I watched the Ed pilot on Youtube

and I don't know why!!

Yesterday, for reasons that are unknown even to me, I became gripped with the desire to watch the television show Ed. What brought Ed into my mind? It was on the air from 2000-2004, the exact years I was in high school, but I didn’t watch it then. I was too busy watching syndicated reruns of Freaks and Geeks on ABC Family and constant reruns of I Love the (Whatever Decade) on VH1. I simply didn’t have time to invest in a gentle dramedy about a quirky small town (I didn’t even start watching Gilmore Girls until college).

But I was aware of the show—set in Stuckeyville, Ohio (not a real town), it was about a man named, well, Ed who moves back home after losing his job and getting cheated on by his wife. Back in Stuckeyville, he immediately reconnects with the most beautiful girl from his high school days, Carol, who is now a teacher at that high school. He also buys a bowling alley. Michael Ian Black works at that bowling alley, and I think that was a big selling point for me at the time because, as previously mentioned, I was watching a lot of I Love the 80s (plus Wet Hot American Summer, plus Stella).

So what put Ed, as an inspirational Instagrammer might say, on my heart? I wish I knew! I certainly didn’t read anything about it…it’s not a hot topic. It was just another example of television fate, I guess.

But my mysterious decision to watch an hour long 2000s show wasn’t easy to put into action. Did you know that Ed isn’t available to watch…anywhere? As in, it’s not on a streaming service. You cannot rent it. You cannot buy it. It’s not even on DVD. In a 2016 Vulture article, creator Rob Burnett speculated that this may be because of music rights or because two studios co-own the show, but even he didn’t know for sure what was going on.

I’m always fascinated and horrified when this occurs. There’s a version of this that happens for authors—it’s extremely common for books to go out of print. If they’re not big sellers that keep selling copies for years and years, it’s likely. My two YA books are, I think, out of print. But they’re still easy to find, as is the case for many recent out of print books—you can get them on Amazon or at your library. But that’s not the case for television shows or movies—it’s significantly harder to find a show that was never even put on DVD. I can’t imagine what this must feel like for anyone who worked on the show, to have your hard work be impossible to access.

But luckily…life/television finds a way, and some kind soul uploaded the whole show to YouTube. A Reddit thread on the show described the quality as “piss poor,” and friends, that is generous. This is the grainiest video I’ve ever seen. I wondered, to paraphrase Cher from Clueless, if it was a Monet situation and I could stand really, really far away from my TV to make it seem more watchable. Alas, our family room is pretty small so that wasn’t an option.

Believe me when I say this YouTube video was almost unwatchable…and when I say almost, I mean that I watched the whole episode and could probably watch the rest of the series because I get sucked into whatever I’m watching and forget my surroundings. Sure, I prefer our big TV with good sound and picture quality, but I could watch a movie on anything (I’m David Lynch’s nightmare because I could totally watch a movie on a phone, and also because I constantly pause movies and watch them over several days). Hollis was designing a Lego and only half paying attention, but he found the picture quality to be too bad to handle. I can only hope that this is a Northern Exposure situation and that it will finally show up on streaming soon, because I just don’t know if we can take this. I literally can’t tell what some of these actors look like because their faces are so blurry.

About the actual pilot itself: am I already fully invested in this town and these people? Of course I am. It’s a quirky Ohio town! I’m hardwired to appreciate this. I mean, I could’ve written on this show (if I wasn’t a teenager at the time). But. But! The pilot made a bewildering, inexcusable decision, one I had to Google because I was afraid I started on the second episode: the entire story of how Ed lost his job, discovered his wife cheating on him, went back to Stuckeyville, reconnected with Carol, kissed Carol, and bought a bowling alley is condensed into a couple of minutes before the opening credits. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom this storytelling decision. It’s like they took the entire actual pilot, decided they didn’t need it, and instead were like, “okay here’s what you missed!” According to the internet, there was an actual pilot with Donal Logue in the Michael Ian Black role when the show was originally trying (and failing) to get the greenlight from CBS. But why, WHY, did they not just reshoot the pilot? I felt instantly disoriented, confused, and left out. Why WAS Ed so obsessed with Carol? Why DID they kiss? Do they have chemistry? I guess it’s none of my business. It felt like the show was mad at me for even wondering, like Ed was telling me “don’t be so nosy, ew.” Well, I am nosy about the characters I decided to invest 45-ish minutes of my life in. Sorry!!

Anyway. The opening credits theme is “Next Year” by Foo Fighters, a song I haven’t thought about since high school, but now it’s stuck in my head. It fits the show really well. The show itself was pleasantly cozy, even if some things felt a little dated—I did not enjoy a character telling his four months postpartum wife that they had to have sex because “the shop needs to reopen for business or it’s going to lose customers,” even if he DID later state he was joking and walk that back! Also there was a whole bit where many characters talked about “whores,” which prompted a conversation between me and Hollis…are you even allowed to say that on network TV now? I don’t think people would use that word on network TV (specifying network tv, not cable/streaming or real life, lol) to describe sex workers in the year 2024, but are you even allowed to? Is it possible the year 2000 was a more permissive time in terms of the language we used on television, or am I just not watching any current network television?

But as for Ed and Carol’s relationship…sure, it wasn’t developed as well as I would’ve liked and an emotional conversation at the end came out of nowhere, but I did feel invested in them pretty immediately. Usually my rule with new shows is that we’re never allowed to watch just the pilot, because pilots are almost always bad—there’s too much exposition, we’re just meeting the characters, we often don’t know where things are going. This is especially true of comedies. So usually we have to watch at least two episodes of any new comedy we start (it’s fun to be married to me!). But I didn’t enforce that rule this time because of the aforementioned piss poor quality. I’m curious about where the show goes and what these characters do!

I’m just not sure I’m going to be able to continue watching these terrible videos on YouTube. I mean, bless the person who uploaded them, seriously. But they’re very unpleasant to watch, and you’re talking to a girl with low viewing standards.

Still, I remain interested. I love bowling alleys as a concept and small towns as a setting. I love Michael Ian Black. And I loved this passage from the Vulture article I linked above:

These days, it feels like practically every show ever made is available at our fingertips, which is why it’s so strange that Ed, a series that lasted several seasons and had such a top-notch creative pedigree behind it is, is not. Both Burnett and Beckerman remain hopeful that this will change and Ed will find a way on to a streaming platform at some point. Given the mood in large swaths of the country right now, there may be an even greater appetite for shows that are life-affirming, intelligently made, and offer an escape from current events.

“September 11th happened right as we were filming our second season,” Beckerman notes. “I’m not saying now is September 11th, but I detect a similarity in the air, at least in some parts of the country. It made it very hard to make Ed after that happened, way more than it would be to make it now.”

“Ultimately we did not address these [more serious] things on the show Ed,” he adds. “It just wasn’t the place for it. It was a place to reflect on what is good and silly and fun about life, and I do think there will always be a place for that. I hope there will always will be.”

“Given the mood in large swaths of the country right now” they said…in 2016! The things we’ve been through since then…the things we’re going through now! A cozy and life-affirming show really does always have a place, and I can only hope that Ed will eventually end up streaming somewhere so I don’t have to strain my eyes to watch it.