I was listening to an NPR interview with Carol Burnett the other day, and she was promoting some book that may or may not be a new one--for all I know, this segment was an "encore presentation" of a 2005 chat--and it made me wonder: Whither "The Carol Burnett Show?"
Is there a more fondly remembered but less seen TV classic around today? Let me mention here that I am not a big fan of the series, but I remember watching it regularly as a kid, when it was on New York TV stations all the time (NOTE: "all the time" may well be an exaggeration based on my distorted kid sense of time), and I enjoyed it here and there. More importantly, I appreciate its place in TV history and respect the love many have for it.
Licensing and legal difficulties reportedly make a comprehensive DVD release of the series impossible, though some compilations and limited direct market video collections have made it through over the years. So if it can't be on DVD, why can't it be on TV?
It just seems odd to me that as visible as Carol Burnett remains to this day, and as many "classic TV" networks are out there now with the launch of Antenna TV and Me-TV supplementing RTV and (let's all hold out noses) TV Land, this show is MIA.
I believe Me-TV in its Chicago incarnation aired the series a while back, but I think the last time the Burnett show was on nationally was a TV Land stint 10 years ago. Did Burnett (and the other owners of the series) yank the show from syndication to boost sales of direct market DVDs? I don't know, but now that the DVD market is fading, perhaps it's time to get the series back out there.
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