TVSquad

So I was watching The Andy Griffith Show marathon that TV Land seems to air every other day. This isn't my complaint, as I would watch that show every day of the week (as long as they're the black and white episodes and not the color ones, but that's another rant). No, my complaint is about the commercial that ran during the marathon.

The promo isn't online so I'll have to describe it. The narrator talks about how times change (with a montage of how phones have evolved over the years), how tastes change (a montage of different foods that people have eaten over the decades), and how we've changed (a montage of different hairstyles you might have had since you were a kid). The point of all this is that things change, but ... change is good! And that's why it's good that TV Land has a bunch of reality shows instead of classic TV shows, because things change and that's where viewers are now in their lives.

I'm going to assume that one of the big reasons why you can now watch full episodes of various TV shows on YouTube is because of the success of sites like Hulu and AOL Video. There have been a lot of TV shows and movies uploaded to YouTube, often in hard-to-navigate "parts," with bad sound. But YouTube has made deals with several networks/studios, including Sony, CBS, Showtime, and Discovery to show full length, legal copies of many TV shows.

It's a fair collection, including current shows like Harper's Island, Jimmy Kimmel Live, As The World Turns, Man vs. Wild, Mythbusters, along with classic shows like Bewitched, MacGyver, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Barney Miller, I Spy, I Dream of Jeannie, and many others. It's not the selection you'll find on Hulu, but it's OK (and I'm sure the list will grow). I just wonder if it's enough to get people to drift away from other video sites.

It's not glitch-free, however. Take a look at this and this and tell me what the heck they have to do with The Dick Van Dyke Show. Only five episodes of the show on there and two of them aren't even from the show.

There are so many cable channels now - I think I have one on my cable system which is just 24 hours of programming about cheese - that it's hard to keep track of them all. Did you know there's an i network? From ION Media Networks. I've never heard of it, but they reach 90 million homes.

They just made a deal with Sony to start showing classic Sony Pictures movies and television series. The shows include Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch, The Monkees, The Partridge Family, and Silver Spoons.

So, basically, it sounds like TV Land or Nick at Nite, only with crappier shows.