Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Find the Entertainment

In the recent past, if I missed a show, I had to wait until the summer re-runs. Or if there was some old black and white movie from the 1940's that I wanted to see, I was out of luck. Recently, I could just go to my library. Luckily, the local library makes all the hot dvds available for free. Or lots of shows, like The Office or Lost, issue dvd sets with each new season. Right now, we don't even have to wait that long. We can catch whatever we missed streaming over the internet, via the network website, hulu, or other sites.

I've even watched some shows on youtube. They'll be broken into 10 or 15 minute chunks, but they still work fine. Usually, I only resort to this with something that is really hard to obtain, like BBC sit-coms (Murder Most Horrid) or PBS shorts (Posh Nosh).

Some shows I just love to re-visit, like Arrested Development or The Tick. I can watch those instantly on hulu.com or Netflix. By the way, I don't understand how The Office can be such a big hit, when Arrested Development barely made it. Arrested Development is almost a hybrid, between the typical family-centered sit-com and the fake documentary-style TV show, like what we see in The Office. And even The Office wasn't the first to do this. Before The Office(British or American), there was People Like Us, also from England. It was part of the late-night British sit-com lineup for PBS here.

If you want, you can even buy lots of these shows. Absolutely Fabulous or Black Adder are both hard to find, unless you purchase the dvd sets.

There you are: lots of suggestions for entertaining time-wasters. Here, I'll get you started. This link takes you to a bit of People Like Us on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_VND1196WI

1 comment:

Barbara said...

Thanks for the link - another never credited source for the genesis of comedies like the Office is the Canadian series "The Industry," about an office of bumbling entertainment brokers. I was hooked on it in the 90's when it played on PBS. Impossible to find on DVD, and now I find its name in non-Canadian markets is "Made in Canada," likewise impossible to find.

I am also on the hunt for "A Town Like Alice" on DVD, or I might just have to subject my book club to the original work and I'll act it out with finger puppets.

I'm taking heart in thefact that I waited for a Dickens flick to come to DVD for THREE YEARS, and when it finally did, it was five bucks. Here to hoping!