I’m making subtle changes to the title of the Couch Avocados post, beginning this week. Instead of a dash separating the date from the rest of the post title, which was the previous Couch Avocados guy’s method, the date will now be bookended by parentheses. It’s much more aesthetically pleasing to me. I never liked the presence of the dash.

I don’t like how there was a colon and a dash, just like in the cumbersome titles of every Mission: Impossible movie after the third one, starting with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. A colon and a dash in the same title always reminds me of my favorite Henry Fonda line from Once Upon a Time in the West: “Wobbles, how can you trust a man that wears both a belt and suspenders? Man can’t even trust his own pants.”

Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Blake Leyh’s “The Fall,” the end title theme from The Wire and the only instrumental that was composed for the show, which remains my all-time favorite HBO original series.

Leyh, The Wire’s music supervisor, and David Simon, The Wire’s creator/showrunner, agreed that The Wire would never have an original score (it was part of Simon’s rule that he “did not want music perpetually in the background; it had to come from something visible in a scene, like a boom box or a car with open windows”), and the only instance of an original score would be the end title theme. Andrew Unterberger from the long-dead blog Intensities in Ten Suburbs described that end title theme, which features the late André Burke on violin, as “the perfect way to close episodes of The Wire” in 2008.

“It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking piece of music, the yearning and defeated counterpoint to the urgent and virulent beginning theme–like one of the show’s police heading home drunk and bleary-eyed after a long day of demoralizing case work,” added Unterberger.

True. The cymbals that kick off “The Fall” are as enticing as drummer Willie Hall’s high-hat ride pattern at the start of Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft”—the same song Detective Herc blasted on his car stereo to pump himself up before a drug bust in “Time After Time,” The Wire’s third-season premiere.

Today’s prompt comes to us once again from Raven Wilder. Thanks, Raven. The prompt is: What’s the funniest moment of a show that isn’t a comedy?

There are too many funny moments from shows that aren’t comedies. Long before viewers realized he was a terrific comic actor in things like his cameo in 1993’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights, his 1994 guest-hosting stint on SNL (“A woman going to the bathroom—you don’t find it erotic?”), his role in the 1995 film version of Jeffrey, his 2003 guest spot on Frasier, his 2005 guest spot on Extras, and, of course, his hilarious voice work as Bullock on American Dad!, the late, great Patrick Stewart had several funny moments where the uptight Picard found himself out of his comfort zone on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The cold open of “The Pegasus,” in which Picard doesn’t want to be the center of attention on Captain Picard Day aboard the Enterprise, immediately comes to my mind.

I don’t have one that I could call the funniest, but I’ll name another one out of the hundreds of favorite moments of mine in which a serious show did humor really fucking well: the conclusion of the saga of Bernard and Squeak in The Wire’s third season.

Bernard is a lower-level soldier in the Barksdale cartel. His task is to repeatedly buy disposable phones for Avon Barksdale’s men. The disposal of those phones is a way for the Barksdale Organization to keep Baltimore cops from prying into its affairs. The task wears down the patience of Squeak, Bernard’s cranky and overbearing girlfriend, so in the season’s 10th episode, Squeak, played by Mia Arnice Chambers, introduces Bernard to a hustler who offers illegally recharged phones at a lower price.

She doesn’t know that the hustler is actually an undercover Lester Freamon. The detective planted wiretaps in the phones he sold to them, and Squeak’s failure to notice that the hustler is a cop brings down the organization. What a fall.

In The Wire’s third-season finale, before Squeak and Bernard are escorted to jail, Squeak says to him, “You’ve got to be the stupidest motherfucker that I’ve ever gone out with.” This led to Melvin Jackson Jr., who played Bernard, whispering to the man next to him a line that, according to Simon in the finale’s audio commentary, was ad-libbed by Jackson.

“I can’t wait to go to jail” is a funny capper to Squeak’s tirades towards Bernard. I’ve said this a few times before: The Wire could sometimes be funnier than most network sitcoms.