Monday, May 5, 2008

What if I need to see “Young Hercules” Season 2 Episode 4?

Posted by Josh in Hulu, Internets, south park, tv

A few weeks back Comedy Central put every episode of “South Park” online. You can now see the modern day classics (”An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig,”) in their entirety and without breaking any of those pesky copyright laws. This got me thinking, what other shows have put every single episode online? I am not counting the fact that you can get any show that has ever existed anywhere via bit torrent (Helllloo “Land of the Lost”). Hulu has an impressive-looking catalog, but some of the shows they list don’t even have complete episodes. Going through Hulu and a few other sources I manages to pull together a loose list of TV shows that you can watch from pilot to often-too-soon finale online:

• South Park
• Daily Show
• Arrested Development
• The Dana Carvey Show
• Andy Barker, P.I. (barely counts as a complete series)
• New Amsterdam
• Kitchen Confidential
• Canterbury’s Law (barely counts as a TV Show)
• Friday Night Lights
• Quarterlife (More episodes than actually aired on TV)
• The Riches
• Firefly (woohoo!)
• The Tick
• Young Hercules

Seems that the majority are shows online are either shows that were canceled without enough episodes to make a decent DVD box set or shows that wouldn’t do that well on DVD. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule. “South Park,” “Arrested Development,” and “Firefly” are all shows that do pretty well on DVD. I guess they assume that those shows have fans who are rabid enough to watch them online and buy the DVDs.

I am sure I missed some shows, and I didn’t look in all that many sources. Anyone is free to add to this list in the comments.

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