Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Welcome to the Latest Installment Of "What Betty's Watching."

Thanks to the acquisition of the TiVo, my DVD-watching rate has dropped off enough I can practically hear the folks at Netflix breathing a sigh of relief.

But I'm still making progress through the DVD queue, even if it's happening much more slowly. Currently, I'm working my way through The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., which just came out on disc a little while back. For some reason I never really followed this show when it was on the air, even though all my friends did. Which, I can see now, was stupid of me. It's a delightful series, and it deserves a lot better than the cult-show obscurity it got. I mean, I'm watching it, of course, because I'm a geek. Hey, it's got Bruce Campell and random science-fiction elements and pulpy adventures that remind me of my old role-playing days! But what gets me is that I keep thinking, man, I bet my mother would like this show. Heck, my grandmother might even like it, and it's extremely difficult to find something all three of us can sit in a room and enjoy. (I think the only thing we're usually able to settle on happily is CSI, and then probably only if they're not investigating a sex crime.) It's sorta sad that something with the the pontial for that kind of wide appeal didn't last longer than one season.

6 comments:

  1. The show apparently did pretty well in syndication on cable, and it's not hard to see why. I think they touch on this in the audio commentary, but the show was sort of ideally suited to a late Saturday morning, rather than the Sunday evening where Fox stranded it.

    I remember watching the first episode and, for whatever reason, not many more than that. So I've been catching up slowly myself with the DVDs.

    ReplyDelete
  2. They did talk about that in the commentary, yeah, as well as the cross-generational appeal thing, a bit. They seem to blame the show's failure pretty much entirely on the timeslot, and I think they're probably to a large extent right, although it's also true that networks seldom quite seem to know what to do with shows that don't fit neatly into single-genre categories. (See also: Firefly.)

    I haven't watched that many of them, yet, but I think the first episode might be the weakest one I've seen so far. Which isn't surprising; pilots usually tend to be kind of rough. Although it's also possible that it just took me an episode or so to get fully into the spirit of the thing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh awesome I didn't realize this was out...ok more acurately I kind of forgot about the show. I will add to my Netflix queue that will last me the next 5 years :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. You too, huh? I think mine's got about 430-440 discs on it at the moment. Yikes.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have all 500 spots filled right now :) Just finished with Dead Zone Season 2.

    ReplyDelete
  6. There's only 500 spots? Oh, no!

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.