"Conversation is like a television set on honeymoon... unnecessary."
- Peter Sellers -
        Syndicate

* Atom 1.0
* RSS 2.0

Videopia the Book for only $9.99! 236 pages, all original content on EVERY topic from light to copyright.

"In my opinion, the content is worth much more than you are charging for it..."
                            - David B.

"This booklet is a great resource, and worth many times the price. Heck, it's worth four bucks just for the entertaining read alone..."
                            - Shane G.

"This is the best explanation of
Internet video I have ever read."
                            - Mark H.

Earl's Meta Movie PDF Print E-mail
Written by D. Eric Franks   
Friday, 26 September 2008 05:11

I like NBC's My Name is Earl well enough, but I'm not a die-hard fan (probably seen less than four episodes). The Season 4 premiere was quite good, especially if you like Seth Green, who guest starred. The premise of the episode is that Earl owes Seth Green's character a big favor, and that favor turns out to be "Makin' a Movie." Seth immediately dubs Earl the producer (who's in charge of financing the project, of course) and hilarity ensues.

my-name-is-earl.jpg

Besides being an Meta Movie (i.e., a movie about movie making), featuring Seth Green and being a very pleasant and funny 30 minutes of television (network TV's not dead, folks!), if you hop over to NBC, you'll notice a couple of other minor-but-interesting delivery changes. First, My Name is Earl Season 4, Episode 1 premiered last night, but you can watch it today in HD, on demand. Second, the episode only seems to have one sponsor. OK, that's actually not new at all: apparently advertisers still don't like online programming. Third, NBC is also offering downloadable versions of all of its shows via a new application. I'm sure it's got some sort of DRM, but I think people will tolerate DRM for free content. The only issue with this is probably fiscal: Can NBC still make money selling DVD box sets of the show if it's available online? Fans and collectors may possibly still buy the discs, but this is probably just another phase in the ultimate Death of the Disc we are seeing right now.

 So live television's only advantage is that fans get to see the premiere "live," which definitely has a certain appeal. For the rest of us, NBC's VoD service has the advantages of (1) being available whenever you want with (2) fewer commercials, (3) you can download it and watch it wherever you want, (4) the quality is better than SD TV and (5) you can pause, rewind and rewatch. This means that old fashioned, traditional television network NBC's VoD is definitely (and ironically) Better than TV.

References:
- My Name is Earl on NBC Rewind
- NBC Direct (beta) - download last night's shows! All of them!
- More Meta Movies - survey of Movies about Makin' Movies

< Prev   Next >