Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Thank you to everyone who posted a prompt suggestion last week. All of you cured my writer’s block. It turns out that I have an answer for each and every prompt suggestion. I’m getting goosebumps just typing out my answer to “Funniest moment in a show that isn’t a comedy,” which will be the subject of the November 5 header.

Speaking of goosebumps, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Jack Lenz’s original version of his theme from the Fox Kids live-action anthology series Goosebumps.

Today’s prompt comes to us from Raven Wilder: Do you have a favorite supernatural-themed episode of a show that’s not otherwise about the supernatural?

Oh, God, I just watched this for the first time on Paramount+ a few months ago, and it’s terrible: “Sub Rosa,” Star Trek: The Next Generation’s ghost candle sex episode.

The 1994 TNG episode is one of the most infamous examples of a supernatural episode of a show that didn’t delve into the supernatural (despite, in TNG’s case, lots of time-travel mishaps, a few bizarre alien creatures, and the occasional presence of a godlike, Mister Mxyzptlk-esque being). TNG had a scientific explanation for every strange new thing that occurred during the Enterprise-D’s continuing mission. The scientific explanation for the ghost who seduces the Crusher women was that he was an “anaphasic life form” who “needs an organic host in order to maintain molecular cohesion.”

There are TNG fans out there who actually like “Sub Rosa” and will stand up for it, so I’ll stop right there and just say that Gates McFadden would have been great as the heroine of some Victorian horror flick, and she got to play that type of role in the episode. That’s the only thing I like about the episode. McFadden’s choreography background has a lot to do with why she was effective in “Sub Rosa.” It also has a lot to do with why McFadden was funny in a three-minute parody of trailers for art-house movies for women in the 1985 Troma comedy movie When Nature Calls.

“So-Called Angels,” My So-Called Life’s Christmas episode, and “Toys in the Attic,” Cowboy Bebop’s Alien parody, are much better examples of supernatural episodes of shows that avoided the supernatural. But my favorite example is “Phright Night,” Run the Burbs’s Halloween episode.

Before I get to “Phright Night,” barely anybody in America is aware of Run the Burbs, an underseen CBC single-camera comedy, so I have to provide some background on it.

Now on Hulu, Tubi, and Prime Video, the now-defunct Run the Burbs had a refreshing emphasis on a suburban Canadian family whose stay-at-home dad, Andrew Pham, is a Vietnamese Canadian sneakerhead (Pham is both a common Vietnamese surname and an Asian Canadian comedy writer’s dream, as seen in punny Run the Burbs episode titles like “Phamily Ties” and “Phamily Budget”), while the mom is Indian Canadian.

Camille Pham, the breadwinner of the house, quits her unfulfilling HR office job early on in Run the Burbs’s first season to run what she always wanted to do, a catering business that specializes in Indian cuisine. Khia, Andrew and Camille’s mischievous teen daughter, is an out lesbian who has fallen in love for the first time. Her first love happens to be the teen daughter of Hudson Hawksley, Andrew’s best friend and a divorced Black accountant who finds the dating scene to be rough.

Run the Burbs was co-created by series lead Andrew Phung, a sneakerhead just like the Pham patriarch, as well as an alum of the TV version of Kim’s Convenience, playwright Ins Choi’s hit Canadian play. Phung’s earlier sitcom was the subject of a non-fiction book I worked on for about two years and then gave up on writing because it was such a frustrating subject to write about, and I could only find one interviewee to talk about it.

The only cool thing that came out of my aborted book project was when I tagged Phung, a fan of the Best of the Best martial arts movies, in a 2021 tweet where I said his fondness for the first Best of the Best flick, which came out in 1989, caused me to watch it for the first time in 2021, and he told me about an uplifting encounter he had with Best of the Best star/co-writer Phillip Rhee.

Phung’s tweet to me about getting to meet Rhee during Kim’s Convenience’s run is one of my favorite stories about an Asian actor becoming emotional while meeting an Asian action legend he admires, along with the moment when Sonny Chiba crashed Keanu Reeves’s John Wick: Chapter 2 press tour and Reeves became starstruck.

