February 2, 2024
My favorite TV show, Northern Exposure (1990-1995) was entirely unavailable on any streaming service since streaming services existed. If you wanted to watch it, you had to get your hands on the DVDs. I totally have them. The first two seasons came in a little cute parka around the case, then they cheaped out and stopped doing that, although now I see the complete series comes in a coat-like thing again.
But I never bother hooking up a DVD player anymore. Technically, I have an XBOX now that should be able to do it, but even though I’ve hung on to these DVDs (and a few more, it was hard to ditch), I imagine I’ll never actually watch them directly again.
At one time, I set about trying to digitize those DVDs, although with the protections against that baked into the format, I was ultimately deterred. I did the torrent thing instead, managing to find decent copies, which I then converted into a format that made them work nicely with my AppleTV and such.
Apparently, it was some issue with music rights that could never be cleared that prevented the streaming, but now all the sudden Amazon Prime has got all the seasons to stream. It’s at least a little newsworthy. It’s unclear if Amazon actually solved the rights issue or just kinda did it anyway. The subreddit is popping again, which is almost enough for me to log in over there again (but not quite lol).
There were various attempts to reboot the show over the years. Some of them seemed quite close, but none ever happened. Probably for the better, as it’s really hard for me to imagine the magic of this show coming back to life in a satisfying way.
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