Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Paul Hoffert’s main title theme from The Hitchhiker.

I’m currently enjoying Jordan Mendoza’s 11-minute Adult Swim sketch comedy series The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza, and it’s not just because I’m Pinoy, and Mendoza—a writer who worked for Big Mouth, Comedy Central’s Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head, and Showtime’s Ziwe and played the “I fucking love salad” guy in No Hard Feelings—is Pinoy as well. It’s also because its wraparound segments are in the style of a dark anthology show like The Hitchhiker and the original Twilight Zone, a show I grew up watching via KOFY TV 20’s annual Twilight Zone Halloween marathons.

Whether it’s Zone, Tales from the Crypt, or the obscure ’80s PBS comedy anthology show Trying Times, the half-hour anthology show is one of my favorite kinds of shows to track on my Serializd account. That’s because half-hour anthologies—which I never binge-watch because I don’t do binge-watches anymore—don’t take too long to watch, and they don’t suffer from Netflix bloat.

The wraparound segments on HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show were an ongoing storyline where the series regulars portrayed themselves and dealt with life after an apocalypse. The wraparound segments in the later seasons of Key & Peele emulated the banter between Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey from True Detective’s first season and followed the titular duo—who ad-libbed all of their conversations—on a never-ending road trip.

Meanwhile, in The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza’s equally clever wraparound segments, Mendoza falls backwards into an endless pit that visually brings to mind Daniel Kaluuya’s descent into the Sunken Place while Steve Buscemi—in deadpan 30 Rock mode instead of violent HBO prestige drama gangster mode—shows up as the laconic host of Mendoza’s nightmares.

These nightmares include a haunted hospital that has been taken over by zombies who don’t snack on human flesh. Instead of devouring people’s brains, these zombies are annoying and talkative white millennials who are “passionate about music, but they don’t play songs,” while some of them transform into Marc Maron—who does a cameo as a “Marc Maron clone” and makes fun of his own now-defunct WTF podcast—and host interminable interview podcasts.

Several of the best horror filmmakers in the last decade have been sketch comics: The aforementioned Jordan Peele and Josh Ruben, a highlight of Dropout improv game shows like Game Changer and Make Some Noise, immediately come to mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mendoza transitions into horror filmmaking like Peele and Ruben did. The haunted hospital sketch is perhaps the funniest sketch The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza has done so far, but it also looks convincingly like an actual 2010s horror flick I would have stumbled into on Chiller.

Buscemi stars in some of Mendoza’s sketches, including an amusing non-horror-related one where he plays a hostage negotiator who has to deal with Mendoza’s character, a bank robber who won’t let his hostages go unless the FBI transforms him into a famous snake like Ekans from Pokémon. He’s a great choice as the host of The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza, and that leads me to today’s prompt: Do you have a favorite anthology series host?

When I say, “anthology series host,” I don’t mean Svengoolie, whose horror feature presentations are the subject of weekly Svengoolie discussion threads on this site, and Elvira. I’m talking about Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, the Control Voice when he was voiced by Vic Perrin, the Control Voice when he was later voiced by Kevin Conway (a.k.a. Kahless II), Freddy Krueger (remember Freddy’s Nightmares?), and Forest Whitaker, who hosted Star Trek: Deep Space Nine showrunner Ira Steven Behr’s Twilight Zone revival on UPN.

Whitaker, whose arc as Lieutenant Kavanaugh was my favorite arc on The Shield, was alright as a Twilight Zone host. But I wish he did all those segments in either his Ghost Dog voice or his Wakandan accent, which Godfrey, a terrific impressionist and the son of Nigerian immigrants, loves to make fun of during his One54 Africa podcast with Akbar Gbajabiamila (“Dee prrrrrrince will now have dee streenth of the Blick Pentheh strrrrrripped eweh!”).

My favorite anthology series host is the Crypt Keeper, who was wonderfully voiced by John Kassir on both Tales from the Crypt and the animated Tales from the Cryptkeeper. Kassir, a 1st & Ten alum and a veteran voice actor, continues to voice him in projects like AMC FearFest 2026’s hosting segments and a funny 2022 Solar Opposites Halloween episode where Terry and Jesse used “dark sci-fi magic” to reanimate a corpse who turns into the Crypt Keeper and speaks in nothing but dad jokes (“Anthony was a simple tailor. But he soon found that you reap what you sew!”). On Tales from the Crypt, Crypty was brilliantly puppeteered by a team that included the late Patty Maloney, who was one of the performers who walked around inside the Twiki robot costume during Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Crypty is, interestingly, the only anthology series host who has been turned into action figures by a toy company.

Meanwhile, the Late Night with David Letterman writers’ favorite anthology series host was clearly Page Fletcher from The Hitchhiker, which explains why Late Night did in 1987 a parody of a low-budget HBO show nobody—except Canadians and ’80s HBO subscribers—knew existed.

The moment when Chris Elliott imitated Fletcher’s Canuck accent made me laugh.

Next week’s prompt: Widow’s Bay’s threats-of-the-week.