Anyway, Phung wasn’t one of the actors who were mistreated during the behind-the-scenes racial scandals that tarnished Kim’s Convenience. The scandals brought attention to the fact that the Canadian TV industry has a severe racism problem.

“I had nothing but wonderful experiences working on Kim’s… But my experience was different, because I was not one of the stars of the show; I was a supporting character that worked his way up to being one of the core members of the show. I can’t speak on [the mistreated actors’] experiences, though I support them fully,” said Phung in 2021 to interviewer Norm Wilner, who happens to be the only person I was able to interview for my aborted book project.

Despite his pleasant working experience, Phung was aware of Kim’s Convenience’s mistakes—like a writers’ room that was predominantly white (something a sitcom about immigrants of color should never allow), a toxic working environment, and the white producers’ denials of the Asian Canadian cast members’ requests to write or direct episodes—so he made sure to avoid them when he developed Run the Burbs.

Rakhee Morzaria, who played Camille, was allowed to join the writers’ room. (“We always want to build a room that is really inclusive of voices,” said Phung to Wilner.) Each season was showrun by a different writer of color (Shebli Zarghami in the first season, Anthony Q. Farrell in the second one, and in the third and final one, Nelu Handa, who split showrunning duties with a frequent collaborator of hers, Jennica Harper, a white writer).

Phung also recruited a Vietnamese cultural consultant (one of his cousins) and an Indian cultural consultant—something the Kim’s Convenience crew never did regarding the show’s depiction of Korean and Indian immigrants in Toronto—to bring some more authenticity to Run the Burbs.

The result was a likable sitcom that didn’t always work, but unlike Kim’s Convenience, which is just unwatchable nowadays, it’s a show I love to revisit. That’s mostly because it reminds me of growing up Pinoy in San Jose, where a lot of my classmates or friends were Vietnamese (I went to school with a few Phams) and Indian.

Run the Burbs was wholesome, but in a Different World kind of way instead of a delusional Cosby Show/Black conservative kind of way. Bill Cosby bizarrely placed the Huxtables in a utopian Brooklyn where nobody was racist—whereas Debbie Allen wanted to show the Hillman students either quietly putting racist scumbags in their place in 1990’s “Pride and Prejudice” or angrily clapping back at them in 1992’s “The Cat’s in the Cradle”—and, like Don Cornelius, he inanely thought rappers were ruining the Black community.

Meanwhile, Run the Burbs, like A Different World, once pitted Camille against a white guy who says racist shit to her face (“There’s no butter chicken ice cream, okay? So, just, you know, pick a normal flavor or go back to your country”), although the audio was muted for the entirety of her explosive takedown of the anti-South Asian dipshit because it was full of what I assume are F-bombs.

In another A Different World-like move, Run the Burbs had no problems with having a rapper as one of its guest stars. Jamaican Canadian rapper Kardinal Offishall had a recurring role where he portrayed himself and was one of Andrew and Hudson’s neighbors in the fictional suburb of Rockridge, which Phung partially based on the Falconridge, Pineridge, and Whitehorn sections of Calgary, Alberta.

Run the Burbs was also one of several sitcoms that did a Sliding Doors episode. That episode—“Phright Night”—is Run the Burbs’s best and funniest episode.

For Halloween (although “Phright Night” actually first aired on CBC in February 2024, not October), the show broke from its usual slice-of-life hijinks and grounded tone to center on a magical coin that splits the Phams’ Halloween into two different timelines. In one timeline, the Pham siblings are miserable because they’re reluctantly in a group costume with their parents, who want to win this year’s Rockridge Halloween costume contest. The group costume is a giant banh mi.

Meanwhile, in the other timeline, Andrew and Camille are miserable in the banh mi costume because their kids left to do their own thing, so Camille accepts a couple of gummies from a neighbor and gets to relive her days of enjoying weed before she gave it up to raise Khia and her little brother. That means that “Phright Night” is simultaneously a stoner episode (but it’s a funnier stoner episode than Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’s stoner episode), a Sliding Doors episode, a Halloween episode, and a mildly supernatural episode of an otherwise non-supernatural show.

“Phright Night” phloored me.

Thanks for the timely submission, Quoth the Raven, “Wilder-more.”