Happy spring, everybody!
With the arrival of the Vernal Equinox yesterday, flowers are blooming, the air smells of growing grass, and baby animals are everywhere! At least at T.V. Club’s outpost of mad science in Long Beach, California, that is. (Don’t ask how things are at the home office in Chicago. Everybody seems a little worked up about that nowadays.) And with the arrival of spring, it can mean but one thing: the return of TV Club Classic! Yes, we’ve taken much of the year off, because we needed to focus on currently running TV, but as the season winds down, we’re going to ramp up some of your favorite TV Club Classic features all over again, then add in a few new ones for good measure.
Here’s the schedule, which will begin running on Monday, March 31.
On Mondays, it’s finally time for Oliver Sava to wrap up his run through Justice League Unlimited. After that’s over, we’re hopeful he’ll tackle some other classic cartoon or another, but we’re not committed to anything just yet (though we have some exciting ideas).
On Tuesdays, Erik Adams left off in his run through The Office seasons we hadn’t covered previously last summer right after the first kiss between Jim and Pam. He’ll steer us through season three, the one season we have yet to cover, and find out what happens to those two crazy kids and everybody they work with.
Todd VanDerWerff covered The Pacific fairly early in his tenure at T.V. Club, and he’s always hoped to get a chance to go through its companion miniseries, Band Of Brothers. He’ll be doing just that on Wednesdays this spring, and you should join him if you know a lot about World War II, because he sure doesn’t.
Here’s another show we never covered one of the seasons of, because T.V. Club was born at an awkward time: Friday Night Lights. Sonia Saraiya has the requisite clear eyes and full hearts, and she definitely hopes you’ll sign up for the show’s first season, when the Dillon Panthers face setback after setback on the road to glory. This feature will run Thursdays. (Zack Handlen’s coverage of Deep Space Nine will soon wrap and will continue to run on this day.)
Finally, we’re hoping to close out some of our outstanding TV Club Classic features throughout this year and the next, and we’re starting that up with Justice League and Rowan Kaiser’s coverage of Babylon 5, which will proceed through the show’s final two seasons at a slightly accelerated pace (Rowan will share that pace with you in his first piece). That will run, as always, on Fridays.
Our weekends will have plenty of TV Club Classic action as well, as Zack Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff wrap up their coverage of The X-Files in just a few weeks, Christopher Bahn continues his biweekly look at the classic adventures of Doctor Who, Alasdair Wilkins fills in the gaps of our coverage of the new Doctor Who, and Erik Adams and a team of T.V. Club all-stars tackle the classic seasons of The Simpsons. The first two of those run on Saturdays, while the latter two run on Sundays.
We’re also hoping to finish out the following features by the end of 2015: Farscape, Gilmore Girls, Home Movies, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Muppet Show (at least the one remaining season on DVD), Peep Show, The Shield, Six Feet Under, The Twilight Zone, and The West Wing. We’d also like to do a continuation of Friends at some point, but that’s contingent on some other stuff, so we can’t promise you anything on that front. We’d also like to fill in some gaps on other shows we never covered the early seasons of, including 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica, Futurama, and The Wire. And we have a few other things up our sleeves.
As always, it’s enormously difficult to find readership for episodic coverage of older TV shows, so if you like any one of these features (or one not listed above that you’d love to see covered or resurrected), the best thing you can do is share links to our coverage on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or the social networking site of your choice. We’d love to cover every show ever made, but we’ve also gotta keep an eye on readership levels. Fortunately, the solution is easy: Tell your friends and family! Or just surreptitiously set their home page to http://www.avclub.com/tv. Tell ‘em Todd VanDerWerff sent you.