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Where's Gary? -- 07/02/13








Well, my original title for this was going to be Where's Doonesbury?

This was prompted by the long series of reruns in the Doonesbury comic strip. Well, eventually, I took my own advice and googled and discovered that the reruns were because Gary Trudeau was busy working on a television series.

Amazon produced pilot episodes for 14 television series, which they made available for streaming and asked viewers to vote for their favorites. The most popular ones would get to become television series exclusively for streaming downloads from Amazon.

One of the winning series is a political comedy by Trudeau and he is taking a summer hiatus from Doonesbury (thus the comic strip reruns) while he writes the television episodes.

Television is changing rapidly. And the old-fashioned broadcast networks are terrified.

Most of what we watch on television is streaming from Netflix. If it's not Netflix, it's probably HBO (Game of Thrones, Newsroom, etc.) and if it's not that, it's either Amazon Prime streaming or on-demand streaming via our cable company (mostly for Castle and Parenthood).

And now Netflix and Amazon are producing their own television shows. (Did you see House of Cards with Kevin Spacey? Netflix is having a second season made.)

I can't wait for the day that cable television goes a la carte, allowing us to pick just the channels we want to get. All we want is HBO and whatever channels are carrying the major tennis tournaments. (And as soon as somebody provides HD streaming over the web, then all we want is HBO.) I understand that in Norway you can get HBO without having to buy a bundle of worthless channels. Eventually we should be able to get to that here.

So I made the title Where's Gary? because, after all, Doonesbury hadn't disappeared; it's just in reruns for the summer.




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