Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is John Williams’s Amazing Stories main title theme, which showrunners Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (as in the Adam Horowitz who’s not Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys) reused in the opening titles for their Apple TV revival of Amazing Stories in 2020.

I like Tubi, the free streaming service that’s like a ’90s mom-and-pop video store. (God, I miss mom-and-pop video stores.)

Where else can I find every Looney Tunes short the Termite Terrace folks made, the subtitled versions of A Better Tomorrow and Fist of Legend (subs are always better than dubs), and the entire runs of Childrens Hospital and the 60 Minutes parody Newsreaders, a Childrens Hospital spinoff?

For people who never watched Newsreaders on Adult Swim (and don’t understand that the “Childrens” in the parent show’s title doesn’t have an apostrophe because it’s referring to Arthur Childrens, the founder of the titular hospital), Newsreaders, which was showrun by former Daily Show EP Jim Margolis, was hit-or-miss.

But two semi-regulars who were consistently funny on Newsreaders were Alison Becker as Xandra Dent, a parody of G4 show hosts, and Twin Peaks alum Ray Wise as Skip Reming. Wise’s character was an Andy Rooney-esque op-ed crank who did often racist or sexist segments about why “things were better because cigarettes tasted like burning flesh… turkey sandwiches were a quarter, and prostitutes were two turkey sandwiches!”

I hadn’t watched Newsreaders in 11 years. Tubi allowed me to re-experience Wise’s perfect delivery of Skip Reming’s absurd rants and watch a bunch of Skip Reming op-eds I never saw before.

But Tubi is not perfect (even though the streamer is heaven when I use it with an ad blocker).

Last year, when I went to Tubi to watch for the first time Detentionaire, a serialized Nelvana slapstick cartoon about a wrongly punished Asian Canadian teen who sneaks out of after-school detention every afternoon to find evidence that can clear his name, it was missing the Detentionaire series premiere. It mislabeled the second episode as the premiere. I watched the premiere and the rest of the first season on Internet Archive instead.

Speaking of shows that were connected to Nelvana, Tales from the Crypt—an anthology show I never watched when it first aired on HBO (where it ended its run with a 2D-animated episode produced by Nelvana), but now I’m a Crypt fan—is now on Tubi after it made its streaming debut on Shudder. But Tubi doesn’t carry every single Crypt episode.

The streamer omitted “Till Death Do We Part.” That was the fifth-season finale where Eileen Brennan was perfectly cast as a ruthless mob boss, while a pre-Battlestar Galactica Kate Vernon runs around in her underwear for most of the episode and looks stunning—especially when she turns into Chow Yun-Fat in the aforementioned A Better Tomorrow and mows down (with the help of John Stamos) an entire tavern full of Mafiosos in just a blazer and no pants.

I’m a little disappointed that “Till Death Do We Part” is missing from Tubi’s collection of Crypt episodes. I ended up watching it for the first time via a Crypt fan’s massive video file of fifth-season Crypt episodes that were taped off HBO, which I downloaded from, again, Internet Archive.

Hot take: Internet Archive is even better than Tubi.

Many Internet Archive users digitize their old VHS tapes and rip DVDs from their physical media collections and then post downloadable files of them. That means there are a lot of Quantum Leap episodes with the original commercial breaks intact (I like watching those early ’90s NBC commercial breaks), and I’ve found tons of shows that either never made it to DVD (the first season of Boston Public—the controversial David E. Kelley high-school drama that never had a DVD release, perhaps due to music clearance issues—has been preserved on Internet Archive) or aren’t found on YouTube or any streamers.

For example, a user posted in its entirety Great Performances’s 2019 presentation of the all-Black New York Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing, which starred Danielle Brooks from Orange Is the New Black and Peacemaker as Beatrice. I watched it on Internet Archive for the first time in April, and it’s an excellent version of Much Ado.

Full episodes of Sazae-san, Japan’s longest-running animated series (it premiered in 1969 and is still in production), are archived over there (but without any English subtitles). Sazae-san episodes used to be hard to find because Machiko Hasegawa, the creator of the manga the series was based on, stipulated that Sazae-san can never be released on home video, even after her death, which occurred in 1992. And when Netflix removed one of its own original shows, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, earlier this year, a Princesses of Power fan did a heroic thing like their idol from planet Etheria would do and immediately posted the DreamWorks Animation cult favorite’s entire run on Internet Archive.

The tart-tongued Out of Practice is a multi-cam sitcom I skipped when it first aired on CBS in 2005. It was about a family whose every adult member, including the divorced parents, is a physician, except for the youngest child, Christopher Gorham’s Ben, an idealistic couples therapist who is, professionally and worldview-wise, the square peg in a family of round holes. When Ben is dumped by his off-screen wife, an environmental activist, via answering machine message on his birthday, he attempts to save his marriage—a plan his parents and siblings try to stop because all of them despise her.

I caught Out of Practice’s pilot on Internet Archive and started watching the rest of its only season over there—even though most of Internet Archive’s copies of Out of Practice were taken from blurry VHS recordings of the original CBS broadcasts. I got into Out of Practice because its cast is stacked and perfect: A pre-Modern Family Ty Burrell played Ben’s sleazy plastic surgeon brother, Stockard Channing played Ben’s domineering cardiologist mom, Henry Winkler played Ben’s gastroenterologist dad, and Jennifer Tilly stole scenes as Crystal, Dad’s new girlfriend.

I’m also finding out that Out of Practice co-creator Christopher Lloyd (the Frasier writer, not the Back to the Future star) recycled a lot of gags and tropes from his CBS show when he co-created Modern Family for ABC: Crystal is a much younger and buxom brunette, just like Gloria, Jay’s rebound woman after his divorce, later was on Modern Family. The lesbianism of Paula Marshall’s Regina, an ER physician, makes her and her brothers’ mom uncomfortable, just like how Mitchell’s gayness later made Jay uncomfortable.

I’m finding Out of Practice to be a bit more to my liking than Modern Family: There are no sappy closing montages where someone explains what they learned today (Raising Hope awesomely made fun of those closing montages when Lucas Neff did off-screen a dead-on impression of Ed O’Neill as Jay narrating what he learned today), and nobody is annoyingly Jimming the camera. That’s because Out of Practice wasn’t trying to be a clone of The Office.

Again, Out of Practice is not on any streamers. Also, Internet Archive carries the entire runs of both versions of Amazing Stories! That’s a gold mine to me.

I don’t subscribe to Apple TV, and even though its Amazing Stories revival was—just like the original Amazing Stories when Steven Spielberg co-produced it (and co-wrote many of its episodes) for NBC—poorly received, I always wanted to watch it.

I wanted to see if the revival was too chicken to do an episode like the Martin Scorsese-directed “Mirror, Mirror” or my favorite Amazing Stories horror episode, Gregory Hines in the Peter Hyams-directed “The Amazing Falsworth.” Both “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Amazing Falsworth” were slapped with “Parental discretion advised” disclaimers by NBC. The Amazing Stories episodes that received the “Parental discretion advised” stamp were always bangers.

And all those things are why Internet Archive is my favorite streamer. Today’s prompt is: What’s your favorite streamer in regards to TV shows?