Boo to TVLand

TVLand ran a weekend marathon of Three's Company and I watched it. Three times.

How could I watch a weekend marathon three times in the same weekend it was being shown, you might ask? Because TVLand showed the same 12-hour block 3 times in a row and called it a marathon!

Now, technically, I guess that does qualify for marathon status. And they did break the blocks up with airings of the spin-offs, The Ropers and Three's a Crowd, but that's still a rip-off. Eight years' worth of episodes and they show the same 20 or so three or four times in a row? Come on!

I happen to know a bit about the TV biz, and it so happens that reruns pay on a de-escalating scale, so that the first rerun pays the most, then subsequent airings pay less and less, until it bottoms-out. But this show's been on the air almost constantly since it originally showed, so there can't be any episodes that are still paying top-dollar.

On the plus-side, and contrary to what I just said, they did show the original pilot (in which Joh Ritter, Audra Lindey, and Norman Fell were the only regular cast members who appeared), where Jack was named "David" and Stanley was named "George." That was a very interesting watch, especially since they showed the series pilot (with Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Sommers) shortly afterward.

It was quite a bit rawer than the pilot that aired -- and I don't just mean substantively -- I mean raunchier. It was cool to see the elements they'd changed and muse on why. I could go into it pretty deeply, but suffice it to say that the original pilot could have made it to TV with far fewer changes and been twice as good.

While a big fan of Ritter's, I've never been particularly fond of Three's Company and I'd hoped that seeing most (if not all) of the series in succession would be a learning experience.

Sadly, TVLand cheated me of that.

BOO, TVLand!