Quiet,” which is best known these days as one of Angela Bassett’s earliest screen credits. But when “Mr. Quiet” first aired, it functioned as a backdoor pilot for a show that was meant to star Tony Orlando as a Brooklyn community center manager who never appeared on Cosby before and never did again.

The Cannell-scripted “Just Another Polish Wedding” was a rare backdoor pilot that was good because Gabby (Gossett’s bougie character) and Gandy (Hayes’s blue-collar character) previously appeared on Rockford (but had never interacted with each other before), and they were two of Jim Rockford’s most entertaining foils.

But NBC execs and Middle America were simply not ready in 1977 for an hour-long buddy comedy where both buddies are Black, which is bizarre—especially in this current era where Martin Lawrence and Will Smith are still starring together in Bad Boys movies and Keke Palmer and SZA had a surprise hit with One of Them Days.

“Just Another Polish Wedding” is also a lot of fun because Gossett and Hayes got to beat the shit out of a bunch of Nazis. That shit never gets old.

Another thing that had spinoff potential was the “Starbase 80?!” episode from the final season of Rick and Morty alum Mike McMahan’s Star Trek: Lower Decks. “Starbase 80?!” guest-starred Nicole Byer (who previously voiced a friendly NASA supercomputer on Apple TV’s Snoopy in Space and is still one of Conan O’Brien’s funniest guests) as a new character, the idealistic Commander Kassia Nox, and current Widow’s Bay MVP Stephen Root as a chief engineer straight out of Petticoat Junction.

The episode finally brought the Cerritos crew to Starbase 80—the worst station in the quadrant and a destination Cerritos officers frequently referred to in earlier episodes as the stuff of their nightmares—but unlike “Mr. Quiet” and its focus on a Nuyorican guy played by Tony Orlando, “Starbase 80?!” wisely kept its focus on Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and Captain Freeman. I would watch every week an animated show where Byer is in charge of a station that’s somehow more ratchet than the Deep Space Nine station—or the misshapen cakes all those amateur bakers made for her and the judges on Nailed It!