Life in a Northern town

Things I love: 90’s sitcom edition

February 29th, 2008

It’s snowing again here. I’m not complaining; I still love the white stuff. It’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever lived somewhere with as much snow as we’ve had this year. I must say it makes me really, really glad for the pair of Merrell Polartech boots I snagged on clearance sometime last year. Expensive? Maybe. Worth. Every. Penny.

And I do love to snuggle up at home on a snowy afternoon or evening and watch hours of mindless TV. Without cable, that’s kind of tough. But I’ve been able to find enough drech (as the Scots say) to watch on Hulu.com, a site that offers a limited number of TV shows with “minimal commercial interruption.” I think I’ve blogged about it here before, but Hulu is to blame for my watching the entire first season of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares back to back over the course of a weekend. Talk about love-hate.

Now, talk about love-love…Hulu just added most (though not all) episodes of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, NewsRadio. It’s always strange to watch a show you loved what seems like a lifetime ago and you get this almost nervous-y feeling that it won’t hold up. But NewsRadio’s been a treat — still funny, still kooky. Makes me nostalgic for the days when Andy Dick wasn’t yet completely drug-addled-mental; when Dave Foley was fresh off The Kids in the Hall, still young, cherubic and funny and not, say, hosting poker shows on Bravo; when Stephen Root had not yet achieved cult status as The Stapler Guy in Office Space; when Joe Rogan was actually mildly entertaining and not yet the grating host of the awful Fear Factor; and, most of all, when comic genius Phil Hartman still walked among us, breathing life and hilarit into the preposterous news anchor Bill McNeal. The latter alone is worth checking out the show, even if the technical quality of the episodes isn’t the best.

Entry Filed under: Things I love