People keep writing me to ask when a certain favorite TV show of the past will get released on DVD. The answer is that every show that was around long enough to now fill out a DVD set is probably on some company's "we'll get around to this eventually" list. A gentleman who packages such things for one of the major DVD houses told me recently that there's a bit of a glut on the market and there may be some slowdown. There also may be some drop in the budgets for special features ("Some people are starting to say it's not cost-effective") but no one is suggesting that there isn't still money to be made packaging runs of old shows. Here, with his permission, is an excerpt from a recent e-mail to me…
We still have clearance problems with a couple of shows that we want to put out. Mostly, it's a matter of music rights but there are a few shows tied up in disputes over who owns the home video rights. The point is we're even working on solving those because we want to put everything out we can. It's mostly now a question of when. When would be a good time to release this? Some months, there are just too many DVD sets out and your product can get lost or you'll wind up competing with yourself to have too many sets out. In some cases, there's reason to believe a certain show might get more attention down the line, like if there's a movie coming out based on it. We also have shows we want to put out, and we will put out, but we're having trouble locating negatives or good complete prints of a few episodes. All we have readily available are syndication prints that are missing a few minutes in each show. We don't want to use those unless we have to.
Coming out May 2 is the first season of That Girl, complete with audio commentaries and a documentary featuring Marlo Thomas and series co-creator Bill Persky. I recall the first season of that show being quite enjoyable, especially in the way Ted Bessell would play sexual frustration and how unbelievably sour Lew Parker was as That Girl's father. From our friends at Shout Factory.
On May 9, Paramount is bringing out the much-awaited DVD of the show variously called Sgt. Bilko, The Phil Silvers Show and You'll Never Get Rich — by any name, one of the best comedies ever done for television. Alas, this is one of the shows that has had clearance problems so they can't just release season by season. Instead, they've picked 21 episodes that they could clear, plus they have the never-aired pilot (which has Jack Warden playing Henshaw, the character played in the series by Allan Melvin) and a staggering number of special features, rare clips, commentary tracks, etc. This sounds like a must-get, and we can hope that if it sells well enough, that might give Paramount the financial incentive to try and mop up those clearance issues and do real season-by-season sets. You can advance order this one here.
There's already a one-DVD sampler release of a few old F Troop episodes and I guess it must have sold well since Warner Home Video is putting out the entire first season of the show on June 6. One hopes it will sell well enough for a quick release of the second and final season. (There were only two, and only the second was in color.) Always liked F Troop — one of the few sitcoms that ever made me laugh out loud.
What's nice about these three releases is that they're all of shows I can't watch just by turning on my TV. I mean, the Andy Griffith Show and M*A*S*H DVD sets are nice but my satellite dish gets two episodes of Andy Griffith per day, each of which run twice, and six episodes of M*A*S*H, four of which air twice — plus every so often, some channel airs a marathon. One time, my "TiVo Suggestions" feature got carried away and recorded 40+ episodes of I Love Lucy over one weekend. (I think my TiVo has a thing for Vivian Vance.) So buying a complete season of that show isn't that big a deal.
One of my few disappointments when I got DirecTV and the eight zillion channels that come with it was that about four zillion were running The Jeffersons. I was expecting lots of shows I wasn't previously able to see and all I got was six chances a day to watch Weezie and George yell at each other. I mentioned here a few months ago that I didn't understand why someone hasn't launched a couple of networks that run some of the hundreds of old TV shows that are not currently on TV Land. No one in the business seems to have a theory as to why this hasn't been attempted, especially now that the DVD market has prompted many studios to go into their vaults and do restoration work on their old shows. Dom DeLuise's Lotsa Luck is out on DVD. So is Good Morning, World. So is Nowhere Man and Have Gun, Will Travel and even Mister Peepers. None of these shows are currently rerun on TV channels as far as I know. If people are willing to shell out good money to own all of them, don't you think someone would watch them once a day for free?